One’s profession is an essential part of modern life. Traditionally, professional development has been criticized for excluding people with disabilities. People with visual impairments, for example, face disproportionately low employment rates, highlighting persistent gaps in professional opportunities. Recently, there has been growing research on social media platforms as spaces for more equitable career development approaches. In this paper, we present an interview study on the professional development experiences of 60 people with visual impairments on TikTok (also known as “BlindTokers”). We report BlindTokers’ goals, strategies, and challenges, supported by detailed examples and in-depth analysis. Based on the findings, we identified that BlindTokers’ practices reveal an alternative professional development approach that is more flexible, inclusive, personalized, and diversified than traditional models. Our study also extends professional development research by foregrounding emerging digital skills and proposing design implications to foster more equitable and inclusive professional opportunities.

Social media platforms are important venues for identity expression, and the Human-Computer Interaction community has been paying growing attention to how marginalized groups express their identities on these platforms. Joining the emerging literature on intersectional experiences, we study blind TikTokers (“BlindTokers”) who are also women and/or LGBTQ+. Using interview data from 41 participants, we identify their intersectional experiences as mediated by TikTok’s socio-technical affordances. We argue that BlindTokers’ intersectional marginalization is infrastructural: TikTok’s classification and moderation features interact with social norms in ways that push them aside and distort how they are treated on the platform. We use this infrastructure perspective to understand what these experiences are, how they were formed, and how they become harmful. We further recognize participants’ infrastructuring work to address these problems. This study guides future social media design with accessible creator tools, inclusive identity options, and context-aware moderation developed in partnership with communities.

The integration of AI-driven support systems within online communities has opened new avenues for enhancing user engagement and support efficiency in recent years. This study investigates the differences in user interactions and engagement within two distinct support channels on the VRChat Discord server: “user support,” where human users provide assistance to peers, and “AI support,” where an AI chatbot addresses user queries. By analyzing user engagement, response dynamics, and interaction patterns across these channels, we uncover different usage patterns and user attitudes toward each approach. Our research employs both quantitative and qualitative methods to explore the trends in the VRChat community when using AI and user support, highlighting the unique advantages and limitations of AI-driven support compared to traditional human assistance. The findings offer valuable insights into optimizing AI and human support systems, aiming to foster more effective support strategies and create more engaging online communities.

During community decision-making and civic collaboration, conflicts can escalate when people suspect misinformation. We introduce the concept of sense of misinformation as experiencing someone's language or behavior as misinformation when it is not, that is to say when no falsehood is involved. Misinformation and sense of misinformation feel similar and can have similar social consequences; but sense of misinformation rests upon a mistaken perception of someone else's information as false. Through a case study of a casino proposal in local community, we examine how sense of misinformation developed over time during a contentious civic process through key factors (i.e., miscoordination governance, miscommunication between local government and citizens, and conflict and the breakdown of civic discourse), undermining trust and community democracy. Distinguishing between misinformation and sense of misinformation presents a challenge, but it is important. We contribute a conceptual distinction to the misinformation literature by identifying this distinct phenomenon and discuss ways to help communities recognize and repair such misattributions. Finally, we discuss design approaches for mitigating sense of misinformation.

Couples often experience a decrease in closeness as they cope with the demands of parenthood.Existing technologies have supported parenting and parental collaboration.However, these technologies do not adequately support closeness in co-parenting.We use scenarios and design probes to brainstorm with 10 new parent couples to explore and envision possibilities for technologies to support closeness.We reported parents' current technology use for co-parenting and how participants considered and envisioned co-parenting technology for closeness, including information and task sharing, emotion awareness and disclosure, and fostering fun interaction.We discuss the potential technology has for fostering closeness in co-parenting by (1) fostering interdependence by supporting parental competence and (2) integrating positive emotions and experiences, such as validation and fun, in parenting.Based on our findings, we expand the design space of technology for closeness to include interdependence.We also expand the design space for co-parenting technology by integrating more positive emotions.

Large multimodal models (LMMs) have enabled new AI-powered applications that help people with visual impairments (PVI) receive natural language descriptions of their surroundings through audible text. We investigated how this emerging paradigm of visual assistance transforms how PVI perform and manage their daily tasks. Moving beyond basic usability assessments, we examined both the capabilities and limitations of LMM-based tools in personal and social contexts, while exploring design implications for their future development. Through interviews with 14 visually impaired users and analysis of image descriptions from both participants and social media using Be My AI (an LMM-based application), we identified two key limitations. First, these systems' context awareness suffers from hallucinations and misinterpretations of social contexts, styles, and human identities. Second, their intent-oriented capabilities often fail to grasp and act on users' intentions. Based on these findings, we propose design strategies for improving both human-AI and AI-AI interactions, contributing to the development of more effective, interactive, and personalized assistive technologies.

