Data infrastructures are major sites through which city government operates and therefore of special interest to critical scholars of technology. Yet ways that these infrastructures are embedded into the institutional fabric of government make them difficult to navigate and often resistant to abstract critique and generalized analysis. We present an ethnographic study of a design effort launched by a team inside a city government to build and deploy a tool with a specific focus on equity and justice. By integrating data from multiple sources and bringing it together in a spatial framework, the team sought to bring neighborhood voices, often marginalized in planning efforts, into the center of the conversation. Tracing the negotiations over data's value in this process, we unveil various tensions involved in this effort, within and between different groups, and how the group of city employees navigated these tensions, mainly by adjusting the relations of the groups around data -- which we call ''data relations.'' Narratives in organizational communications were key in both revealing and mobilizing the data relations constituting the institutional data infrastructure. With the empirical findings, we argue that tracing the data relations can be an effective way for the CSCW community to understand the institutional data politics and make interventions in the systems in power.

In this article, we show that explanations of decisions made by machine learning systems can be improved by not only explaining why a decision was made but also explaining how an individual could obtain their desired outcome. We formally define the concept of directive explanations (those that offer specific actions an individual could take to achieve their desired outcome), introduce two forms of directive explanations (directive-specific and directive-generic), and describe how these can be generated computationally. We investigate people’s preference for and perception toward directive explanations through two online studies, one quantitative and the other qualitative, each covering two domains (the credit scoring domain and the employee satisfaction domain). We find a significant preference for both forms of directive explanations compared to non-directive counterfactual explanations. However, we also find that preferences are affected by many aspects, including individual preferences and social factors. We conclude that deciding what type of explanation to provide requires information about the recipients and other contextual information. This reinforces the need for a human-centered and context-specific approach to explainable AI.

Human–computer interaction (HCI) has traditionally framed itself as a design-oriented discipline. This position, in turn, frames design as HCI’s primary tool for intervening or producing change in the world. By taking up two apparently contradictory suggestions—that there is less design in the world than there might seem, and that there is more of it around than ever before—this article examines the limits and rhetorics of design in HCI and in the broader cultural settings within which HCI is embedded.

In this paper we examine Anshimi, a mobile safety application that hosts women's safety services. We present a case study based on qualitative data gathered from semi-structured interviews and a participatory design workshop with women in Seoul, South Korea. We examine women's perceptions of various kinds of safety data that Anshimi provides and collects from its users, such as GPS data, security camera footage, messages, personal information, etc. Exploring how women negotiate the tension between feeling protected and surveilled, we account for the nuanced ways in which women understand, feel, and use safety data in their daily lives. We also present scenarios for engaging with women's safety data, in the hopes of developing a guiding framework for designing women's safety applications and safety data practices.

Iteration is a central feature of most HCI design methods, creating as it does opportunities for engagements with stakeholder groups. But what does iteration demand of those groups? Under what conditions do iterative engagements arise, and with what stakes? Building on experiences with Aboriginal Australian communities, and drawing on feminist and decolonial thinking, we examine the nature of iteration for HCI and how it frames encounters between design and use, with a focus on the affective dimension of engagement in iterative design processes.

Engagements with social media today frequently involve the use of multiple platforms, which often exchange personal data about users. We explore individuals' experiences with the flow of personal data across platforms through interviews about dating apps, often requiring integration with a Facebook account. Inductive analysis revealed complex and, at times, conflicted ideas over what appropriate behaviors around personal data should look like in multiplatform engagements-central to these tensions were the multiple relationships that must be managed through participation in these ecosystems. For example, individuals talked of resignation in relation to specific platforms and the 'cost" of using free services (people:platform), a lack of clarity and agency in defining what personal data might be shared between platforms (people:platform:platform), and, of course, the role of personal data in their efforts to establish and maintain relationships with other users in these 'social discovery" ecosystems (people:people). We explore how these attitudes can be understood as morally charged, drawing attention to the ways in which personal data flows can enact expectations and obligations between various sociotechnical actors in personal data ecosystems and how these compound relationships reveal the complexity and texture of multiplatform participation.

"Commentary: Interactivity as Cultural." Human–Computer Interaction, 32(3), pp. 153–154

CSCW researchers have become interested in crowd work as a new form of collaborative engagement, that is, as a new way in which people's actions are coordinated in order to achieve collective effects. We address this area but from a different perspective - that of the labor practices involved in taking crowd work as a form of work. Using empirical materials from a study of ride-sharing, we draw inspiration from studies of the immaterial forms of labor and alternate analyses of political economy that can cast a new light on the context of crowd labor that might matter for CSCW researchers.

In their article on faceless interaction, Janlert and Stolterman (2014) offer us an examination of a foundational concept in interaction design that is both generative in the conversations that it ...

