| Adapting Virtual Reality for the Participatory Design of Work Environments | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 1-33 | |
| Roy C. Davies | |||
| This paper describes the evolution of a standard PC-based virtual reality
tool which has been adapted for the participatory design of work environments.
Tool features, method of control and combination with other participatory
design tools are investigated in the context of a particular design situation.
This research is aimed at participatory design facilitators to aid in the
adaptation of similar virtual reality systems for a similar purpose. The
context of this work is the EnvisionmentWorkshop, in which a group of workers
participate with design experts in using full-scale modelling, pedagogical
drama, and democratic meetings to (re)design their workplace. A series of
prototypes have been developed and tested during the design of a new university
in the region using a case study methodology to provide high ecological
validity. These were preceded by a task analysis, brainstorming and pilot
study. The results suggest that such a tool can be constructed and used
successfully by a small group of people using projected virtual reality.
However larger groups suffer from a bottleneck at the input devices such that a
virtual reality expert must take control and build what the participants wish. Keywords: envisionment foundry - multiple-case study - participatory design - virtual
reality - work environments | |||
| Small-Scale Classification Schemes: A Field Study of Requirements Engineering | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 35-61 | |
| Morten Hertzum | |||
| Small-scale classification schemes are used extensively in the coordination
of cooperative work. This study investigates the creation and use of a
classification scheme for handling the system requirements during the
redevelopment of a nation-wide information system. This requirements
classification inherited a lot of its structure from the existing system and
rendered requirements that transcended the framework laid out by the existing
system almost invisible. As a result, the requirements classification became a
defining element of the requirements-engineering process, though its main
effects remained largely implicit. The requirements classification contributed
to constraining the requirements-engineering process by supporting the software
engineers in maintaining some level of control over the process. This way, the
requirements classification provided the software engineers with an important
means of discretely balancing the contractual aspect of requirements
engineering against facilitating the users in an open-ended search for their
system requirements. The requirements classification is analysed in terms of
the complementary concepts of boundary objects and coordination mechanisms.
While coordination mechanisms focus on how classification schemes enable
cooperation among people pursuing a common goal, boundary objects embrace the
implicit consequences of classification schemes in situations involving
conflicting goals. Moreover, the requirements specification focused on
functional requirements and provided little information about why these
requirements were considered relevant. This stands in contrast to the
discussions at the project meetings where the software engineers made frequent
use of both abstract goal descriptions and concrete examples to make sense of
the requirements. This difference between the written requirements
specification and the oral discussions at the meetings may help explain
software engineers' general preference for people, rather than documents, as
their information sources. Keywords: classification schemes - conceptual design - cooperative work - coordination
- requirements engineering - requirements specification - small-scale
classification | |||
| Empirical Study on Collaborative Writing: What Do Co-authors Do, Use, and Like? | | BIBAK | DOI | 63-89 | |
| Sylvie Noel; Jean-Marc Robert | |||
| How do people work when they are collaborating to write a document? What
kind of tools do they use and, in particular, do they resort to groupware for
this task? Forty-one people filled out a questionnaire placed on the World Wide
Web. In spite of the existence of specialized collaborative writing tools, most
respondents reported using individual word processors and email as their main
tools for writing joint documents. Respondents noted the importance of
functions such as change tracking, version control, and synchronous work for
collaborative writing tools. This study also confirmed the great variability
that exists between collaborative writing projects, whether it be group
membership, management, writing strategy, or scheduling issues. Keywords: CSCW: Computer Supported Collaborative Work - computer supported
collaborative writing - collaboration - collaborative writing - groupware | |||
| From Cards to Code: How Extreme Programming Re-Embodies Programming as a Collective Practice | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 91-117 | |
| Adrian MacKenzie; Simon Monk | |||
| This paper discusses Extreme Programming (XP), a relatively new and
increasingly popular 'user-centred' software design approach. Extreme
Programming proposes that collaborative software development should be centred
on the practices of programming. That proposal contrasts strongly with more
heavily instrumented, formalised and centrally managed software engineering
methodologies. The paper maps the interactions of an Extreme Programming team
involved in building a commercial organisational knowledge management system.
Using ethnographic techniques, it analyses how this particular style of
software development developed in a given locality, and how it uniquely
hybridised documents, conversations, software tools and office layout in that
locality. It examines some of the many artifices, devices, techniques and talk
that come together as a complicated contemporary software system is produced.
