| Leisure and CSCW: Introduction to Special Edition | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 1-10 | |
| Barry Brown; Louise Barkhuus | |||
| In this article we review the contribution to this special edition, and
putting them into the context of research into leisure and technology. We
discuss the challenges of studying leisure in a field where its very name seems
to focus attention on the study of work. Keywords: enjoyment - entertainment - friendship - games - leisure - media consumption
- social network analysis - tourism | |||
| Collecting and Sharing Location-based Content on Mobile Phones in a Zoo Visitor Experience | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 11-44 | |
| Kenton O'Hara; Tim Kindberg; Maxine Glancy; Luciana Baptista; Byju Sukumaran; Gil Kahana; Julie Rowbotham | |||
| The augmentation of visitor experiences with location-based technologies has
been available for some time. Through in-depth studies of users during these
experiences the field is building a rich picture of user behaviour in relation
to certain location-based technologies. However, little work has explored the
use of mobile camera phones and 2D barcodes on situated signs and their
properties as a way of delivering such augmented visitor experiences. In this
paper we present a study of people engaged in such a location-based experience
at London zoo in which they use mobile camera phones to read 2D barcodes on
signs at the animal enclosures in order to access related content. Through the
fieldwork we highlight the social and collaborative aspects of the experience
and how particular characteristics of the mobile phone and barcode technology
shape these behaviours. The paper also highlights some of the non-instrumental
aspects of the location-based experience, in particular in relation to the
importance of collecting location-based content. We explore the social aspects
of collecting as well as certain competitive elements it introduces into
people's behaviour. This creates an interesting tension in that aspects of the
application encourage cooperation and sharing among the visitors whereas others
encourage competition. In the course of presenting the fieldwork, we explore
this tension further. Keywords: 2D barcodes - collecting - location-based computing - mobile phones -
situated displays - visitor experience - zoo | |||
| A Look at Tokyo Youth at Leisure: Towards the Design of New Media to Support Leisure Outings | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 45-73 | |
| Diane J. Schiano; Ame Elliott; Victoria Bellotti | |||
| In this paper we present a set of studies designed to explore Japanese young
people's practices around leisure outings (how they are discovered, planned,
coordinated, and conducted), and the resources they use to support these
practices. Tokyo youth have a wealth of leisure opportunities and tools to
choose from; they are technologically savvy, and are in the vanguard of those
for whom the new mobile Internet technologies are available. We characterize
typical leisure outings described by our study participants, how they are
structured, and the tools used to support them. We found that discovery of
leisure options tends to occur serendipitously, often through personal
recommendations from friends and family. For leisure research and planning, the
Internet is the tool of choice, but accessed via PC, not the mobile phone (or
"keitai"), which is primarily used to communicate and coordinate, not to search
for information. These and related findings suggest some emerging issues and
opportunities for the design of future leisure support technologies. Keywords: Japanese technology use - leisure - leisure outings - leisure planning -
mobile internet - mobile phones - user-centered design | |||
| Group-Based Mobile Messaging in Support of the Social Side of Leisure | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 75-97 | |
| Scott Counts | |||
| Communication on mobile devices plays an important role in people's use of
technology for leisure, but to date this communication has largely been
one-to-one. Mobile internet connectivity can support a variety of group-based
messaging and media sharing scenarios. Switching to group-based messaging
should enhance the social and leisure aspects of the communication, but in what
ways and to what extent? An experimental system for text and photo messaging on
mobile devices was tested in a research deployment to four groups of 6-8
participants who used both a group-based and one-to-one version of the system.
Results highlight a significant increase in message sending, in mobile device
"fun", and in the social qualities of mobile communication when messaging
group-wide, along with a few minor costs. Qualitative feedback provides further
explanation of the social benefits. Keywords: groups - leisure - messaging - mobile - photos - social - social computing | |||
| Entertaining Situated Messaging at Home | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 99-128 | |
| Mark Perry; Dorothy Rachovides | |||
| Leisure and entertainment-based computing has been traditionally associated
with interactive entertainment media and game playing, yet the forms of
engagement offered by these technologies only support a small part of how we
act when we are at leisure. In this paper, we move away from the paradigm of
leisure technology as computer-based entertainment consumption, and towards a
broader view of leisure computing. This perspective is more in line with our
everyday experience of leisure as an embodied, everyday accomplishment in which
people artfully employ the everyday resources in the world around them in
carrying out their daily lives outside of work. We develop this extended notion
of leisure using data from a field study of domestic communication focusing on
asynchronous and situated messaging to explore some of these issues, and
develop these findings towards design implications for leisure technologies.
