Cognitive technologies as boundary objects in digital place

Boundary objects consist of devices, artifacts, and images that support the construction of meaning by different actors (Carlile, 2002, 2004). By acting and interacting, people even transform subjective meanings into artifacts, assigning meaning to reality, and thereby constructing it. Boundary objects translate, coordinate, and align the perspectives of different parties (Klimbe et al., 2010), but with their plasticity, they remain both adaptable to local needs and robust enough to maintain a common identity across different uses (Mele, Sebastiani and Corsaro, 2018). This paper explores the role of cognitive technologies as boundary objects in digital space. An interactive, qualitative, case-study approach is adopted to gain insights into the phenomena described. Starting from the idea that social construction and sensemaking process that transform spaces and create a “sense of place” (Parsons et al., 2017: 143), we show the way cognitive technologies perform inmost cases as boundary objects enacting actors’ interactions and sensemaking in digital space.