Water pollution remains a critical global challenge, threatening public health and aquatic ecosystems. Governmental efforts to monitor and manage water resources often face limitations due to constrained resources and socio-political priorities that may not prioritize sustainable solutions. Citizen science has emerged as a promising approach, engaging communities in scientific research to expand data collection capabilities and foster environmental stewardship. This paper explores the role of distributed collaboration infrastructure, exemplified by the Water Data Collaborative (WDC), in connecting and enhancing citizen-based water quality monitoring groups across North America. Through participatory design sessions with WDC users, the study identifies essential design features needed to support collaboration and address common challenges such as data standardization and resource sharing. Our findings emphasize the complexity of relationships among citizen science groups, government entities, and higher-order organizations, emphasizing the need for scalable, integrated solutions that avoid creating new silos within the ecosystem. This research contributes insights into how CSCW and HCI can facilitate effective citizen science practices and infrastructure design to advance sustainable water management.

This study investigates the dynamics of peer-to-peer support exchange (P2P SE) in non-monetized sharing economies. Utilizing a scenario-based within-subjects experiment with 93 participants across nine conditions, we examined how support request visibility and recognition for making requests affect perceived social costs of seeking help. We also explored the interplay between these social costs, community belonging, and confidence in giving and getting support in shaping future participation intentions. Our findings revealed that participants often leveraged different strategies to mitigate social costs of seeking support, such as justifying needs to ask for help, using apologetic language, and offering direct reciprocation or compensation, diverging from the ideals of non-monetized P2P SE. However, we found that receiving recognition for making requests, particularly from helpers, effectively reduces social cost concerns. We also discovered that interventions to strengthen a sense of community belonging and confidence in giving support should be prioritized to enhance future participation intentions. Our study offers insights for designing platforms to enhance participation and achieve critical mass in non-monetized sharing economies, addressing key psychological barriers and leveraging facilitators of P2P SE.

Infrastructure is an indispensable part of human life. In the past decades, the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community has paid increasing attention to human interactions with infrastructure. In this paper, we conducted a systematic literature review on infrastructure studies in SIGCHI, one of the most influential communities in HCI. We collected a total of 190 primary studies; the corpus includes studies published between 2006 and 2024. Most of the studies are inspired by Susan Leigh Star's notion of infrastructure. We discover three themes of infrastructure studies, including growing infrastructure, appropriating infrastructure, and coping with infrastructure. We foreground the overall trend of infrastructure studies in SIGCHI, which focuses on informal infrastructural activities in various socio-technical contexts. Especially, we discuss studies that problematize infrastructures and alert the HCI community about the underlying harmful side of infrastructure.

Community management is critical for stakeholders to collaboratively build and sustain communities with socio-technical support. However, most of the existing research has mainly focused on the community members and the platform, with little attention given to the developers who act as intermediaries between the platform and community members and develop tools to support community management. This study focuses on third-party developers (TPDs) for the live streaming platform Twitch and explores their tool development practices. Using a mixed method with in-depth qualitative analysis, we found that TPDs maintain complex relationships with different stakeholders (streamers, viewers, platform, professional developers), and the multi-layered policy restricts their agency regarding idea innovation and tool development. We argue that HCI research should shift its focus from tool users to tool developers with regard to community management. We propose designs to support closer collaboration between TPDS and the platform and professional developers and streamline TPDs’ development process with unified toolkits and policy documentation.

The Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community has consistently focused on the experiences of users moderated by social media platforms. Recently, scholars have noticed that moderation practices could perpetuate biases, resulting in the marginalization of user groups undergoing moderation. However, most studies have primarily addressed marginalization related to issues such as racism or sexism, with little attention given to the experiences of people with disabilities. In this paper, we present a study on the moderation experiences of blind users on TikTok, also known as "BlindToker," to address this gap. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 20 BlindTokers and used thematic analysis to analyze the data. Two main themes emerged: BlindTokers’ situated content moderation experiences and their reactions to content moderation. We reported on the lack of accessibility on TikTok’s platform, contributing to the moderation and marginalization of BlindTokers. Additionally, we discovered instances of harassment from trolls that prompted BlindTokers to respond with harsh language, triggering further moderation. We discussed these findings in the context of the literature on moderation, marginalization, and transformative justice, seeking solutions to address such issues.