Central to our discussion on the normal, everyday and occasioned conduct of
leisure lie the notions of playfulness and creativity, the interweaving of the
worlds of work and leisure, and in the creation of embodied displays of affect,
all of which may be seen manifested in the use of messaging artefacts. This
view of technology in support of leisure-in-the-broad is strongly divergent
from traditional entertainment computing models in its coupling of the
mechanics of the organisation of everyday life to the ways that we make
entertainment for ourselves. This recognition allows us to draw specific
implications for domestic situated messaging technologies, but also more
generally for technology design by tying activities that we tend to regard as
purely functional to other multifaceted and leisure-related purposes. Keywords: communication - domestic computing - ludic computing - playfulness - shared
displays - situated messaging | |||
| Virtual "Third Places": A Case Study of Sociability in Massively Multiplayer Games | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 129-166 | |
| Nicolas Ducheneaut; Robert J. Moore; Eric Nickell | |||
| Georg Simmel [American Journal of Sociology 55:254-261 (1949)] is widely
credited as the first scholar to have seriously examined sociability -- "the
sheer pleasure of the company of others" and the central ingredient in many
social forms of recreation and play. Later Ray Oldenburg [The Great Good Place.
New York: Marlowe & Company (1989)] extended Simmel's work by focusing on a
certain class of public settings, or "third places," in which sociability tends
to occur, such as, bars, coffee shops, general stores, etc. But while Simmel
and Oldenburg describe activities and public spaces in the physical world,
their concepts may apply as well to virtual or online worlds. Today Massively
Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) are extensive, persistent online 3D
environments that are populated by hundreds of thousands of players at any
given moment. The sociable nature of these online spaces is often used to
explain their success: unlike previous video games, MMOGs require players to
exchange information and collaborate in real-time to progress in the game. In
order to shed light on this issue, we critically examine player-to-player
interactions in a popular MMOG (Star Wars Galaxies). Based on several months of
ethnographic observations and computerized data collection, we use Oldenburg's
notion of "third places" to evaluate whether or not the social spaces of this
virtual world fit existing definitions of sociable environments. We discuss the
role online games can play in the formation and maintenance of social capital,
what they can teach us about the evolution of sociability in an increasingly
digitally connected social world, and what could be done to make such games
better social spaces. Keywords: automated data collection - online games - sociability - third places | |||
| The Cooperative Work of Gaming: Orchestrating a Mobile SMS Game | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 167-198 | |
| Andy Crabtree; Steve Benford; Mauricio Capra; Martin Flintham; Adam Drozd; Nick Tandavanitj; Matt Adams; Ju Row Farr | |||
| This paper focuses on orchestration work in the first iteration of a mobile
game called Day Of The Figurines, which explores the potential to exploit text
messaging as a means of creating an engaging gaming experience. By focusing on
orchestration we are especially concerned with the 'cooperative work that makes
the game work'. While the assemblage or family of orchestration practices
uncovered by our ethnographic study are specific to the game -- including the
ways in which behind the scenes staff make sense of messages, craft appropriate
responses, and manage and track the production of gameplay narratives as the
game unfolds -- orchestration work is of general significance to our
understanding of new gaming experiences. The focus on orchestration work
reveals that behind the scenes staff are co-producers of the game and that the
playing of games is, therefore, inseparably intertwined with their
orchestration. Furthermore, orchestration work is 'ordinary' work that relies
upon the taken for granted skills and competences of behind the scenes staff;
'operators' and 'authors' in this case. While we remain focused on the
specifics of this game, explication of the ordinary work of orchestration
highlights challenges and opportunities for the continued development of gaming
experiences more generally. Indeed, understanding the specificities of
orchestration work might be said to be a key ingredient of future development. Keywords: cooperative work - ethnography - mobile games - orchestration - SMS text
messages | |||
| Let's Get Physical! In, Out and Around the Gaming Circle of Physical Gaming at Home | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 199-229 | |
| Allison Sall; Rebecca E. Grinter | |||
| Physical gaming is a genre of computer games that has recently been made
available for the home. But what does it mean to bring games home that were
