Federico Cabitza, Marco Loregian, Marcello Sarini
Università degli studi di Milano Bicocca

Aim of the SWIRLS project is to give support to practitioners working in hospital wards [1]. In particular the focus is on how practitioners can be supported by technology in coordinating their activities without disrupting their habitual practices. We chose to focus on hospital wards because they represent a paradigmatic case of work setting where actors are heterogeneous in role and experience, distributed in various locations and continuously moving from place to place. Supporting coordination work in hospital settings has always been one of the most challenging endeavors in the deployment of IT applications in real-life settings. Several researchers have tried to understand why this endeavor has generally been frustrated by the refractoriness of practitioners in adopting supporting applications that propose a more or less accentuated dismissal of paper and traditional artifacts [2]. As a matter of fact the level of digitalization in hospitals is still quite low.