One of the most significant contemporary technological trends is institutional adoption and use of mobile and location‐based systems and services. We argue that the notion of “location” as it manifests itself in location‐based systems is being produced as an object of exchange. Here we are specifically concerned with what happens to institutional roles, power relationships, and decision‐making processes when a particular type of information—that of spatiotemporal location of people—is made into a technologically tradable object through the use of location‐based systems. We examine the introduction of GPS (Global Positioning Systems) technologies by the California criminal justice system and the institution of parole for monitoring the movements of parolees, with consequences both for the everyday lives of these parolees and the work practices of their parole officers. We document the ways in which broad adoption of location‐based and mobile technologies has the capacity to radically reconfigure the spatiotemporal arrangement of institutional processes. The presence of digital location traces creates new forms of institutional accountability, facilitates a shift in the understood relation between location and action, and necessitates new models of interpretation and sense making in practice.

In this paper, we discuss how a flourishing scene of DIY makers is turning visions of tangible and ubiquitous computing into products. Drawing on long-term multi-sited ethnographic research and active participation in DIY making, we provide insights into the social, material, and economic processes that undergird this transition from prototypes to products. The contribution of this paper is three-fold. First, we show how DIY maker practice is illustrative of a broader "return to" and interest in physical materials. This has implications for HCI research that investigates questions of materiality. Second, we shed light on how hackerspaces and hardware start-ups are experimenting with new models of manufacturing and entrepreneurship. We argue that we have to take seriously these maker practices, not just as hobbyist or leisure practice, but as a professionalizing field functioning in parallel to research and industry labs. Finally, we end with reflections on the role of HCI researchers and designers as DIY making emerges as a site of HCI innovation. We argue that HCI is positioned to provide critical reflection, paired with a sensibility for materials, tools and design methods.

In this article, we present and articulate the analytical lens of multisited design to illuminate transnational connections between sites of design, and aid in the translation of knowledge between designers and ethnographers. This position emerges from the authors' respective engagements in ethnographic research and design engagements with a slum community center in Bangkok, Thailand, and with “makers” and entrepreneurs in Shanghai and Shenzhen, China. In both cases, we found design to be a site of engagement with and interpretation of wider connections between different locales, and between local and global networks. We identify four crucial aspects of design for the purposes of this discussion: It is normative, concerned with function and the attainment of goals; it is practical, and oriented toward constraints and opportunities; it frames and defines problems concurrently with solving them; and it takes a systems approach that accounts for the broad context of the design situation. Approaching and participating in these aspects of design evolved in concert with our ethnographic fieldwork and analysis, allowing us to take design seriously without sacrificing an ethnographic commitment to nuanced description. We conclude by touching on the epistemological similarities, rather than conflicts, between ethnography and design.

research-article Epilogue: Where the action was, wasn't, should have been, and might yet be Author: Paul Dourish University of California, Irvine University of California, IrvineView Profile Authors Info & Claims ACM Transactions on Computer-Human InteractionVolume 20Issue 1Article No.: 2pp 1–4https://doi.org/10.1145/2442106.2442108Published:11 April 2013Publication History 22citation1,424DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations22Total Downloads1,424Last 12 Months47Last 6 weeks3 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

The diverse ways in which technologies are modified and appropriated into local contexts are an important theme in CSCW research. Today, translocal processes such as the formation of international corporations and the movement of people and ideas across nation states increasingly shape these local contexts of technology use and design. We draw from prior work on appropriation in CSCW and meld it with work from transnational studies to illustrate appropriation as a cultural phenomenon and as it unfolds in relation to emerging translocal processes. We ground our explorations in findings from ethnographic research on collaborations and exchange among IT professionals in urban China. This work makes two main contributions. First, it expands CSCW's focus on socio-technical systems by taking seriously socio-political and socio-economic processes. Second, it contributes to debates on cross-cultural and global technological development by employing transnational imagination as an analytical tool.

Ubiquitous computing has a grand vision. Even the name of the area identifies its universalizing scope. In this, it follows in a long tradition of projects that attempt to create new models and paradigms that unite disparate, distributed elements into a large conceptual whole. We link concerns in ubiquitous computing into a colonial intellectual tradition and identify the problems that arise in consequence, explore the locatedness of innovation, and discuss strategies for decolonizing ubicomp's research methodology.

In this paper we argue that how scientific collaborations share data is bound up in the ways in which they produce and acquire that data. We draw on ethnographic work with two robotic space exploration teams to show how each community's norms of "data-sharing" are best understood as arising not from the context of the use or exchange of data, but from the context of data production. Shifting our perspective back to the point of production suggests that digital artifacts are embedded in a broader data economy. We present implications for analysis of data in interactional context, and for introducing systems or policies that conflict with the value of data in its context of production.

Design and evaluation of user-generated media production and sharing in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) often focus on formal and informal media sharing, such as communication within social networks, automatic notifications of activities, and the exchange of digital artifacts. However, conceptual tools for understanding how people relate to the audiences they reach through these systems are limited. The increasing interest in user-generated content in HCI demands the infusion of new methods and theories that explicitly engage the construction and use of media within and among large groups of individuals and systems. In this paper, we suggest that the notion of “publics,” drawn from media theory, provides useful insights into user-driven, social, and cultural forms of technology use and digital content creation. We illustrate this by employing the notion of publics to the findings from a two-month deployment of a mobile photo sharing platform in a youth housing community. The results of this empirical work coupled with a theoretical examination of publics stimulate reflection on prevailing interpretations of user-designer-reader roles. The paper provides an outlook for potentially new and productive ways of understanding interdependencies within those activities. Implications that can be drawn from this work concern the role of digital media creation and sharing for the formation of collectives and how people position themselves collectively in relation to larger social groups and societal norms. The analysis suggests fruitful crossovers among HCI, Media Theory and New Media Research by approaching the user as both consumer and producer of digital content.

