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  1. The Metaverse represents the next generation of the Internet that, at this instant in time, is still a concept. It is envisioned to provide interconnected experiences that are immersive and varied. This vision challenges both designers and users to understand its possible coordination architecture and develop strategies for participation. One way to understand the concept and affect its instantiation is to take a design science approach that articulates design principles that might guide the exploration of different architectures. We apply concepts related to platforms and business ecosystems as well as ideas about facilitating technologies including choreography and orchestration as ways of blending together experiences, providing transitions between virtual locations. We derive three design principles from an analysis of Metaverse scenarios: narrative composability, social assortativity, and path discoverability. Thinking through these aspects of design leads to a discussion about the tradeoffs that will face designers of the Metaverse. 
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  2. As work changes, so does technology. The two coevolve as part of a work ecosystem. This paper suggests a way of plotting this coevolution by comparing the embeddings - high dimensional vector representations - of textual descriptions of tasks, occupations and technologies. Tight coupling between tasks and technologies - measured by the distances between vectors - are shown to be associated with high task importance. Moreover, tasks that are more prototypical in an occupation are more important. These conclusions were reached through an analysis of the 2020 data release of The Occupational Information Network (O*NET) from the U.S. Department of Labor on 967 occupations and 19,533 tasks. One occupation, journalism, is analyzed in depth, and conjectures are formed related to the ways technologies and tasks evolve through both design and exaptation. 
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    Autonomous, intelligent tools are reshaping all sorts of work practices, including innovative design work. These tools generate outcomes with little or no user intervention and produce designs of unprecedented complexity and originality, ushering profound changes to how organizations will design and innovate in future. In this paper, we formulate conceptual foundations to analyze the impact of autonomous design tools on design work. We proceed in two steps. First, we conceptualize autonomous design tools as ‘rational’ agents which will participate in the design process. We show that such agency can be realized through two separate approaches of information processing: symbolic and connectionist. Second, we adopt control theory to unpack the relationships between the autonomous design tools, human actors involved in the design, and the environment in which the tools operate. The proposed conceptual framework lays a foundation for studying the new kind of material agency of autonomous design tools in organizational contexts. We illustrate the analytical value of the proposed framework by drawing on two examples from the development of Ubisoft’s Ghost Recon Wildlands video game, which relied on such tools. We conclude this essay by constructing a tentative research agenda for the research into autonomous design tools and design work. 
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    The increased pervasiveness of technological advancements in automation makes it urgent to address the question of how work is changing in response. Focusing on applications of machine learning (ML) to automate information tasks, we draw on a simple framework for identifying the impacts of an automated system on a task that suggests 3 patterns for the use of ML—decision support, blended decision making and complete automation. In this paper, we extend this framework by considering how automation of one task might have implications for interdependent tasks and how automation applies to coordination mechanisms. 
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  6. Metahuman systems are new, emergent, sociotechnical systems where machines that learn join human learning and create original systemic capabilities. Metahuman systems will change many facets of the way we think about organizations and work. They will push information systems research in new directions that may involve a revision of the field’s research goals, methods and theorizing. Information systems researchers can look beyond the capabilities and constraints of human learning toward hybrid human/machine learning systems that exhibit major differences in scale, scope and speed. We review how these changes influence organization design and goals. We identify four organizational level generic functions critical to organize metahuman systems properly: delegating, monitoring, cultivating, and reflecting. We show how each function raises new research questions for the field. We conclude by noting that improved understanding of metahuman systems will primarily come from learning-by-doing as information systems scholars try out new forms of hybrid learning in multiple settings to generate novel, generalizable, impactful designs. Such trials will result in improved understanding of metahuman systems. This need for large-scale experimentation will push many scholars out from their comfort zone, because it calls for the revitalization of action research programs that informed the first wave of socio-technical research at the dawn of automating work systems. 
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  7. Bots and humans can combine in multiple ways in the service of knowledge production. Designers make choices about the purpose of the bots, their technical architecture, and their initiative. That is, they decide about functions, mechanisms, and interfaces. Together these dimensions suggest a design space for systems of bots and humans. These systems are evaluated along several criteria. One criterion is productivity. Another is their effects on human editors, especially newcomers. A third is sustainability: how they persist in the face of change. Design and evaluation spaces are described as part of an analysis of Wiki-related bots: two bots and their effects are discussed in detail, and an agenda for further research is suggested. 
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  8. As people increasingly innovate outside of formal R&D departments, individuals take on the responsibility of attracting, managing, and protecting social, financial, human, and information capital. With internet technology playing a central role in how individuals work together to produce something that they could not produce alone, it is necessary to understand how technologies are shaping the innovation process from start to finish. We bring together human-computer interaction researchers and industry leaders who have worked with people and platforms designed to support collective innovation across diverse domains. We will discuss the current and future research on the role of platforms in collective innovation, including topics in social computing, crowdsourcing, peer production, online communities, gig economy, & online marketplaces. 
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