CREW - About CREW

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The design of new organizations and the technologies of voice, data, and video communication that make them possible.

	CREW's research draws on computer, information, cognitive, and social science
	CREW collaborates with corporate, academic, and government partners
	CREW provides graduate education to train a new kind of professional, one who knows both the disciplines and the organizations



	Research on how new technologies enable new ways of organizing work is of vital interest to organizations, both as providers and users of this technology. CREW has performed large-scale field studies of how people work with new technologies in both academic and business environments. And both commercial and academic organizations have become partners with us, learning from our research results and helping guide our research agenda. Individual members at remote sites have also become partners, including corporate executives and researchers, and academics. CREW itself is an example of what it studies -- a "collaboratory," a distributed organization made possible by new technologies. Our locations at the University of Michigan include West Hall on Central Campus and the School of Information North on the North Campus. Distributed in time and/or place, our investigators share common facilities that support group work and allow them to jointly conduct research.



	The avalanche of new information technologies is still building: the World Wide Web; electronic mail and other Internet services; desktop video conferencing and application sharing; workflow software; groupware work environments with scheduling, discussion, contact, and other shared work tools; intelligent agents; nomadic computing and telecommunication; ... Even this list is incomplete, and new additions are arriving all the time. CREW's focus is not on any one of these technologies, but rather on the ways in which all of them (and their successors) make possible new forms of working. In particular, many of these new forms are "distributed, robust organizations." They are not located in any single place, and they are often highly flexible in the short-term (and long-term) purposes they serve. Distributed robust organizations include collaboratories (such as CREW), virtual corporations, distance-learning systems, and electronic commerce. These organizations allow the distributed and robust conduct of scientific research, business activities, instruction, even highly variable patterns of buying, selling, or negotiating.



	CREW faculty believe that technology is best evaluated by careful study of how it affects the way people work. The research advances will come only from a combination of scientific care and real-world relevance. For that reason CREW faculty use both laboratory and field research methods -- often yoked together -- as well as engage in the design of new systems. One long line of CREW laboratory studies collects information about the process and outcome of design work, using small teams who are charged to design consumer devices. The studies have collected information about work done with a variety of technological supports: whiteboard or shared software for face to face meetings; shared software with audio and video, or with audio alone, for distributed meetings. Detailed recordings of the process of work are analyzed to see what proportion of time is spent, say, formulating and evaluating prospective solutions, digressing, managing time or equipment And the process can be analyzed to see how the allocation of time and the quality of the final product are affected by different technological supports. Other CREW laboratory studies have involved topics such as group use of drawing tools and the formation of routines in computer-mediated group problem-solving. CREW faculty have used intensive field observation in many other research projects, often feeding their analyses into the design of new systems, and then studying the resulting changes in organization. A good example of this kind of research is the Space Physics and Aeronomy Research Collaboratory (SPARC) , a project funded by the U. S. National Science Foundation .In this case, CREW faculty have carefully observed the work of teams of scientists who have traditionally traveled to Greenland to study phenomena such as the northern lights. Their observations have informed the design of a networked system of computerized display and group discussion tools linking the researchers' home laboratories to each other and to the Greenland instruments. Now the science is being done without the arduous and expensive winter trips to Greenland. CREW faculty are studying the changes this is producing in the conduct of upper atmospheric research and in graduate training in the discipline. Other CREW field studies (ongoing or completed) involve tools for learning object-oriented software development, the design and evaluation of the use of a system for conferring at a distance over medical images, studies of distributed corporate teams using technologies to help them coordinate their work, and design and use of a suite of tools to aid users of digital library resources. CREW believes it can contribute most through a well-chosen mixture of the control offered by laboratory studies and the relevance offered by field observation and engagement in actual design of new systems and work arrangements. As the new technologies relax constraints of distance and time, CREW strives to bring together the best of the ivory tower and the real world, to the benefit of both.


		CREW, as part of the SI (School of Information) , provides graduate education to train a new kind of professional who can use abstract disciplinary knowledge to solve real-world organizational problems.