Many HCI researchers have recently begun to examine the opportunities to use ICTs to promote environmental sustainability and ecological consciousness on the part of technology users. This paper examines the way that traditional HCI discourse obscures political and cultural contexts of environmental practice that must be part of an effective solution. Research on ecological politics and the political economy of environmentalism highlight some missing elements in contemporary HCI analysis, and suggest some new directions for the relationship between sustainability and HCI. In particular, I propose that questions of scale -- the scales of action and the scales of effects -- might provide a useful new entry point for design practice.

As our technologies travel to new cultural contexts and our designs and methods engage new constituencies, both our design and analytical practices face significant challenges. We offer postcolonial computing as an analytical orientation to better understand these challenges. This analytic orientation inspires four key shifts in our approach to HCI4D efforts: generative models of culture, development as a historical program, uneven economic relations, and cultural epistemologies. Then, through reconsideration of the practices of engagement, articulation and translation in other contexts, we offer designers and researchers ways of understanding use and design practice to respond to global connectivity and movement.

In this paper, we present a view of design methods as discourse on practice. We consider how the deployment of a particular set of design methods enables and constrains not only practical action but also discursive action within the design practice. A case study of agile software development methods illustrates the ways that methods establish conditions for who can speak in the design process and how. We indentify three main kinds of discourse work performed in the invoking of design methods. These are the establishing of ontologies, the authorizing of voices, and the legitimizing of practices. We then discuss implications of this view on methods for CSCW research on the relationship between methods and practice as well as implications for participation in the design process.

Coordination is central in CSCW systems design, where it is often considered as a process of bringing artifacts and activities together and making them part of a larger system. In this paper, we argue that existing conceptualizations of coordination in CSCW can be successfully extended with the notion of coordination by avoidance. We introduce this notion to describe particular coordination mechanisms whereby actors avoid routines or routes of actions when it conflicts with those of other actors. In a study of pre-diagnostic work, we found that actors coordinate by avoidance when they realize alternative routes of action or that a routine has to be set to a halt to ensure that practices stay coordinated. Routines in diagnostic work are for instance the rescheduling of patients and requesting of relevant patient records that are mundane practices, however, necessary when responsibility is shared or shifts between various actors collaborating to diagnose a patient. Thus, the contribution of this paper lies in empirically identifying practices of avoidance and extending dominant conceptualizations of coordination through the notion of avoidance. We identify four ways that actors coordinate their practices by avoidance; by demarcating, procrastinating, delegating and accommodating routines or routes of action. Furthermore, we conceptualize coordination by avoidance as a distinct type of coordination mechanism to be taken into consideration in CSCW information systems design.

A significant focus in the United States recently has been to increase engagement and interest in STEM curricula, particularly among girls and underrepresented minorities [3]. In this work, we take an approach to teaching and learning that supports flexibility, experimentation, and play with technology. With this approach, we aim to make STEM curricula more comfortable and engaging for all types of children and teens, with a particular emphasis on lower socio-economic status female students. We designed and tested a computing course for middle school girls, and this work resulted in three best practices: hands-on work incorporating creativity through crafts into engineering and computing, the frequent presence of an audience to motivate engagement, and engineering-focused individual roles structuring group work. Pre- and post-surveys and exit interviews revealed significant changes in attitudes and an enthusiasm for engineering projects and careers as a result of participation in the course.

Location-based ubiquitous computing systems are entering mainstream society and becoming familiar parts of everyday life. However, the settings in which they are deployed are already suffused with complex social dynamics. We report on a study of parole officers and parolees whose relationships are being transformed by location-based technologies. While parolees are clearly subjects of state discipline, the parole officers also find themselves subject to new responsibilities. This study highlights the complexities of power in sociotechnical systems and what happens when location becomes a tradable, technological object.

Researchers and designers are increasingly creating technologies intended to support urban mobility. However, the question of what mobility is remains largely under-examined. In this paper we will use the notion of aesthetic journeys to reconsider the relationship between urban spaces, people and technologies. Fieldwork on the Orange County bus system and in the London Underground leads to a discussion of how we might begin to design for multiple mobilities.

Mobile technologies are deployed into diverse social, cultural, political and geographic settings, and incorporated into diverse forms of personal and collective mobility. We present an ethnography of transnational Thai retirees and their uses of mobile technology, highlighting forms of mobility that are spatially, temporally, and infrastructurally anchored, and concepts of the house as a kinship network that may be globally distributed. We conclude in pointing out several ways in which our observations and analysis can influence design.

