The Affordances of a Web of artifacts: Coordinating Distributed Collaboration in Medical Care

In this article we focus on the affordances and tangibilities of a web of non-electronic artifacts, and the different and partly overlapping roles and functionalities that characterizes this web of artifacts shows. We argue that an analysis of these affordances and the web of artifacts can be a resource for design, because they are evidence of some of the capabilities that are difficult to capture in software engineering and which are important for cooperative work. The affordances and multiple roles and functionalities of a web of artifacts, are especially informative for design in the light of pervasive computing, which envisions a plethora of interactive artifacts embedded in our daily environment.