It argues that XP's emphasis on programming as the coreactivity and governing
metaphor can only be understood in relation to competing overtly formal
software engineering approaches and the organisational framing of software
development. XP, it suggests, gains traction by re-embodying the habits of
programming as a collective practice. Keywords: co-ordination work - ethnography - extreme programming - software
development techniques - user-centred design | |||
| Ambiguities, Awareness and Economy: A Study of Emergency Service Work | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 125-154 | |
| Marten Pettersson; Dave Randall; Bo Helgeson | |||
| This paper derives from a study undertaken at an emergency service centre by
researchers at the Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden. It forms part of a
project involving partners at the university and in Swedish emergency service
centres. The focus in this project was on the possibility of developing new
technology for use in these centres. One vision for the new technology is to
support distribution of calls and handling of cases across several centres.
Historically the work has been conducted in a number of different centres,
where responsibilities are thus primarily geographically localised and where,
as a result, practices in the different centres may be distinctively local.
The study has focused on features of work familiar to the CSCW community, including documenting and analysing current work practices, understanding the properties of the technology in question, and perhaps most importantly how the technology functions in use. Our focus in this paper exemplifies these themes through the analysis of three cases. In the first, the issue in question is the way in which an emergency is identified and dealt with, it being the case that a typical problem to be dealt with by operators, and more commonly in the days of mobile telephony, is that of multiple reporting of a single case. Of particular interest here is the phenomenon of listening-in, which is a function in the Computer Aided Dispatch system and by contrast that of 'overhearing', which is not. The second and third cases focus on the relevance of large paper maps, given the existence of computerized maps in these centres. Based on our own analysis and on work done by others in similar contexts, we develop an argument for a sense of organizational relevance that hopefully integrates existing analytic interests in emergency service work. Keywords: ambiguity - awareness - control room study - design - emergency handling -
ethnography - ethnomethodology - field study - safety critical work -
technology-in-use | |||
| Organizational Memory as Objects, Processes, and Trajectories: An Examination of Organizational Memory in Use | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 155-189 | |
| Mark S. Ackerman; Christine Halverson | |||
| For proper knowledge management, organizations must consider how knowledge
is kept and reused. The term organizational memory is due for an overhaul.
Memory appears to be everywhere in organizations; yet, the term has been
limited to only a few uses. Based on an ethnographic study of a telephone
hotline group, this paper presents a micro-level, distributed cognition
analysis of two hotline calls, the work activity surrounding the calls, and the
memory used in the work activity. Drawing on the work of Star, Hutchins, and
Strauss, the paper focuses on issues of applying past information for current
use. Our work extends Strauss' and Hutchins' trajectories to get at the
understanding of potential future use by participants and its role in current
information storage. We also note the simultaneously shared provenance and
governance of multiple memories - human and technical. This analysis and the
theoretical framework we construct should be to be useful in further efforts in
describing and analyzing organizational memory within the context of knowledge
management efforts. Keywords: boundary objects - collective memory - contextualization - corporate memory
- distributed cognition - information reuse - knowledge management - memory
reuse - organizational memory - trajectories of information | |||
| Domestic Routines and Design for the Home | | BIB | Full-Text | 191-220 | |
| Andy Crabtree; Tom Rodden | |||
| Introduction to Special Issue on Context-Aware Computing in CSCW | | BIB | DOI | 221-222 | |
| Albrecht Schmidt; Tom Gross; Mark Billinghurst | |||
| A Historical View of Context | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 223-247 | |
| Matthew Chalmers | |||
| This paper examines a number of the approaches, origins and ideals of
context-aware systems design, looking particularly at the way that history
influences what we do in our ongoing activity. As a number of sociologists and
philosophers have pointed out, past social interaction, as well as past use of
the heterogeneous mix of media, tools and artifacts that we use in our everyday
activity, influence our ongoing interaction with the people and media at hand.