How do mobility and presence feature as aspects of social life? Using a case study of paroled offenders tracked via Global Positioning System (GPS), we explore the ways that location-based technologies frame people's everyday experiences of space. In particular, we focus on how access and presence are negotiated outside of traditional conceptions of "privacy." We introduce the notion of accountabilities of presence and suggest that it is a more useful concept than "privacy" for understanding the relationship between presence and sociality.

Graphical virtual worlds are increasingly significant sites of collaborative interaction. Many argue that the simulation of the everyday environment makes them particularly effective for collaboration. Based on a study of visual practice in Second Life, we argue: first, that the practice of looking is more varied than it might at first seem; second, that we need to look beyond the virtual in understanding virtual worlds; and third, that implementations blend interactional practice. We suggest that the value of virtual worlds as sites of collaboration might lie more in their richness and openness to appropriation than in their simulation of everyday interaction.

We trace how cultural probes have been adopted and adapted by the HCI community. The flexibility of probes has been central to their uptake, resulting in a proliferation of divergent uses and derivatives. The varying patterns of adaptation of the probes reveal important underlying issues in HCI, suggesting underacknowledged disagreements about valid interpretation and the relationship between methods and their underlying methodology. With this analysis, we aim to clarify discussions around probes, and, more importantly, around how we define and evaluate methods in HCI, especially those grounded in unfamiliar conceptions of how research should be done.

While tangible interfaces open up new possibilities for input and interaction, they are also interesting because of the ways in which they occupy the physical world just as we do. We have been working at the intersection of three research areas - tangible interfaces, ambient displays, and collaboration awareness. Our system, Nimio, uses engaging physical objects as both input devices (capturing aspects of individual activity) and output devices (expressing aspects of group activity). We present our design and experiences, focusing in particular on the tension between legibility and ambiguity and its relevance in collaborative settings.

Ubiquitous computing is unusual amongst technological research arenas. Most areas of computer science research, such as programming language implementation, distributed operating system design, or denotational semantics, are defined largely by technical problems, and driven by building upon and elaborating a body of past results. Ubiquitous computing, by contrast, encompasses a wide range of disparate technological areas brought together by a focus upon a common vision. It is driven, then, not so much by the problems of the past but by the possibilities of the future. Ubiquitous computing’s vision, however, is over a decade old at this point, and we now inhabit the future imagined by its pioneers. The future, though, may not have worked out as the field collectively imagined. In this article, we explore the vision that has driven the ubiquitous computing research agenda and the contemporary practice that has emerged. Drawing on cross-cultural investigations of technology adoption, we argue for developing a “ubicomp of the present” which takes the messiness of everyday life as a central theme.

Although ethnography has become a common approach in HCI research and design, considerable confusion still attends both ethnographic practice and the criteria by which it should be evaluated in HCI. Often, ethnography is seen as an approach to field investigation that can generate requirements for systems development; by that token, the major evaluative criterion for an ethnographic study is the implications it can provide for design. Exploring the nature of ethnographic inquiry, this paper suggests that "implications for design" may not be the best metric for evaluation and may, indeed, fail to capture the value of ethnographic investigations.

In the ten years since the distinction between "place" and "space" emerged as a consideration for CSCW researchers and designers, the concepts have proven useful across a range of domains. In that same period of time, wireless and mobile technologies have given us new sites at which to examine the issues of space, practice, and mobility. These changes suggest that it might be fruitful to re-examine the issues of place and space in light of recent developments. In particular, the nature of space and spatiality deserve further consideration.

Despite their rapid proliferation, there has been little examination of the coordination and social practices of cyberinfrastructure projects. We use the notion of "human infrastructure" to explore how human and organizational arrangements share properties with technological infrastructures. We conducted an 18-month ethnographic study of a large-scale distributed biomedical cyberinfrastructure project and discovered that human infrastructure is shaped by a combination of both new and traditional team and organizational structures. Our data calls into question a focus on distributed teams as the means for accomplishing distributed work and we argue for using human infrastructure as an alternative perspective for understanding how distributed collaboration is accomplished in big science.

The focus of our approach to the usability considerations of privacy and security has been on providing people with information they can use to understand the implications of their interactions with a system, as well as, to assess whether or not a system is secure enough for their immediate needs. To this end, we have been exploring two design principles for secure interaction: visualizing system activity and integrating configuration and action. Here we discuss the results of a user study designed as a broad formative examination of the successes and failures of an initial prototype based around these principles. Our response to the results of this study has been twofold. First, we have fixed a number of implementation and usability problems. Second, we have extended our visualizations to incorporate new considerations regarding the temporal and structural organization of interactions.

As everyday life is increasingly conducted online, and as the electronic world continues to move out into the physical, the privacy of information and action and the security of information systems are increasingly a focus of concern both for the research community and the public at large. Accordingly, privacy and security are active topics of investigation from a wide range of perspectives-institutional, legislative, technical, interactional, and more. In this article, we wish to contribute toward a broad understanding of privacy and security not simply as technical phenomena but as embedded in social and cultural contexts. Privacy and security are difficult concepts to manage from a technical perspective precisely because they are caught up in larger collective rhetorics and practices of risk, danger, secrecy, trust, morality, identity, and more. Reductive attempts to deal with these issues separately produce incoherent or brittle results. We argue for a move away from narrow views of privacy and security and toward a holistic view of situated and collective information practice.

