For users to trust planning algorithms, they must be able to understand the planner's outputs and the reasons for each action selection. This output does not tend to be user-friendly, often consisting of sequences of parametrised actions or task networks. And these may not be practical for non-expert users who may find it easier to read natural language descriptions. In this paper, we propose PlanVerb, a domain and planner-independent method for the verbalization of task plans. It is based on semantic tagging of actions and predicates. Our method can generate natural language descriptions of plans including causal explanations. The verbalized plans can be summarized by compressing the actions that act on the same parameters. We further extend the concept of verbalization space, previously applied to robot navigation, and apply it to planning to generate different kinds of plan descriptions for different user requirements. Our method can deal with PDDL and RDDL domains, provided that they are tagged accordingly. Our user survey evaluation shows that users can read our automatically generated plan descriptions and that the explanations help them answer questions about the plan.

Motion planning is a hard problem that can often overwhelm both users and designers: due to the difficulty in understanding the optimality of a solution, or reasons for a planner to fail to find any solution. Inspired by recent work in machine learning and task planning, in this paper we are guided by a vision of developing motion planners that can provide reasons for their output—thus potentially contributing to better user interfaces, debugging tools, and algorithm trustworthiness. Towards this end, we propose a preliminary taxonomy and a set of important considerations for the design of explainable motion planners, based on the analysis of a comprehensive user study of motion planning experts. We identify the kinds of things that need to be explained by motion planners ("explanation objects"), types of explanation, and several procedures required to arrive at explanations. We also elaborate on a set of qualifications and design considerations that should be taken into account when designing explainable methods. These insights contribute to bringing the vision of explainable motion planners closer to reality, and can serve as a resource for researchers and developers interested in designing such technology.

In recent years, we have witnessed the emergence of large-scale centers of command and control that bring together a range of personnel from various services responsible for the management of day-to-day incidents and events. These multicenter control rooms stand in marked contrast to what Suchman termed ‘centers of coordination’ (Suchman 1997), which have typically formed the focus of much research within HCI and Computer supported co-operative work (CSCW). In this paper, we explore the practices and technical resources within one of these very large multicenter control rooms. Staff in this control room do collaborate with colleagues who are copresent, but there is little reliance on the subtle interactional practices found in earlier studies. However, one information system is critical for collaboration and managing incidents that arise: the information system that is used to record incidents. Unlike in previous settings where records were made after an incident had taken place, these records are used for the concurrent management of activities. We consider the practices through which staff assemble these records to serve the demands of different individuals, with differing responsibilities in various organizations within the control room. We consider instances of copresent collaboration and suggest that these are often to ameliorate problems with the records rather than supporting real-time colocated activities. Although staff may be copresent in these multicenter control rooms, they have different kinds of technological resources available to them, and a different ‘division of labor.’ This can undermine the integration of these resources within forms of work. We conclude by discussing the implications for our understanding of copresent work and also for the methods and approaches we can draw upon for understanding these contemporary workplaces.

In this paper we report on a pervasive practice in video-mediated communication: where participants show one another one or more objects. This is a distinct activity from others considered by researchers of video-mediated technologies that focus on a face-to-face orientation, or just on the support necessary to help people to refer to objects. We first present examples of this pervasive phenomenon in naturally occurring Skype conversations, revealing how this conduct is configured and organized within the interaction between participants. We reveal how the subtle adjustment of the position of the body, the head and gaze with respect to the handheld objects offers crucial resources for participants to achieve joint seeing. Then we report on a quite different setting, a naturalistic experiment where participants collaborate on a collective task with remote colleagues through maneuverable, orientable devices (Kubis). Again, in these experiments participants frequently show objects, and at times the devices provide additional resources to support these activities. But at other times they also involve some difficulties. We conclude by suggesting possible technological developments, some quite simple, others more radical, that might support participants to show objects, whether they are in domestic settings or undertaking work activities.

In this paper we report on some experiments with a high fidelity media space, t-Room, an immersive system that presents full scale, real-time images of co-participants. The system has been enhanced to provide more flexibility in the ways participants could organise themselves and the materials they are working on. Drawing on some quasi-naturalistic experiments, where the participants were required to undertake a range of complex tasks, we consider the formations they adopt and the issues and problems that arise when they attempt to establish and preserve a common focus and alignment. We conclude by briefly discussing the consequences for developing advanced spaces to support collaborative work and understanding complex video-mediated interaction.