originally designed for play in the arcade? This paper describes an empirical
study that looks at physical gaming and how it finds its place in the home. We
discuss the findings from this study by organizing them around four topics: the
adoption of the game, its unique spatial needs, the tension between visibility
and availability of the game, and what it means to play among what we describe
as the gaming circle, or players and non-players alike. Finally, we discuss how
physical gaming in the home surfaces questions and issues for householders and
researchers around adoption, gender and both space and place. Keywords: collaborative play - exergaming - physical games - spatiality | |||
| How Can I Help You? Call Centres, Classification Work and Coordination | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 231-264 | |
| David Martin; Jacki O'Neill; Dave Randall; Mark Rouncefield | |||
| As a comparatively novel but increasingly pervasive organizational
arrangement, call centres have been a focus for much recent research. This
paper identifies lessons for organizational and technological design through an
examination of call centres and 'classification work' -- explicating what Star
[1992, Systems/Practice vol. 5, pp. 395-410] terms the 'open black box'.
Classification is a central means by which organizations standardize procedure,
assess productivity, develop services and re-organize their business.
Nevertheless, as Bowker and Star [1999, Sorting Things Out: Classification and
Its Consequences. Cambridge MA: MIT Press] have pointed out, we know relatively
little about the work that goes into making classification schema what they
are. We will suggest that a focus on classification 'work' in this context is a
useful exemplar of the need for some kind of 'meta-analysis' in ethnographic
work also. If standardization is a major ambition for organizations under late
capitalism, then comparison might be seen as a related but as-yet unrealized
one for ethnographers. In this paper, we attempt an initial cut at a
comparative approach, focusing on classification because it seemed to be the
primary issue that emerged when we compared studies. Moreover, if technology is
the principal means through which procedure and practice is implemented and if,
as we believe, classifications are becoming ever more explicitly embedded
within it (for instance with the development of so-called 'semantic web' and
associated approaches to ontology-based design), then there is clearly a case
for identifying some themes which might underpin classification work in a given
domain. Keywords: call centres - categorization - classification - ethnography -
ethnomethodology - ontology | |||
| Doing Virtually Nothing: Awareness and Accountability in Massively Multiplayer Online Worlds | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 265-305 | |
| Robert J. Moore; Nicolas Ducheneaut; Eric Nickell | |||
| To date the most popular and sophisticated types of virtual worlds can be
found in the area of video gaming, especially in the genre of Massively
Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG). Game developers have made great
strides in achieving game worlds that look and feel increasingly realistic.
However, despite these achievements in the visual realism of virtual game
worlds, they are much less sophisticated when it comes to modeling face-to-face
interaction. In face-to-face, ordinary social activities are "accountable,"
that is, people use a variety of kinds of observational information about what
others are doing in order to make sense of others' actions and to tightly
coordinate their own actions with others. Such information includes: (1) the
real-time unfolding of turns-at-talk; (2) the observability of embodied
activities; and (3) the direction of eye gaze for the purpose of gesturing. But
despite the fact that today's games provide virtual bodies, or "avatars," for
players to control, these avatars display much less information about players'
current state than real bodies do. In this paper, we discuss the impact of the
lack of each type of information on players' ability to tightly coordinate
their activities and offer guidelines for improving coordination and,
ultimately, the players' social experience. Keywords: collaborative virtual environments - conversation analysis -
ethnomethodology - game design - Massively Multiplayer Online Games - virtual
worlds | |||
| Boundary Negotiating Artifacts: Unbinding the Routine of Boundary Objects and Embracing Chaos in Collaborative Work | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 307-339 | |
| Charlotte P. Lee | |||
| Empirical studies of material artifacts in practice continue to be a rich
source of theoretical concepts for CSCW. This paper explores the foundational
concept of boundary objects and questions the conception that all objects that
move between communities of practice are boundary objects. This research
presents the results of a year-long ethnographic study of collaborative work,
specifically the multidisciplinary collaborative design of a museum exhibition.