In distributed software development, two sorts of dependencies can arise. The structure of the software system itself can create dependencies between software elements, while the structure of the development process can create dependencies between software developers. Each of these both shapes and reflects the development process. Our research concerns the extent to which, by looking uniformly at artifacts and activities, we can uncover the structures of software projects, and the ways in which development processes are inscribed into software artifacts. We show how a range of organizational processes and arrangements can be uncovered in software repositories, with implications for collaborative work in large distributed groups such as open source communities.

As interest in usable security spreads, the use of visual approaches in which the functioning of a distributed system is made visually available to end users is an approach that a number of researchers have examined. In this paper, we discuss the use of the social navigation paradigm as a way of organizing visual displays of system action. Drawing on a previous study of security in the Kazaa peer to peer system, we present some examples of the ways in which social navigation can be incorporated in support of usable security.

In our research, we have been concerned with the question of how to make relevant features of security situations visible to users in order to allow them to make informed decisions regarding potential privacy and security problems, as well as regarding potential implications of their actions. To this end, we have designed technical infrastructures that make visible the configurations, activities, and implications of available security mechanisms. This thus allows users to make informed choices and take coordinated and appropriate actions when necessary. This work differs from the more traditional security usability work in that our focus is not only on the usability of security mechanism (e.g., the ease-of-use of an access control interface), but how security can manifest itself as part of people's interactions with and through information systems (i.e., how people experience and interpret privacy and security situations, and are enabled or constrained by existing technological mechanisms to act appropriately). In this paper, we report our experiences designing, developing, and testing two technical infrastructures for supporting this approach for usable security.

introduction Share on Introduction to the special section on recommender systems Authors: John Riedl View Profile , Paul Dourish View Profile Authors Info & Claims ACM Transactions on Computer-Human InteractionVolume 12Issue 3September 2005 pp 371–373https://doi.org/10.1145/1096737.1096738Published:01 September 2005Publication History 11citation1,428DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations11Total Downloads1,428Last 12 Months14Last 6 weeks1 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

Everyday work frequently involves coordinating and collaborating with others, but the structure of collaboration is largely invisible to conventional desktop applications. We are exploring ways to support everyday collaboration by allowing applications access to the social, organizational, and temporal settings within which work is conducted. In this paper, we present two generations of systems supporting everyday collaboration, focusing on ways to recover and represent the temporal and social structures of online activity.

In large projects, software developers struggle with two sources of complexity - the complexity of the code itself, and the complexity of the process of producing it. Both of these concerns have been subjected to considerable research investigation, and tools and techniques have been developed to help manage them. However, these solutions have generally been developed independently, making it difficult to deal with problems that inherently span both dimensions. We describe Augur, a visualization tool that supports distributed software development processes. Augur creates visual representations of both software artifacts and software development activities, and, crucially, allows developers to explore the relationship between them. Augur is designed not for managers, but for the developers participating in the software development process. We discuss some of the early results of informal evaluation with open source software developers. Our experiences to date suggest that combining views of artifacts and activities is both meaningful and valuable to software developers.

Summary form only given. "Practice," suggests Wenger, "is first and foremost a process by which we can find the world and our engagement with it as meaningful." What, then, should we make of the practice of programming? Developing software is a complex and demanding task, and a range of studies have explored cognitive aspects of programming - problem-solving, manipulation of formal systems, representational aspects of languages and environments, and so on. However, software development is also situated in social, organizational and cultural contexts that shape and give meaning to the activities that arise within them. The metaphors that shape the ways in which we encounter and imagine software systems are cultural currency as much as cognitive artifacts. In this talk, the author wants to consider some aspects of software as an embodied phenomenon, that is, as one that shapes, and is shaped by, the broader contexts within which it is produced, and through which collection social meaning is enacted

Although privacy is broadly recognized as a dominant concern for the development of novel interactive technologies, our ability to reason analytically about privacy in real settings is limited. A lack of conceptual interpretive frameworks makes it difficult to unpack interrelated privacy issues in settings where information technology is also present. Building on theory developed by social psychologist Irwin Altman, we outline a model of privacy as a dynamic, dialectic process. We discuss three tensions that govern interpersonal privacy management in everyday life, and use these to explore select technology case studies drawn from the research literature. These suggest new ways for thinking about privacy in socio-technical environments as a practical matter.

Software development is typically cooperative endeavor where a group of engineers need to work together to achieve a common, coordinated result. As a cooperative effort, it is especially difficult because of the many interdependencies amongst the artifacts created during the process. This has lead software engineers to create tools, such as configuration management tools, that isolate developers from the effects of each other's work. In so doing, these tools create a distinction between private and public aspects of work of the developer. Technical support is provided to these aspects as well as for transitions between them. However, we present empirical material collected from a software development team that suggests that the transition from private to public work needs to be more carefully handled. Indeed, the analysis of our material suggests that different formal and informal work practices are adopted by the developers to allow a delicate transition, where software developers are not largely affected by the emergent public work. Finally, we discuss how groupware tools might support this transition.