We suggest that ones experience and history is thus part of ones current
context, with patterns of use temporally and subjectively combining and
interconnecting different media as well as different modes of use of those
media. One such mode of use is transparent use, put forward by Weiser as
ubicomps design ideal. One theoretical finding is that this design ideal is
unachievable or incomplete because transparent and more focused analytical use
are interdependent, affecting and feeding into each other through ones
experience and history. Using these theoretical points, we discuss a number of
context-aware system designs that make good use of history in supporting
ongoing user activity. Keywords: adaptation - appropriation - context modelling - system design - theory -
ubicomp | |||
| People-to-People-to-Geographical-Places: The P3 Framework for Location-Based Community Systems | | BIBA | Full-Text | 249-282 | |
| Quentin Jones; Sukeshini A. Grandhi; Loren Terveen; Steve Whittaker | |||
| In this paper we examine an emerging class of systems that link People-to-People-to-Geographical-Places; we call these P3-Systems. Through analyzing the literature, we have identified four major P3-System design techniques: People-Centered systems that use either absolute user location (e.g. Active Badge) or user proximity (e.g. Hocman) and Place-Centered systems based on either a representation of peoples use of physical spaces (e.g. ActiveMap) or on a matching virtual space that enables online interaction linked to physical location (e.g. Geonotes). In addition, each feature can be instantiated synchronously or asynchronously. The P3-System framework organizes existing systems into meaningful categories and structures the design space for an interesting new class of potentially context-aware systems. Our discussion of the framework suggests new ways of understanding and addressing the privacy concerns associated with location aware community system and outlines additional socio-technical challenges and opportunities. | |||
| Modelling Shared Contexts in Cooperative Environments: Concept, Implementation, and Evaluation | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 283-303 | |
| Tom Gross; Wolfgang Prinz | |||
| Users who work together require adequate information about their cooperative
environment: about other group members presence and activities, about shared
artefacts, etc. In the CSCW literature several concepts, prototypes, and
systems for providing this group awareness information have been presented. In
general, they capture information from the environment, process it, and present
it to the users. This paper addresses the processing aspect; in particular, we
present a concept for processing awareness information by means of awareness
contexts. With this concept we address the problem of contextualising event
notifications enabling the presentation of notifications in the appropriate
user situation. We describe a lightweight model and its integration into an
event and notification infrastructure. We report on an empirical study, and
draw some conclusions for the design of context-awareness for cooperative
environments. Keywords: contexts - CSCW - evaluation - group awareness - modelling | |||
| Building Connections among Loosely Coupled Groups: Hebb's Rule at Work | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 305-327 | |
| S. Carter; J. Mankoff; P. Goddi | |||
| Awareness of others interests can lead to fruitful collaborations,
friendships and positive social change. Interviews of groups involved in both
research and corporate work revealed a lack of awareness of shared interests
among workers sharing an organizational affiliation and collocated in the same
building or complex but still physically separated (e.g., by walls or floors).
Our study showed that loosely coupled groups were less likely to discover
shared interests in the way that many tightly collocated groups do, such as by
overhearing conversations or noticing paraphernalia. Based on these findings we
iteratively developed a system to capture and display shared interests. Our
platform includes an e-mail sensor to discover personal interests, a search
algorithm to determine shared interests, a public peripheral display and
lightweight location-tracking system to convey those interests. We deployed the
system to two groups for two months and found that the system did lead to
increased awareness of shared interests. Keywords: CSCW - social computing - peripheral displays - sensors | |||
| Building a Context Sensitive Telephone: Some Hopes and Pitfalls for Context Sensitive Computing | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 329-345 | |
| Barry Brown; Rebecca Randell | |||
| Although the idea of making technology more context aware is an alluring
one, this seemingly simple move hides a great deal of complexity. Even simple
examples such as a context sensitive mobile phone which knows when not to ring,
are unlikely to be successful. Any context sensitive technology is likely to
make mistakes - like ringing in the middle of a film, or not ringing for an
urgent call. Using three examples from fieldwork of alerting systems (two
ringing phones and one medical alarm in a hospital), we suggest three
guidelines for context systems which could genuinely assist users. First, we
argue that context sensitive computing should be used defensively, where
incorrect behaviour is tolerable. Second, that technology can provide
structures to which people themselves can add context. Third, that technology
can communicate context to users, allowing users to make sense of that
contextual information themselves. Lastly we argue for an understanding of the
long term use of technology use, dwelling with technology, a process which
changes how the world is seen and experienced. Keywords: alarms - context sensitive computing - dwelling - telephones | |||
| Preface | | BIB | Full-Text | 347-348 | |