I suggest that artifacts can serve to establish and destabilize protocols
themselves and that artifacts can be used to push boundaries rather than merely
sailing across them. Artifacts used for collaboration do not necessarily exist
within a web of standardized processes and disorderly processes should not be
treated as "special cases". Keywords: articulation work - artifacts - artefacts - boundary negotiating artifacts -
boundary objects - collaborative work - communities of practice - Computer
Supported Cooperative Work - design - ethnography - museums - theory | |||
| Beyond Boundary Objects: Collaborative Reuse in Aircraft Technical Support | | BIBAK | DOI | 341-372 | |
| Wayne G. Lutters; Mark S. Ackerman | |||
| Boundary objects are a critical, but understudied, theoretical construct in
CSCW. Through a field study of aircraft technical support, we examined the role
of boundary objects in the practical achievement of safety by service
engineers. Their resolution of repair requests was preserved in the
organization's memory via three compound boundary objects. These
crystallizations did not manifest a static interpretation, but instead were
continually reinterpreted in light of meta-negotiations. This suggests design
implications for organizational memory systems which can more fluidly represent
the meta-negotiations surrounding boundary objects. Keywords: boundary objects - collaborative work - high reliability organizations -
hotlines - information reuse - organizational memory - safety - service
engineering - technical support | |||
| Learning In Communities: Introduction to the Special Issue | | BIB | Full-Text | 373-374 | |
| J. M. Carroll | |||
| Local Groups Online: Political Learning and Participation | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 375-395 | |
| Andrea L. Kavanaugh; Than Than Zin; Mary Beth Rosson; John M. Carroll; Joseph Schmitz; B. Joon Kim | |||
| Voluntary associations serve crucial roles in local communities and within
our larger democratic society. They aggregate shared interests, collective
will, and cultivate civic competencies that nurture democratic participation.
People active in multiple local groups frequently act as opinion leaders and
create "weak" social ties across groups. In Blacksburg and surrounding
Montgomery County, Virginia, the Blacksburg Electronic Village (BEV) community
computer network has helped to foster nearly universal Internet penetration.
Set in this dense Internet context, the present study investigated if and how
personal affiliation with local groups enhanced political participation in this
high information and communication technology environment. This paper presents
findings from longitudinal survey data that indicate as individuals' uses of
information technology within local formal groups increases over time, so do
their levels and types of involvement in the group. Furthermore, these
increases most often appear among people who serve as opinion leaders and
maintain weak social ties in their communities. Individuals' changes in
community participation, interests and activities, and Internet use suggest
ways in which group members act upon political motivations and interests across
various group types. Keywords: social computing - empirical methods - survey research | |||
| Sustaining a Community Computing Infrastructure for Online Teacher Professional Development: A Case Study of Designing Tapped In | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 397-429 | |
| Umer Farooq; Patricia Schank; Alexandra Harris; Judith Fusco; Mark Schlager | |||
| Community computing has recently grown to become a major research area in
human-computer interaction. One of the objectives of community computing is to
support computer supported cooperative work among distributed collaborators
working toward shared professional goals in online communities of practice. A
core issue in designing and developing community computing infrastructures --
the underlying socio-technical layer that supports communitarian activities --
is sustainability. Many community computing initiatives fail because the
underlying infrastructure does not meet end user requirements; the community is
unable to maintain a critical mass of users consistently over time; it
generates insufficient social capital to support significant contributions by
members of the community; or, as typically happens with funded initiatives,
financial and human capital resource become unavailable to further maintain the
infrastructure. Based on more than nine years of design experience with Tapped
In -- an online community of practice for education professionals -- we present
a case study that discusses four design interventions that have sustained the
Tapped In infrastructure and its community to date. These interventions
represent broader design strategies for developing online environments for
professional communities of practice. Keywords: community of practice - human-computer interaction - participatory design -
social capital - sustainability | |||
| Expert Recommender: Designing for a Network Organization | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 431-465 | |
| Tim Reichling; Michael Veith; Volker Wulf | |||
| Recent knowledge management initiatives focus on expertise sharing within
formal organizational units and informal communities of practice. Expert