In collaborative video communication systems, establishing co-orientation around physical objects, virtual objects and people is a critical requirement. This is problematic as the technical limitations of video fractures the display of conduct in the connected environments. We present the results of a study of one collaborative system, CamBlend, which aims to alleviate some of these problems by using screen based pointing tools to both physical spaces and virtual resources. We report on how participants achieved co-orientation when using this system. We relate these findings to previous research into the fractured ecologies of collaborative spaces, describing how the form and nature of fractures in CamBlend differ from earlier reported work.

A concern with “embodied action” has informed both the analysis of everyday action through technologies and also suggested ways of designing innovative systems. In this article, we consider how these two programs, the analysis of everyday embodied interaction on the one hand, and the analysis of technically-mediated embodied interaction on the other, are interlinked. We draw on studies of everyday interaction to reveal how embodied conduct is embedded in the environment. We then consider a collaborative technology that attempts to provide a coherent way of presenting life-sized embodiments of participants alongside particular features of the environment. These analyses suggest that conceptions of embodied action should take account of the interactional accomplishment of activities and how these are embedded in the material environment.

In this paper we report on some experiments with a high fidelity media space, t-Room, an immersive system that presents full scale, real-time images of co-participants who are in similar spaces many miles apart. Although being designed to provide a coherent environment for interaction the system introduces a number of incongruities, both in time and space. Drawing on some quasi-naturalistic experiments, where the participants were required to analyse complex data, we consider how the participants manage these incongruities. We conclude by briefly discussing the resources people utilize to produce and recognize conduct in embodied spaces.

This paper advocates an approach to requirements analysis drawing on social scientific research strategies (Ethnography) and model based engineering (MBE). Our work is aimed at bridging the gap between applied ethnographic reports and the early stages of the software development lifecycle (SDLC). Taking a view on how we think data should be represented at the requirements level, we demonstrate an approach to modeling and documenting requirement-centric ethnographic reports based on linguistic statements and human behaviour. The work is particularly oriented towards documenting requirements for `data'. We make an arguement on what types of information should be included in requirements level data schemas. Our methodology looks at an established ethnographic study in order to elucidate problems that you find with standard requirements models. Our solution is to extend UML with so called Tacit Contracts that enhance requirements-level data schemas by highlighting tacit information to do with the composition and characteristics of the data being described. The tacit contract then requires system designers at latter phases of the SDLC to also take into account information expressed as tacit in the requirements models when making design decisions about the system.

There are numerous settings where people examine, scrutinize and discuss the details of images in the course of their work. In most medical domains, scans and x-rays are used in the diagnosis of cases; in most areas of science, methods of visualization have been adopted to assist in the analysis of data; and images of different kinds are critical for many research fields in the social sciences and humanities. It is not surprising that recently technologies have been proposed to assist with the analysis and examination of images. In this paper, we consider requirements for technologies in a rather distinctive domain of research, the classics. Drawing upon an analysis of the detailed ways in which classicists work with digital images, we discuss the requirements for systems to support researchers in this domain, and also provide further considerations on the general development of image processing technologies and visualization techniques.

Auctions, both traditional and electronic, are a pervasive social organisation for the valuation and exchange of goods and services. Despite the long-standing interest in integrating internet contributions into the more traditional auction such initiatives have remained problematic. We consider the organization of interaction of sales of fine art and antiques and develop a prototype 'intelligent' gavel system that is designed to enhance remote participation and ease the flexible ways in which internet contributions are legitimately integrated into live auctions. We present the findings of a quasi-naturalistic experiment involving the use of the system by auctioneers and its consequences for the general development of technologies to support internet participation in live co-located events.

