Christopher Sadorge

• Sadorge, Christopher (2026). Making work flow: The constitutive role of knowledge domains in co-design processes. Learning, Culture and Social Interaction. ISSN 2210-6561. 58. doi: 10.1016/j.lcsi.2026.101007. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Professional practices periodically have to be adjusted. Professionals are therefore increasingly involved in co-design activities where they need to manage professional knowledge, cultural resources, and conflicting concerns when developing workflows. This study aims to obtain a better understanding of professionals' knowledge work in developing new workflows, focusing on how healthcare teams mobilise and integrate knowledge resources during co-design. Over a year and a half, meetings were observed where healthcare professionals and software engineers worked together to design a technology for recording and sharing patient information across healthcare units. Healthcare professionals contributed to the co-design by sharing knowledge and local concerns about implementing workflows into the system. Drawing on the concept of epistemic space, the analysis focuses on how healthcare professionals collaboratively identified and evaluated knowledge resources within two medical domains in which the resources framed problems and facilitated collective inquiry. This study shows that, depending on the cultures of the two knowledge domains and by participants' interactions with the available knowledge resources and their meaning potential, the team's work evolved differently: the infection care domain provided minimal guidance on organising workflows, leading the team to consider multiple infection variations, while medication management, governed by laws, regulations, and checklists, required extensive sense-making of formalised resources. These findings underscore that the conditions for co-design vary notably across knowledge domains, as domain-specific features shape how professionals mobilise, interpret, and integrate knowledge resources.

• Sadorge, Christopher; Nerland, Monika & Mäkitalo, Åsa (2023). Conditioning the work of colleagues: health professionals’ explorative work in technology design. Vocations and Learning. ISSN 1874-785X. doi: 10.1007/s12186-023-09331-0. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Abstract Professional learning at work is related to the opportunities to participate in explorative and constructive practices. Co-designing tools and technologies to support work offers such opportunities, which need to be better understood in the field of professional and vocational learning. As digitalisation initiatives become more ambitious and aim at wider service reorganisation, more professionals from nontechnical domains become involved in the work of designing technologies and developing routines for their practice. This study explores how health professionals participate in the design of a technology for the registration and sharing of patient information across healthcare units in a Norwegian city. Over a year, we observed the design meetings with a team of health professionals and IT developers. The health professionals were mandated this task as part of their regular work to ensure that the way of categorising and displaying patient information would serve the services’ needs. The interactions in the design meetings were analysed to examine how categories of patient information were explored and negotiated as objects of design. Our findings show how the team needed to test candidate categories for various contexts of use. This implied both negotiation of future service routines and efforts to reconfigure tasks and responsibilities in multiple service contexts. This work brings extended responsibilities and opportunities for learning to health professionals. We discuss how their decisions are consequential beyond their own workplace as the information system and its categories condition the work of colleagues in the wider service chain.

• Sadorge, Christopher; Nerland, Monika & Grisot, Miria (2023). The Generative Role of Objects in Infrastructure Design: A Case of Designing a System for Continuity of Care. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). ISSN 0925-9724. doi: 10.1007/s10606-023-09485-4. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Abstract This study explores the generative role of objects in design work. While the CSCW literature includes a range of contributions on infrastructure design and ways of accounting for diverse existing systems, practices and perspectives in design, the focus has typically been on the point of use, rather than the earlier stages of design processes. However, as more worker groups become involved in design there is a need to understand the microdynamics of collaborative design in this phase and the interplay between problem framing and exploration. We examined how the design of an information system in the health sector evolved through the instantiation and exploration of intermediary objects that become generative in the design process. The data comprised observations over 2 years from design meetings with a team of health professionals and software developers mandated to develop a system for the registration and sharing of patient information across primary care units. The analysis showed how intermediary objects formed focal points from which infrastructure design problems were framed and collectively explored. These processes required considerable negotiation and exploration within and between the interdependencies that become relevant in the design process. We identified how intermediary objects take different representational forms and become generative in two ways: By producing new or transformed objects, and by revealing layers of complexity inherent in the design problem. We discussed implications of the analysis as regards aspects of the infrastructure design that can be handled in the design team versus aspects that should be delegated to local adaptation.

