About

Charlotte P. Lee is a professor in the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering at the University of Washington. Her specialization includes computer supported cooperative work (CSCW), human-computer interaction (HCI), science and technology studies (STS), and design processes. Her research focuses on understanding and improving the ways people interact with technology, emphasizing collaborative and cooperative work environments, and exploring the social and cultural implications of technological design. She contributes to advancing knowledge in these areas through her scholarly work and teaching, supporting the development of human-centered approaches to technology design and implementation.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Information Retrieval
• Engineering
• Data Mining
• Systems engineering
• Data science
• Sociology
• Management science
• Knowledge management
• Biology
• Process management
• Programming language

Selected publications

• Floating Points

  2025-07-23 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Making Software Work Sustainable for the Academic Research Group: a Comparative Case Study

  Proceedings of the ... Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences/Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Studies of research software development have focused on how to promote or encourage the adoption of software engineering practices, but we do not have a good empirical understanding of strategies that researchers have already begun to take in order to integrate those practices into research work in sustainable ways. We conduct a comparative case study of two research groups in different fields, and characterize two approaches that they have taken to get research software engineering work done: practice integration and differentiating expertise. From these findings we argue that examining outcomes of change in research software development practice is critical for understanding sustainability and the ramifications of such changes for scientific work.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Agony and Ecstasy of Extended Research on Computational Systems

  2025-07-23

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Ripple Effect of Information Infrastructures

  Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) · 2025-01-04 · 1 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Concept of Operations as Epistemic Object: The Sociotechnical Design Roles of a Systems Engineering Document

  Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction · 2024 · 3 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Knowledge management
  • Computer Science

  When large, complex interorganizational collaborations create new systems, they must discover how the system should work and how it should integrate into the overall organizational milieu. These collaborations must also draw upon and accommodate a host of processes and resources. In this paper, we present results from a qualitative case study of a key policy and process document for a large design project for a civic traffic management system that must serve multiple organizations and government agencies. The document is one common to systems engineering, but less familiar to CSCW: the Concept of Operations (ConOps). We describe the sociotechnical design functions of the ConOps. We also analyze the document and its developmental process using Ewenstein and Whyte's concept of epistemic objects," which has been useful for CSCW and design research scholars to understand the roles artifacts play in the messy processes of design and cooperative work. We find that the ConOps exhibits many qualities of an epistemic object and supports the deeply integrated work of "designing" both the system and the interorganizational collaboration itself. We then explore avenues for future research in similarly complex infrastructural design settings.

  PublisherDOI

• ‘The Cloud is Not Not IT’: Ecological Change in Research Computing in the Cloud

  Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) · 2024-03-14 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Organizing Oceanographic Infrastructure: The Work of Making a Software Pipeline Repurposable

  Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction · 2023-04-14 · 3 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Drawing from a longitudinal case study, we inspect the activities of an expanding team of scientists and their collaborators as they sought to develop a novel software pipeline that worked both for themselves and for their wider community. We argue that these two tasks - making the software work for themselves and also for their wider scientific community - could not be differentiated from each other at the beginning of the software development process. Rather, this division of labor and software capacities emerged, articulated by the actors themselves as they went about their tasks. The activities of making the novel software "work" at all, and the "extra work" of making that software repurposable or reusable could not be distinguished until near the end of the development process - rather than defined or structured in advance. We discuss implications for the trajectory of software development, and the practical work of making software repurposable.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Lessons Learned from a Comparative Study of Long-Term Action Research with Community Design of Infrastructural Systems

  Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction · 2023-04-14 · 10 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  The question of how to develop and maintain appropriate, socially informed and sophisticated infrastructural systems is an ongoing concern for CSCW. Information infrastructure development efforts are usually large endeavors that involve many stakeholders, including several organizations that need to interoperate with legacy systems. Projects typically take several years to develop. The duration, variety, and sites of engagement in the development of information infrastructures can be challenging to approach with typical CSCW approaches. In this paper, we compare and analyze our varied experiences in order to generate lessons learned based on being embedded for three or more years as action researchers and ethnographers in infrastructure development projects in the domains of traffic engineering, vocational education, and ocean science. Drawing upon these experiences, as well as literature in infrastructure studies, design methodologies, and organizational studies, we extract guidance for researchers and practitioners seeking to understand and engage in long-term organizationally complex system development projects. Among these lessons, we encourage revisiting previously gathered data as scope and scale change, observing changes in the discursive "reference public" who will benefit from the system, and planning for different intellectual points of entry and exit. This paper lays groundwork for future developments in theory and method of collaborative design and development in and with complex systems.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Data Integration as Coordination

  Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction · 2021 · 72 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Data science
  • Computer Science

  Recent CSCW research on the collaborative design and development of research infrastructures for the natural sciences has increasingly focused on the challenges of open data sharing. This qualitative study describes and analyzes how multidisciplinary, geographically distributed ocean scientists are integrating highly diverse data as part of an effort to develop a new research infrastructure to advance science. This paper identifies different kinds of coordination that are necessary to align processes of data collection, production, and analysis. Some of the hard work to integrate data is undertaken before data integration can even become a technical problem. After data integration becomes a technical problem, social and organizational means continue to be critical for resolving differences in assumptions, methods, practices, and priorities. This work calls attention to the diversity of coordinative, social, and organizational practices and concerns that are needed to integrate data and also how, in highly innovative work, the process of integrating data also helps to define scientific problem spaces themselves.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Construction of Shared Situational Awareness in Traffic Management

  Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction · 2021-04-13 · 6 citations

  articleSenior author

  The construct of "situational awareness" (SA) has a rich and productive history within both academic literature and practice. Situational awareness as a technical term has its earliest roots in formative human factors research in service of military and flight applications. However, its value as a construct in other domains, particularly those having to do with rapid sensemaking in safety-sensitive conditions, has led to a broader applied and theoretical interest over the past few decades. As a discipline, CSCW has been relatively less engaged with this concept, but has empirical and theoretical tools that will be valuable to its study. To bring CSCW more fully into the conversation, we present a description of how operators in a city department of transportation's transportation management center (TMC) develop and maintain situational awareness for themselves and the key recipients of their critical information outputs. We identify some of the schemas operators must develop in order to effectively construct situational awareness and dynamically articulate common fields of work, and the social collaborative practices they engage in to support that awareness. Implications for design and further research are proposed.

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• HCC: Medium: Scientists and their Software: A Sociotechnical Investigation of Scientific Software Development and Sharing

  NSF · $516k · 2013–2017

• OCI: VOSS: Stakeholder Participation and the Emergence of Dominant Design in Large-Scale Cyber-Infrastructure (CI) Systems

  NSF · $413k · 2012–2016

• CAREER: Interacting with Cyberinfrastructure in the Face of Changing Science

  NSF · $578k · 2010–2017

• HCC: Collaboration in the Development of Cyberinfrastructure

  NSF · $293k · 2008–2011

• HCC: Collaboration in the Development of Cyberinfrastructure

  NSF · $450k · 2007–2010

Frequent coauthors

• Matthew J. Bietz

  University of California, Irvine

  13 shared

• Drew Paine

  11 shared

• Andrew B. Neang

  University of Washington

  5 shared

• Alexander Thayer

  Hewlett-Packard (United States)

  5 shared

• James Fogarty

  University of Washington

  4 shared

• Will Sutherland

  University of Washington

  4 shared

• C. Aragon

  4 shared

• Ridley Jones

  University of Washington

  4 shared

Labs

• Computer Supported Collaboration (CSC) LaboratoryPI

Education

• PhD, Information Studies

  University of California Los Angeles

Awards & honors

• Google Research Award
• National Science Foundation CAREER Award
• University of Washington’s College of Engineering Junior Fac…