Designing technologies that support the explanation of museum exhibits is a challenging domain. In this paper we develop an innovative approach - providing a robot guide with resources to engage visitors in an interaction about an art exhibit. We draw upon ethnographical fieldwork in an art museum, focusing on how tour guides interrelate talk and visual conduct, specifically how they ask questions of different kinds to engage and involve visitors in lengthy explanations of an exhibit. From this analysis we have developed a robot guide that can coordinate its utterances and body movement to monitor the responses of visitors to these. Detailed analysis of the interaction between the robot and visitors in an art museum suggests that such simple devices derived from the study of human interaction might be useful in engaging visitors in explanations of complex artifacts.

If robot systems are being deployed in real world settings with untrained users who happen to accidentally pass by or could leave at any moment in time, then this places specific demands on the robot system: it needs to secure and maintain the user's engagement. In this, a common and critical problem consists of entering into a `focused encounter'. It requires each interactional partner to closely react upon the other's actions on a very fine-grained level engaging in a stepwise and dynamic process of mutual adjustments. We report initial findings from a study in which we have developed a preliminary, simple solution to this problem inspired by work from Conversation Analysis. Using this as an instrument to explore the impact of a `contingent' (CE) vs. `non-contingent entry' (NCE), we find that users who enter into the interaction in a dynamic and contingent manner show a significantly different way of interacting with the robot than the NCE group.

In this paper we consider the development of a museum guide robot that has both autonomous and remotely controlled features. We focus on the capabilities such a robot could have to help focus the attention of a visitor on an object or artefact. Inspired by studies of social interaction, which investigate whether the robot could deploy "restarts" and "pauses" at certain moments in its talk to first elicit the visitor's attention/gaze towards the robot. We report an experiment where we deployed such a robot to interact with real visitors to a science museum. These experiments show that such a strategy does seem to have a significant impact on obtaining the visitor's gaze.

Alongside the emergence of the use of fieldwork studies for design there has been a discussion on how best these studies can inform system development. Concerns have been expressed as to whether their most appropriate contribution is a list of requirements or design recommendations. This article explores a recurrent issue that has emerged from fieldwork studies in Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, awareness, and with respect to a particular system development project discusses some of the implications for the development and deployment of one particular kind of technology—image recognition systems—in particular, organizational settings. In the setting in question—surveillance centers or operations rooms—staff utilize a range of practices to maintain awareness. Rather than extending field studies so that they can better assist design, it may be considered how workplace studies can contribute to a respecification of key concepts, like awareness, that are critical to an understanding of how technologies are used and deployed in everyday environments.

Museums increasingly deploy new technologies to enhance visitors' experience of their exhibitions. They primarily rely on touch-screen computer systems, PDAs and digital audio-guides. Tate Britain recently employed two innovative systems in one of their major exhibitions of John Constable's work; a gestural interface and a touch-screen panel, both connected to large projection screens. This paper reports on the analysis of video-recordings and field observations of visitors' action and interaction. It explores how people interact with and around the systems, how they configure the space around the installation and how they examine and discover their properties. It suggests that designers of interfaces and installations developed for museum exhibitions face particular challenges, such as the transparency of the relationship between people's actions and the system' response, the provision of opportunities for individual and collaborative experiences and the interweaving of technological and aesthetic experiences.

Recently a number of researchers have uncovered various ways in which paper documents support everyday work practice and have suggested how these may be reflected in the design of new technologies. In this paper we consider how activities on and around paper documents may be supported when participants are remote from each other. When we consider the uses of an experimental system that provides a number of resources for supporting work over documents, it becomes apparent how critical it is to support apparently simple pointing and referencing, and how complex such conduct can be. This suggests some considerations both for developers of enhanced media spaces and analysts of everyday conduct.Clarified descriptions of technology and fragments including changes to figures. Added points concerning the scope of the technology the conception of sequence and calrified the requirement regarding redundancy. Revised descriptions of fragments in an atempt to make thsee less dense Corrected several typographic errors including those mentioned by the reviewers' gesture.

In this paper we investigated systems for supporting remote collaboration using mobile robots as communication media. It is argued that the use of a remote-controlled robot as a device to support communication involves two distinct ecologies: an ecology at the remote (instructor's) site and an ecology at the operator's (robot) site. In designing a robot as a viable communication medium, it is essential to consider how these ecologies can be mediated and supported. In this paper, we propose design guidelines to overcome the problems inherent in dual ecologies, and describe the development of a robot named GestureMan-3 based on these guidelines. Our experiments with GestureMan-3 showed that the system supports sequential aspects of the organization of communication.