Most cooperative work takes place in information-rich environments. However, studies of "information work" tend to focus on the decontextualized access and retrieval problems faced by individual information seekers. Our work is directed towards understanding how information management is seamlessly integrated into the course of everyday activities. Drawing on an ethnographic study of medical work, we explore the relationship between information and temporal coordination and discuss the role of temporal patterns or "rhythms" in providing individuals with the means to coordinate information and work.

The thorny problem of usability has been recognized in the security community for many years, but has, so far, eluded systematic solution. We characterize the problem as a gap between theoretical and effective levels of security, and consider the characteristics of the problem. The approach we are taking focuses on visibility -- how can we make relevant features of the security context apparent to users, in order to allow them to make informed decisions about their actions and the potential implications of those actions?

Medical care involves intense collaboration amongst a number of practitioners including physicians, nurses, and pharmacists. Their work is concentrated on a single patient, and yet their activities, motivations, and concerns are very different. We explore the use of a shared information system in helping these individuals coordinate their work. In particular, we use the idea of a common information space to explore how the shared information is incorporated into the diverse work practices of an intensive care unit. In addition to physical co-location, we found that providing information in many specialised representations is critical to managing their coordination. Unlike paper records, computer systems offer the ability to decouple information from its representations. This decoupling opens up a rich design space for systems that allow people with different interests, concerns and work practices to work together effectively. 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.

Workflow technologies present a problem for CSCW. On the one hand, they are perhaps the most successful form of groupware technology in current use; but on the other, they have been subject to sustained and cogent critiques, particularly from perspective of the analysis of everyday working activities. This leads inevitably to the question: in the face of these critiques, just why and how do work-flow technologies prove effective? This paper suggests that part of the solution lies in the fact that workflow technologies play more than one role in organisations, and that, in fact, the success of work flow technologies may have little to do with the typical relationship of those technologies to the accomplishment of everyday work. On the basis of the notion of a dual role for workflow technologies, I lay out a framework for considering the design and analysis of workflow systems that may help to bridge between these two roles.

Context-aware computing is generally associated with elements of the ubiquitous computing program, and the opportunity to distribute computation and interaction through the environment rather than concentrating it at the desktop computer. However, issues of context have also been important in other areas of human-computer interaction research. I argue that the scope of context-based computing should be extended to include not only ubiquitous computing, but also recent trends in tangible interfaces as well as work on sociological investigations of the organization of interactive behavior. By taking a view of context-aware computing that integrates these different perspectives, we can begin to understand the foundational relations that tie them all together, and that provide a framework for understanding the basic principles behind these various forms of embodied interaction. In particular, I point to phenomenology as a basis for the development of a new framework for design and evaluation of context-aware technologies.

Pervasive Computing is a term for the strongly emerging trend toward: --Numerous, casually accessible, often invisible computing devices. --Frequently mobile or embedded in the environment. --Connected to an increasingly ubiquitous network infrastructure composed of a wired core and wireless edges.

Traditionally, designers organize software system as active end-points (e.g.applications) linked by passive infrastructures (e.g.networks).Increasingly, however, networks and infrastructures are becoming active components that contribute directly to application behavior.Amongst the various problems that this presents is the question of how such active infrastructures should be programmed.We have been developing an active document management system called Placeless Documents.Its programming model is organized in terms of properties that actively contribute to the functionality and behavior of the documents to which they are attached.This paper discusses active properties and their use as a programming model for active infrastructures.We have found that active properties enable the creation of persistent, autonomous active entities in document systems, independent of specific repositories and applications, but present challenges for managing problems of composition.

introduction Free Access Share on Introduction to the special issue on human-computer interaction and collaborative virtual environments Authors: Steve Benford Univ. of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK Univ. of Nottingham, Nottingham, UKView Profile , Paul Dourish Univ. of California, Irvine Univ. of California, IrvineView Profile , Tom Rodden Univ. of Lancaster, Lancaster, PA Univ. of Lancaster, Lancaster, PAView Profile Authors Info & Claims ACM Transactions on Computer-Human InteractionVolume 7Issue 4Dec. 2000 pp 439–441https://doi.org/10.1145/365058.365080Online:01 December 2000Publication History 3citation1,240DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations3Total Downloads1,240Last 12 Months31Last 6 weeks2 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 SiteeReaderPDF

Document properties are a compelling infrastructure on which to develop document management applications. A property-based approach avoids many of the problems of traditional heierarchical storage mechanisms, reflects document organizations meaningful to user tasks, provides a means to integrate the perspectives of multiple individuals and groups, and does this all within a uniform interaction framework. Document properties can reflect not only categorizations of documents and document use, but also expressions of desired system activity, such as sharing criteria, replication management, and versioning. Augmenting property-based document management systems with active properties that carry executable code enables the provision of document-based services on a property infrastructure. The combination of document properties as a uniform mechanism for document management, and active properties as a way of delivering document services, represents a new paradigm for document management infrastructures. The Placeless Documents system is an experimental prototype developed to explore this new paradigm. It is based on the seamless integration of user-specific, active properties. We present the fundamental design approach, explore the challenges and opportunities it presents, and show our architectures deals with them.