| Carla Simone; Marilyn Tremaine | |||
| Ordering Systems: Coordinative Practices and Artifacts in Architectural Design and Planning | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 349-408 | |
| Kjeld Schmidt; Ina Wagner | |||
| In their cooperative effort, architects depend critically on elaborate
coordinative practices and artifacts. The article presents, on the basis of an
in-depth study of architectural work, an analysis of these practices and
artifacts and shows that they are multilaterally interrelated and form
complexes of interrelated practices and artifacts which we have dubbed ordering
systems. In doing so, the article outlines an approach to investigating and
conceiving of such practices. Keywords: architectural work - classification - coordinative artifacts - common
information spaces - indexation - nomenclatures - notations | |||
| Push-to-Talk Social Talk | | BIBAK | DOI | 409-441 | |
| Allison Woodruff; Paul M. Aoki | |||
| This paper presents an exploratory study of college-age students using
two-way, push-to-talk cellular radios. We describe the observed and reported
use of cellular radio by the participants. We discuss how the half-duplex,
lightweight cellular radio communication was associated with reduced
interactional commitment, which meant the cellular radios could be used for a
wide range of conversation styles. One such style, intermittent conversation,
is characterized by response delays. Intermittent conversation is surprising in
an audio medium, since it is typically associated with textual media such as
instant messaging. We present design implications of our findings. Keywords: cellular radio - instant messaging - two-way radio - walkie-talkies | |||
| Increasing Workplace Independence for People with Cognitive Disabilities by Leveraging Distributed Cognition among Caregivers and Clients | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 443-470 | |
| Stefan Carmien; Rogerio DePaula; Andrew Gorman; Anja Kintsch | |||
| This paper describes a group configuration that is currently employed to
support the everyday living and working activities of people with cognitive
disabilities. A client receiving face-to-face, often one-to-one, assistance
from a dedicated human job coach is characteristic of this traditional
configuration. We compare it with other group configurations that are used in
cooperative and distributed work practices and propose an alternative
configuration titled active distributed support system. In so doing, we
highlight requirements that are unique to task support for people with
cognitive disabilities. In particular, we assert that the knowledge of how to
perform such activities is shared not only among people, but also between
people and artifacts. There is a great potential for innovative uses of
ubiquitous and mobile technologies to support these activities. A survey of
technologies that have been developed to provide these individuals with greater
levels of independence is then presented. These endeavors often attempt to
replace human job coaches with computational cognitive aids. We discuss some
limitations of such approaches and present a model and prototype that extends
the computational job coach by incorporating human caregivers in a distributed
one-to-many support system. Keywords: active distributed support - disabilities - lifeline - MAPS - work group
organization | |||
| Community-Building with Web-Based Systems - Investigating a Hybrid Community of Students | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 471-499 | |
| Markus Rohde; Leonard Reinecke; Bernd Pape; Monique Janneck | |||
| This paper examines WiInf-Central, the virtual homeplace of a student
community (on Information Systems) at the University of Hamburg, and focuses on
processes of social identity and community-building. Drawing on social-identity
theory and communities of practice as our theoretical basis, we illustrate that
the processes of identity-building and positive in-group evaluation triggered
by WiInf-Central serve as a means for students of Information Systems to assert
themselves against faculty members and students of other disciplines. While our
study reveals strong mechanisms of social exclusion, inclusion mechanisms have
to be assessed in a more differentiated way. In particular, our study shows the
emergence of several subgroups, which appear largely closed to other community
members. We ascribe this to both the self-organized and the hybrid - half
virtual, half real - nature of the community based on WiInf-Central. Keywords: CommSy - communities of practice (COP) - e-community-building - hybrid and
self-organized community of students - qualitative interviews - social identity
theory (SIT) | |||
| Roles of Orientation in Tabletop Collaboration: Comprehension, Coordination and Communication | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 501-537 | |
| Russell Kruger; Sheelagh Carpendale; Stacey D. Scott; Saul Greenberg | |||
| In order to support co-located collaboration, many researchers are now
investigating how to effectively augment tabletops with electronic displays. As
far back as 1988, orientation was recognized as a significant human factors
issue that must be addressed by electronic tabletop designers. As with
traditional tables, when people stand or sit at different positions around a
horizontal display they will be viewing the contents from different angles. One
common solution to this problem is to have the software reorient objects so
that a given individual can view them right way up. Yet is this the best
approach? If not, how do people actually use orientation on tables? To answer
these questions, we conducted an observational study of collaborative activity
on a traditional table. Our results show that the strategy of reorienting
objects to a persons view is overly simplistic: while important, it is an
incomplete view of how people exploit their ability to reorient objects.