Despite the wide-ranging recognition that paper remains a pervasive resource for human conduct and collaboration, there has been uncertain progress in developing technologies to bridge the paper-digital divide. In this essay we discuss the design of a technology that interweaves developments in new materials, electronics and software, and seeks to provide a cheap and accessible solution to creating new affinities between digital content, in whatever form, and ordinary paper. The technology and its design draws from a broad range of field studies, including research in classrooms and museums. These delineate the requirements and considerations that inform solutions to enhancing paper whilst preserving its integrity. The paper also discusses a naturalistic experiment, an evaluation in a museum, where we assessed the technology and the solution. We also chart the progressive development of this solution and the ways in which seemingly simple actions and issues became reconstituted as highly complex technical and analytic problems.

It is increasingly recognized that social interaction and collaboration rely on the participants' abilities to access and use a range of resources including objects and artifacts from within the immediate environment. In recent years, system support for remote collaboration has begun to address this issue, and we have witnessed the emergence of a number of technologies designed to provide remote participants with access to (features of) each others' environment. In this article we examine the use of one such system, an innovative mixed media environment designed to enable participants to refer to and point at objects and artifacts within each other's remote environment. The article addresses the ways in which participants use the system to undertake various collaborative activities and discusses the problems and issues that emerge, for the participants' themselves, in coordinating action with and through objects. We then consider these issues with regard to interaction and collaboration in more conventional environments such as work settings, and we discuss the ways in which the interpretation and production of action are inextricably embedded within the immediate environment, an environment of action that is inadvertently fractured in even this more sophisticated media space.

Drawing on studies of experimental systems and everyday settings we explore the relationship between social interaction and its environment. We show how interaction is inextricably embedded within its environment and discuss the ways in which innovative systems designed to support remote collaboration inadvertently fracture conduct from its setting, and undermine the participants abilities to produce, interpret and coordinate activities. We discuss the implications of these issues for the design of future systems, and, more critically, for studies of work and collaboration. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Recent technologies to support collaborative work have sought, in various ways, to enhance an individual's awareness of another's activities. Through a range of diverse technologies developers have endeavoured to provide users with capabilities that allow them to monitor, either passively or actively, what others are doing. In this paper we aim to examine awareness by analysing a setting where one of the responsibilities of the staff is to oversee, through a set of technologies, a complex environment in order to monitor the various spaces and locations in the local domain, the individuals who move through these spaces, and the events that occur in it. We outline the resources they utilise to make sense of what personnel see on the screens and to initiate collaborative action with colleagues. We conclude by discussing how such analyses can inform the design of novel systems which aim to support awareness and monitoring of environments. More critically we draw on this study to reconsider the conception of awareness utilised within Computer Supported Cooperative Work and other fields where technological solutions are being proposed to support individuals to monitor, whether peripherally or not, locations, activities and other individuals in digital environments.

This paper addresses an issue that has received little attention within CSCW- the requirements to support mobility within collaboration activities. By examining three quite different settings each with differing technological support, we examine the ways in which mobility is critical to collaborative work. We suggest that taking mobility seriously, may not only contribute our understanding of current support for collaboration, but raise more general issues concerning the requirements for mobile and other technologies. Keywords mobile communications, augmented reality, object-centred interaction

Article Documents and professional practice: "bad" organisational reasons for "good" clinical records Share on Authors: Christian Heath Centre for Work, Interaction and Technology, School of Social Studies, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, United Kingdom Centre for Work, Interaction and Technology, School of Social Studies, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, United KingdomView Profile , Paul Luff Centre for Work, Interaction and Technology, School of Social Studies, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, United Kingdom Centre for Work, Interaction and Technology, School of Social Studies, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, United KingdomView Profile Authors Info & Claims CSCW '96: Proceedings of the 1996 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative workNovember 1996 Pages 354–363https://doi.org/10.1145/240080.240342Online:16 November 1996Publication History 140citation1,845DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations140Total Downloads1,845Last 12 Months76Last 6 weeks5 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