Programmable Embodied Agents are portable, wireless, interactive devices embodying specific, differentiable, interactive characteristics. They take the form of identifiable characters who reside in the physical world and interact directly with users. They can act as an out-of-band communication channel between users, as proxies for system components or other users, or in a variety of other roles. Traditionally, research into such devices has been based on costly custom hardware. In this paper, we report on our explorations of the space of physical character-based interfaces built on recently available stock consumer hardware platforms, structured around an initial framework of applications.

Process descriptions are used in workflow and related systems to describe the flow of work and organisational responsibility in business processes, and to aid in coordination. However, the division of a working process into a sequence of steps provides only a partial view of the work involved. In many cases, the performance of individual tasks in a larger process may depend on interpretations and understandings of how other aspects of the work were conducted.

Research into collaborative document use often concentrates on how people share document content. However, studies of real-world document practices reveal that the structures by which document corpora are organised may also, themselves, be important sites of collaborative activity. Unfortunately, this poses a problem. When category structures are used to understand a set of documents, the manipulation of those structures can interfere with shared understanding and intelligibility of the document space.We show how this problem arises in real-world settings, using a case arising from some recent field work. We outline a solution to the customisation/intelligibility problem, and show how it has been implemented in a system for personal and workgroup document management.

Most document or information management systems rely on hierarchies to organise documents (e.g. files, email messages or web bookmarks). However, the rigid structures of hierarchical schemes do not mesh well with the more fluid nature of everyday document practices. This paper describes Presto, a prototype system that allows users to organise their documents entirely in terms of the properties those documents hold for users. Properties provide a uniform mechanism for managing, coding, searching, retrieving and interacting with documents. We concentrate in particular on the challenges that property-based approaches present and the architecture we have developed to tackle them.

Traditional document systems use hierarchical filing structures as the basis for organizing, storing and retrieving documents. However, this structure is very limited in comparison with the rich and varied forms of document interaction and category management in everyday document use. Presto is a prototype document management system providing rich interaction with documents through meaningful, user-level document attributes, such as “Word file,” “published paper,” “shared with Jim,” “about Presto,” or “currently in progress” Document attributes capture the multiple different roles that a single document might play, and they allow users to rapidly reorganize their document space for the task at hand. They also provide a basis for novel document systems design and new approaches to document management and interaction. In this article, we outline the motivations behind this approach, describe the principal components of our implementation, discuss architectural consequences, and show how these support new forms of interactions with large personal document spaces.

Article Free Access Share on CSCW '98 workshop program Authors: Paul Dourish Xerox PARC Xerox PARCView Profile , Mike Robinson University of Jyvaskyla, Finland University of Jyvaskyla, FinlandView Profile Authors Info & Claims CSCW '98: Proceedings of the 1998 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative workNovember 1998 Pages 415–417https://doi.org/10.1145/289444.289804Published:01 November 1998Publication History 0citation288DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations0Total Downloads288Last 12 Months4Last 6 weeks0 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 SiteeReaderPDF

Over the past 10 years, the use of sociological methods and sociological reasoning have become more prominent in the analysis and design of interactive systems. For a variety of reasons, one form of sociological inquiry—ethnomethodology—has become something of a favored approach. Our goal in this article is to investigate the consequences of approaching system design from the ethnomethodological perspective. In particular, we are concerned with how ethnomethodology can take a foundational place in the very notion of system design, rather than simply being employed as a resource in aspects of the process, such as requirements elicitation and specification. We begin by outlining the basic elements of ethnomethodology and discussing the place that it has come to occupy in computer-supported cooperative work and, increasingly, in human-computer interaction. We discuss current approaches to the use of ethnomethodology in systems design, and we point to the contrast between the use of ethnomethodology for critique and for design. Currently, understandings of how to use ethnomethodology as a primary aspect of system design are lacking. We outline a new approach and present an extended example of its use. This approach takes as its starting point a relationship between ethnomethodology and system design that is a foundational, theoretical matter rather than simply one of design practice and process. From this foundation, we believe, emerges a new model of interaction with computer systems, which is based on ethnomethodological perspectives on everyday human social action.

Ideally, software toolkits for collaborative applications should provide generic, reusable components, applicable in a wide range of circumstances, which software developers can assemble to produce new applications. However, the nature of CSCW applications and the mechanics of group interaction present a problem. Group interactions are significantly constrained by the structure of the underlying infrastructure, below the level at which toolkits typically offer control. This article describes the design features of Prospero, a prototype CSCW toolkit designed to be much more flexible than traditional toolkit techniques allow. Prospero uses a metalevel architecture so that application programmers can have control over not only how toolkit components are combined and used, but also over aspects of how they are internally structured and defined. This approach allows programmers to gain access to “internal” aspects of the toolkit's operation that affect how interaction and collaboration proceed. This article explains the metalevel approach and its application to CSCW, introduces two particular metalevel techniques for distributed data management and consistency control, shows how they are realized in Prospero, and illustrates how Prospero can be used to create a range of collaborative applications.