recommender systems seem to be a promising tool in support of these
initiatives. This paper presents experiences in designing an expert recommender
system for a knowledge-intensive organization, namely the National Industry
Association (NIA). Field study results provide a set of specific design
requirements. Based on these requirements, we have designed an expert
recommender system which is integrated into the specific software
infrastructure of the organizational setting. The organizational setting is, as
we will show, specific for historical, political, and economic reasons. These
particularities influence the employees' organizational and (inter-)personal
needs within this setting. The paper connects empirical findings of a long-term
case study with design experiences of an expertise recommender system. Keywords: expertise sharing - expert recommender system - case study | |||
| Architecture, Infrastructure, and Broadband Civic Network Design: An Institutional View | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 467-499 | |
| Murali Venkatesh; Mawaki Chango | |||
| Cultural values frame architectures, and architectures motivate
infrastructures-by which we mean the foundational telecommunications and
Internet access services that software applications depend on. Design is the
social process that realizes architectural elements in an infrastructure. This
process is often a conflicted one where transformative visions confront the
realities of entrenched power, where innovation confronts pressure from
institutionalized interests and practices working to resist change and
reproduce the status quo in the design outcome. We use this viewpoint to
discuss design aspects of the Urban-net, a broadband civic networking case.
Civic networks are embodiments of distinctive technological configurations and
forms of social order. In choosing some technological configurations over
others, designers are favoring some social structural configurations over
alternatives. To the extent that a civic network sets out to reconfigure the
prevailing social order (as was the case in the Urban-net project considered
here), the design process becomes the arena where challengers of the prevailing
order encounter its defenders. In this case the defenders prevailed, and the
design that emerged was conservative and reproduced the status quo. What steps
can stakeholders take so that the project's future development is in line with
the original aim of structural change? We outline two strategies. We argue the
importance of articulating cultural desiderata in an architecture that
stakeholders can use to open up the infrastructure to new constituents and
incremental change. Next, we argue the importance of designing the conditions
of design. The climate in which social interactions occur can powerfully shape
design outcomes, but this does not usually figure in stakeholders' design
concerns. Keywords: network architecture - infrastructure - civic networks - broadband
telecommunications | |||
| Supporting Community Emergency Management Planning through a Geocollaboration Software Architecture | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 501-537 | |
| Wendy A. Schafer; Craig H. Ganoe; John M. Carroll | |||
| Emergency management is more than just events occurring within an emergency
situation. It encompasses a variety of persistent activities such as planning,
training, assessment, and organizational change. We are studying emergency
management planning practices in which geographic communities (towns and
regions) prepare to respond efficiently to significant emergency events.
Community emergency management planning is an extensive collaboration involving
numerous stakeholders throughout the community and both reflecting and
challenging the community's structure and resources. Geocollaboration is one
aspect of the effort. Emergency managers, public works directors, first
responders, and local transportation managers need to exchange information
relating to possible emergency event locations and their surrounding areas.
They need to examine geospatial maps together and collaboratively develop
emergency plans and procedures. Issues such as emergency vehicle traffic routes
and staging areas for command posts, arriving media, and personal first
responders' vehicles must be agreed upon prior to an emergency event to ensure
an efficient and effective response. This work presents a software architecture
that facilitates the development of geocollaboration solutions. The
architecture extends prior geocollaboration research and reuses existing
geospatial information models. Emergency management planning is one application
domain for the architecture. Geocollaboration tools can be developed that
support community-wide emergency management planning and preparedness. This
paper describes how the software architecture can be used for the geospatial,
emergency management planning activities of one community. Keywords: collaboration architecture - software design - emergency planning | |||
| Seeds of Cross-Media Production | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 539-566 | |
| Susanne Bødker; Anja Bechmann Petersen | |||
| We present an empirical study of an organization that has recently moved
from traditional newspaper production towards cross-media production involving
the integrated digital production of newspaper, television, radio and web-news.