Methods for requirements elicitation have emphasized techniques for their elicitation and representation. The conception of tasks embodied in these methods is often vague or left implicit and generally characterized in individualistic terms. The authors draw from empirical materials to reveal the social and collaborative nature of task that is also overlooked in participative design or in attempts to elicit multiple viewpoints of an activity. Exploring the socio-interactional nature of activities leads to some radical implications for the technological design. An approach that utilizes ethnographic studies of real-world settings with detailed analysis of interactions of the participants may make an important contribution to the development of requirements method.>

The paper examines the relationship between human-computer interaction and interpersonal communication in general practice consultations. Drawing on detailed analyses of video recordings of consultations conducted by four doctors in an inner city medical practice, we describe how patients recurrently coordinate their actions with visible and audible aspects of the doctors' use of a computer. We then suggest that this linkage between computer use and communicative conduct raises important conceptual, methodological and substantive issues for the fields of both HCI and CSCW. Some potential implications for the design of human computer interactions and for the development of CSCW systems are outlined.

Drawing on field studies of three, real world, organisational environments, namely an architectural practice, a medical centre and the Control Rooms on London LJnderground, this paper explores the ways in which personnel use paper and screen based documentation to support synchronous and asynchronous collaborative activity.It discusses how collaboration involves a complex configuration of coparticipation by personnel in a range of activities, ranging from seemingly individual tasks to mutually focussed, real time cooperation.By addressing the ways in which personnel manage collaboration and interactionally organise a range of activities, we discuss the ways in which paper and screen based media provide rather distinctive support for cooperation.These observations form the basis for some suggestions concerning requirements for CSCW systems.

Despite the growing interest in using audio-visual technologies to support communication and collaborative work among individuals in different locations, we still have relatively little understanding of the organization of video-mediated interaction. In the following article, we discuss some findings of recent research concerning interpersonal communication in a sophisticated multimedia office environment. Based on the detailed naturalistic analysis of individuals collaborating on various tasks during their day-to-day working lives, we explore the extent to which the media space provides a satisfactory means for interpersonal communication and ordinary sociability. In particular, the research suggests that audio-visual technology introduces certain asymmetries into interpersonal communication that can transform the impact of visual and vocal conduct. These communicative asymmetries may be consequential for the design and implementation of audio-visual infrastructures used to support informal sociability and collaborative work.

In the following paper we disettss some findings of recent research concerning the organisation of video mediated communication in collaborative work in a dispersed, multimedia office environment.Based on the detailed, naturalistic analysis of video-recordings of individuals collaborating on various tasks through audio-visual links, we describe the ways in which the technology transforms nonverbal and verbal conduct, introducing certain asymmetries into the social interaction between users.It is argued that such communicative asymmetries may facilitate, rather than hinder, certain forms of collaborative work and provide a foundation for the emergence of new forms of sociability in the work place.What of the hands?We require, promise, call, dismiss, threaten, pray, supplicate, deny, refuse, interrogate, admire, number, confess, repent,

Suchman (1987) has recently drawn attention to the situated nature of human social action and its implications for the design of interactive computer systems. In particular, she has highlighted the shortcomings of globally managing human computer dialogues by matching user actions to some idealised plan for carrying out a task. In this paper we outline a scheme for the local management of dialogues based on the findings of conversation analysis. The scheme makes available a variety of communicative resources to both user and system, including the ability to give and take turns at talk, to initiate and carry out repair work, and to continue or change the topic of conversation. An implementation of the scheme in a welfare rights Advice System is described.

Formulating precise descriptions of human-computer interactions is a prerequisite for the principled design, implementation, and evaluation of interactive systems. This article reports an exercise in interaction specification using Foley and Van Dam's (1982) multilayered method of documenting the design of a user-computer interface. The specification was used to communicate the intended behaviour of a Forms Helper system from a design team to an implementation team. The ease with which the interaction could be represented at each of Foley and Van Dam's four levels of abstraction is discussed, and recommendations are made for improving the method in places where its guidance was unclear or inadequate. The value of the method is examined prior to a discussion of the potential role of such specifications in the design and development cycle.