Article Free Access Share on Technomethodology: paradoxes and possibilities Authors: Graham Button Rank Xerox Research Centre, Cambridge Laboratory (EuroPARC), 61 Regent Street, Cambridge CB2 1AB, United Kingdom Rank Xerox Research Centre, Cambridge Laboratory (EuroPARC), 61 Regent Street, Cambridge CB2 1AB, United KingdomView Profile , Paul Dourish Rank Xerox Research Centre, Cambridge Laboratory (EuroPARC), 61 Regent Street, Cambridge CB2 1AB, United Kingdom Rank Xerox Research Centre, Cambridge Laboratory (EuroPARC), 61 Regent Street, Cambridge CB2 1AB, United KingdomView Profile Authors Info & Claims CHI '96: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing SystemsApril 1996 Pages 19–26https://doi.org/10.1145/238386.238394Published:13 April 1996Publication History 97citation2,450DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations97Total Downloads2,450Last 12 Months98Last 6 weeks14 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 SiteView all FormatsPDF

Article Consistency guarantees: exploiting application semantics for consistency management in a collaboration toolkit Share on Author: Paul Dourish Apple Research Laboratories, 1 Infinite Loop MS:301-4UE, Cupertino CA Apple Research Laboratories, 1 Infinite Loop MS:301-4UE, Cupertino CAView Profile Authors Info & Claims CSCW '96: Proceedings of the 1996 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative workNovember 1996 Pages 268–277https://doi.org/10.1145/240080.240300Online:16 November 1996Publication History 46citation559DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations46Total Downloads559Last 12 Months9Last 6 weeks0 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

In order to understand some problems associated with workflow, we set out an analysis of workflow systems, identifying a number of basic issues in the underlying technology.This points to the conflation of temporal and dependency information as the source of a number of these problems.We describe Freeflow, a prototype which addresses these problems using a variety of technical innovations, including a rich constraint-based process modelling formalism, and the use of declarative dependency relationships.Its focus is on mediation between process "and action, rather than the enactment of a process.We outline the system and its design principles, and illustrate the features of our approach with examples from ongoing work.

Article Re-place-ing space: the roles of place and space in collaborative systems Share on Authors: Steve Harrison Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, CA Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, CAView Profile , Paul Dourish Apple Research Laboratories, 1 Infinite Loop MS: 301-4UE, Cupertino, CA Apple Research Laboratories, 1 Infinite Loop MS: 301-4UE, Cupertino, CAView Profile Authors Info & Claims CSCW '96: Proceedings of the 1996 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative workNovember 1996 Pages 67–76https://doi.org/10.1145/240080.240193Online:16 November 1996Publication History 651citation8,224DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations651Total Downloads8,224Last 12 Months623Last 6 weeks68 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

Recent years have seen a shift in perception of the nature of HCI and interactive systems. As interface work has increasingly become a focus of attention for the social sciences, we have expanded our appreciation of the importance of issues such as work practice, adaptation, and evolution in interactive systems. The reorientation in our view of interactive systems has been accompanied by a call for a new model of design centered around user needs and participation. This article argues that a new process of design is not enough and that the new view necessitates a similar reorientation in the structure of the systems we build. It outlines some requirements for systems that support a deeper conception of interaction and argues that the traditional system design techniques are not suited to creating such systems. Finally, using examples from ongoing work in the design of an open toolkit for collaborative applications, it illustrates how the principles of computational reflection and metaobject protocols can lead us toward a new model based on open abstraction that holds great promise in addressing these issues.

We are investigating ways in which media space technologies can support distributed work groups through access to information that supports general awareness. Awareness involves knowing who is “around”, what activities are occurring, who is talking with whom; it provides a view of one another in the daily work environments. Awareness may lead to informal interactions, spontaneous connections, and the development of shared cultures—all important aspects of maintaining working relationships which are denied to groups distributed across multiple sites.

At EuroPARC, we have been exploring ways to allow physically separated colleagues to work together effectively and naturally. In this paper, we briefly discuss several examples of our work in the context of three themes that have emerged: the need to support the full range of shared work; the desire to ensure privacy without giving up unobtrusive awareness; and the possibility of creating systems which blur the boundaries between people, technologies and the everyday world.

Awareness of individualand group activities is critical to successful collaboration and is commonly supported in CSCW systems by active, information generation mechanisms separate from the shared workspace.These mechanisms pena~ise information providers, presuppose relevance to the recipient, and make access difficult, We discuss a study of shared editor use which suggests that awareness information provided and exploited passively through the shared workspace, allows users to move smoothly between close and loose collaboration, and to assign and coordinate work dynamically.Passive awareness mechanisms promise effective support for collaboration requiring this sort of behaviour, whilst avoiding problems with active approaches.