Orientation proves critical in how individuals comprehend information, how
collaborators coordinate their actions, and how they mediate communication. The
coordinating role of orientation is evident in how people establish personal
and group spaces and how they signal ownership of objects. In terms of
communication, orientation is useful in initiating communicative exchanges and
in continuing to speak to individuals about particular objects and work
patterns as collaboration progresses. The three roles of orientation have
significant implications for the design of tabletop software and the assessment
of existing tabletop systems. Keywords: collaborative computing - co-located collaboration - computer-supported
cooperative work - interface design - observational study - orientation -
rotation - synchronous interaction - tabletop display | |||
| The MAUI Toolkit: Groupware Widgets for Group Awareness | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 539-571 | |
| Jason Hill; Carl Gutwin | |||
| Group awareness is an important part of synchronous collaboration, and
support for group awareness can greatly improve groupware usability. However,
it is still difficult to build groupware that supports group awareness. To
address this problem, we have developed the Multi-User Awareness UI toolkit
(MAUI) toolkit, a Java toolkit with a broad suite of awareness-enhanced UI
components. The toolkit contains both extensions of standard Swing widgets, and
groupware-specific components such as telepointers. All components have added
functionality for collecting, distributing, and visualizing group awareness
information. The toolkit packages components as JavaBeans, allowing wide code
reuse, easy integration with IDEs, and drag-and-drop creation of working
group-aware interfaces. The toolkit provides the first ever set of UI widgets
that are truly collaboration-aware, and provides them in a way that greatly
simplifies the construction and testing of rich groupware interfaces. Keywords: awareness - feedthrough - groupware interfaces - group widgets | |||
| Consistency Control for Synchronous and Asynchronous Collaboration Based on Shared Objects and Activities | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 573-602 | |
| Jurgen Vogel; Werner Geyer; Li-Te Cheng; Michael Muller | |||
| We describe a new collaborative technology that bridges the gap between ad
hoc collaboration in email and more formal collaboration in structured shared
workspaces. Our approach is based on the notion of object-centric sharing,
where users collaborate in a lightweight manner but aggregate and organize
different types of shared artifacts into semi-structured activities with
dynamic membership, hierarchical object relationships, as well as real-time and
asynchronous collaboration. We present a working prototype that implements
object-centric sharing on the basis of a replicated peer-to-peer architecture.
In order to keep replicated data consistent in such a dynamic environment with
blended synchronous and asynchronous collaboration, we designed appropriate
consistency control algorithms, which we describe in detail. The performance of
our approach is demonstrated by means of simulation results. Keywords: ActivityExplorer - activity-centric collaboration - consistency control -
object-centric sharing - peer-to-peer - replication - synchronous and
asynchronous collaboration | |||
| Software Framework for Managing Heterogeneity in Mobile Collaborative Systems | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 603-638 | |
| Carlos D. Correa; Ivan Marsic | |||
| Heterogeneity in mobile computing devices and application scenarios
complicates the development of collaborative software systems. Heterogeneity
includes disparate computing and communication capabilities, differences in
users needs and interests, and semantic conflicts across different domains and
representations. In this paper, we describe a software framework that supports
mobile collaboration by managing several aspects of heterogeneity. Adopting
graph as a common data structure for the application state representation
enables us to develop a generic solution for handling the heterogeneities. The
effect external forces, such as resource constraints and diverging user
interests, can be quantified and controlled as relational and attribute
heterogeneity of state graphs. When mapping the distributed replicas of the
application state, the external forces inflict a loss of graph information,
resulting in many-to-one correspondences of graph elements. A key requirement
for meaningful collaboration is maintaining a consistent shared state across
the collaborating sites. Our framework makes the best of maximizing the state
consistency, while accommodating the external force constraints, primarily the
efficient use of scarce system resources. Furthermore, we describe the mobility
aspects of our framework, mainly its extension to peer-to-peer scenarios and
situations of intermittent connectivity. We describe an implementation of our
framework applied to the interoperation of shared graphics editors across
multiple platforms, where users are able to share 2D and 3D virtual
environments represented as XML documents. We also present performance results,
namely resource efficiency and latency, which demonstrate its feasibility for
mobile scenarios. Keywords: collaborative systems - consistency maintenance - content adaptation -
mobile computing - scene simplification | |||