The paper focuses on the daily production rhythms of the media separately and
of cross-media production. Since cross-media production is in the making, we
study the instruments currently used for planning and coordination, and analyze
them as seeds that will eventually make cross-media production happen. Time and
timing are important in news production in general, and our analyses focus on
the rhythm of the daily planning, coordination and production processes.
Specifically, we analyze the temporal coordination of the activities in and
around the Superdesk -- the current center of coordination of the news
organization, and of the persons who work specifically with planning and
coordination. We demonstrate how the production rhythms of the individual media
collide with that of cross-media, and how product lifecycle rhythms add to the
list of causes of problems that may jeopardize cross-media production. We
propose to strengthen planning and overview support elements of the Superdesk,
and the main new coordinator role of the organization. We point out how the
media rhythms of newspaper in particular must be backgrounded. To achieve
cross-media production, the starting point must be to strengthening and
developing further the cross-media rhythms, rather than supplementing
individual media rhythms. Keywords: cross-media production - daily production rhythms - Superdesk | |||
| Improving the Effectiveness of Virtual Teams by Adapting Team Processes | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 567-594 | |
| Daniel J. Rice; Barry D. Davidson; John F. Dannenhoffer; Geri K. Gay | |||
| Results are presented from a study on virtual teams and whether appropriate
early training can positively influence their effectiveness. Sixteen teams that
worked together for periods ranging from three months to three years were
studied. Team processes that emerged naturally from long-duration teams were
formalized and taught to shorter duration teams. These shorter duration teams
comprised three different cohorts, each of which received different levels of
training. It was found that the adoption of formal procedures and structured
processes significantly increased the effectiveness of virtual teams. Tasks
that lend themselves to a structured approach were most effectively
accomplished during virtual meetings, whereas face-to-face interactions were
better for relatively unstructured, discussion intensive tasks. The performance
of a virtual team was significantly improved when team processes were adapted
to the affordances of the CMC environment. It is shown that this adaptation can
occur very rapidly if teams are trained on the technology as well as on work
processes that best exploit it. Keywords: brainstorming - collaboration - communication - computer-mediated -
consensus - decision-making - dispersed - distance - geographically distributed | |||
| Telehealth in Context: Socio-technical Barriers to Telehealth use in Labrador, Canada | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 595-614 | |
| Katrina Peddle | |||
| Currently telehealth is being offered as an innovative solution to
austerity, staffing issues and problems accessing care in Canada's rural
communities. Despite the current enthusiasm for telehealth in provincial and
federal policy documents, many of these promises have not been realized. The
Labrador region is a large and sparsely populated area that was vested with a
federal "Smart Community" project to increase the region's technological
capacity, making it one of the most connected locales in the country. While
telehealth was a key component of the SmartLabrador plan, there has been
limited uptake of newly available technologies for the purposes of mediating
distance in health care. My work critically examines the factors surrounding
this lack of uptake, and takes the work of Harold Innis as a starting point
when analyzing the breakdown of time and space in Labrador. Focused around
qualitative field research conducted in Labrador in 2003, I explore
spatialization, structuration and work practice as they relate to telehealth
use and non-use in the region. I review federal and provincial telehealth
policy to provide a macro context for the study, which I then link to meso and
micro levels of analysis in organization structures and situated work practice.
I examine telehealth in the user context from the health care provider
perspective. This reveals several constraints that have limited the usage of
new technologies for health communication in Labrador. The user context must be
considered in the design of telehealth programs and policy if the desired
outcomes for telehealth are to be realized. The barriers to telehealth use are
not simply technical, but relate to issues of privacy, culture and trust. I
discuss these and other barriers with a focus on the needs of the Labrador
community. Keywords: health services - policy - political economy - rural communications - Smart
Community - telehealth - work practice | |||
| "Designing Collaborative Systems" by Andy Crabtree. | | BIB | Full-Text | 615-617 | |
| Bob Anderson | |||
| "Ethnomethodology's Program: Working Out Durkheim's Aphorism." edited by Harold Garfinkel | | BIB | DOI | 619-626 | |
| Graham Button | |||
| "Sharing Expertise: Beyond Knowledge Management." edited by Mark Ackerman, Volkmar Pipek, Volker Wulf | | BIB | DOI | 627-630 | |
| David W. Randall | |||