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• Lunde, Ida Martinez; Nerland, Monika; Sadorge, Christopher & Grisot, Miria (2024). Implementing Electronic Health Records: Shifts and Obstacles in Machineries of Knowing. Full text in Research Archive
• Sadorge, Christopher (2024). Helsepersonell som deltakerar i utvikling av IT-system. Full text in Research Archive
• Nerland, Monika; Brandenberger, Isabel Alexandra; Sadorge, Christopher; Dæhlen, Åsmund & Aanestad, Margunn (2024). Hva krever digitaliseringen av helsearbeidere og ledere? Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Digitaliseringen av helsetjenestene i kommunen endrer både jobben som skal gjøres og kompetansen som kreves. I denne formidlingskonferansen presenterte forskere i CORPUS-prosjektet resultater under to tematiske bolker: 1) Hva innebærer digitaliseringen for ansatte i tjenestene? 2) Hva er implikasjonene for ledelse av utviklingsprosjekter og endringer i arbeidsmiljøene? Resultatene ble kommentert og diskutert med forskere og representanter for aktuelle praksisfelt.

• Sadorge, Christopher & Nerland, Monika (2023). Professional Learning in Design Work: Developing Patient Information Systems through Object Construction. Full text in Research Archive
• Sadorge, Christopher (2022). Collaborative work in designing a system for patient information sharing in health care. Full text in Research Archive
• Sadorge, Christopher; Nerland, Monika & Mäkitalo, Åsa (2022). New challenges for health professionals. Full text in Research Archive
• Sadorge, Christopher; Nerland, Monika & Mäkitalo, Åsa (2021). Categorisation work in the design of health information systems. Full text in Research Archive
• Sadorge, Christopher; Nerland, Monika & Mäkitalo, Åsa (2021). Negotiating categories in design work. A study of a team developing a patient information system. Full text in Research Archive
• Sadorge, Christopher (2026). Health professionals as co-designers of patient information systems. A study of collaborative knowledge work and novel demands to expertise. Universitetet i Oslo. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  While health professionals’ work is traditionally associated with care, digitalisation has increasingly involved professionals in technology design to ensure better integration of technology and work practices. In these settings, their tasks and responsibilities extend well beyond routine care work. Yet there is limited attention to what this actually entails for the professionals’ knowledge work and expertise. This dissertation examines co‑design as knowledge work by focusing on health professionals co‑designing a patient information system for use in primary care. In the thesis, knowledge work is defined as the varied nature of professional action through which knowledge is generated, validated, and transformed when addressing complex tasks. The thesis is developed within the larger research project CORPUS, funded by the Research Council of Norway. Using an ethnographically inspired approach, the project followed the work of a design team in a major Norwegian city, consisting mainly of health professionals from different healthcare units, as well as a software engineer and a project leader. The primary data consist of recorded video observations from attended digital meetings over 1.5 years, during which a patient information system was designed with the goal of improving continuity of care across city districts and healthcare units. Supplementary data include documents and other material resources, as well as weekly recorded conversations with two team participants. The following research questions guide the analysis: 1) how do the co‑design processes of patient information systems evolve? 2) what do design processes demand of health professionals? and 3) how can health professionals’ expertise in co‑design be conceptualised to account for these processes and demands? The empirical work is presented in three journal articles, which forms the basis for an integrated discussion in the thesis. The thesis offers important insights into the demands placed on health professionals in co‑design settings, which extend beyond those of regular care work. The complexity of design settings entails professionals’ engagement in non‑routine problem‑solving, where challenges are rarely well defined. The thesis shows that professionals frame problems through their collective engagement with a range of established standards and knowledge from medical domains, such as medical standards, ideas of care, legal frameworks, and institutional and professional discourses. Two capacities stand out as important for knowledge work in co‑design: 1) epistemic reflexivity, the capacity to critically examine and reconfigure knowledge claims and their implications for professional action, and 2) system thinking, understood as the capacity to anticipate, align, and integrate specific work practices with wider workflows in healthcare. These capacities are important to understand in order to better support and facilitate professionals’ knowledge work when they face complex digitalisation challenges.

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