Challenges to reproducibility and replicability have gained widespread attention, driven by large replication projects with lukewarm success rates. A nascent work has emerged developing algorithms to estimate the replicability of published findings. The current study explores ways in which AI-enabled signals of confidence in research might be integrated into the literature search. We interview 17 PhD researchers about their current processes for literature search and ask them to provide feedback on a replicability estimation tool. Our findings suggest that participants tend to confuse replicability with generalizability and related concepts. Information about replicability can support researchers throughout the research design processes. However, the use of AI estimation is debatable due to the lack of explainability and transparency. The ethical implications of AI-enabled confidence assessment must be further studied before such tools could be widely accepted. We discuss implications for the design of technological tools to support scholarly activities and advance replicability.

Remote sighted assistance (RSA) offers prosthetic support to people with visual impairments (PVI) through image- or video-based conversations with remote sighted assistants. While useful, RSA services introduce privacy concerns, as PVI may reveal private visual content inadvertently. Solutions have emerged to address these concerns on image-based asynchronous RSA, but exploration into solutions for video-based synchronous RSA remains limited. In this study, we developed BubbleCam, a high-fidelity prototype allowing PVI to conceal objects beyond a certain distance during RSA, granting them privacy control. Through an exploratory field study with 24 participants, we found that 22 appreciated the privacy enhancements offered by BubbleCam. The users gained autonomy, reducing embarrassment by concealing private items, messy areas, or bystanders, while assistants could avoid irrelevant content. Importantly, BubbleCam maintained RSA’s primary function without compromising privacy. Our study highlighted a cooperative approach to privacy preservation, transitioning the traditionally individual task of maintaining privacy into an interactive, engaging privacy preserving experience.

Understanding and recognizing emotions are important and challenging issues in the metaverse era. Understanding, identifying, and predicting fear, which is one of the fundamental human emotions, in virtual reality (VR) environments plays an essential role in immersive game development, scene development, and next-generation virtual human-computer interaction applications. In this article, we used VR horror games as a medium to analyze fear emotions by collecting multi-modal data (posture, audio, and physiological signals) from 23 players. We used an LSTM-based model to predict fear with accuracies of 65.31% and 90.47% under 6-level classification (no fear and five different levels of fear) and 2-level classification (no fear and fear), respectively. We constructed a multi-modal natural behavior dataset of immersive human fear responses (VRMN-bD) and compared it with existing relevant advanced datasets. The results show that our dataset has fewer limitations in terms of collection method, data scale and audience scope. We are unique and advanced in targeting multi-modal datasets of fear and behavior in VR stand-up interactive environments. Moreover, we discussed the implications of this work for communities and applications. The dataset and pre-trained model are available at https://github.com/KindOPSTAR/VRMN-bD.

Beginning in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic repercussions exacerbated food insecurity in the United States. Government-led infrastructure was depleted as a result of a dramatic increase in the number of individuals requesting basic necessities and food aid, and grassroots attempts to alleviate the resource shortage increased. The Community Fridge movement was one of these initiatives that combated food insecurity and food waste. It consisted of local community members sharing surplus food with neighbors via a shared refrigerator placed on a sidewalk. We conducted semi-structured interviews with its 17 users to understand how they practice information, human, and social infrastructuring work, as well as how their core values shaped norms for managing refrigerators and surplus food as the commons in local communities. We discuss how the concepts of commoning and infrastructuring may complement one another, which can help design value-embedded interventions to promote infrastructuring practices that build resilience and sustain commoning practices.

Positive co-parenting is critical for parenting and child outcomes, especially for new parents, who suffer from an increase in conflicts and decreased marital relationships. Investigating the practices, strategies, and challenges of new parents' co-parenting, including collaborating, supporting, and relating to each other, can help better understand this vulnerable parenting period. Furthermore, this understanding can bring insights to inform technology design for supporting co-parenting. In this paper, we present an overview of related research on parents' collaboration, support, and relationships. We then report findings from an exploratory semi-structured interview study with 11 pairs of new parents who are interested in co-parenting skills and unpack their helpful co-parenting strategies, tools, and challenges when applying those strategies. We conclude with a discussion of the design implications aiming to support new parents' positive co-parenting in their day-to-day lives and an observation that couples' co-parenting is a case of coproduction.

There has been extensive research on the experiences of individuals with visual impairments on text- and image-based social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter. However, little is known about the experiences of visually impaired users on short-video platforms like TikTok. To bridge this gap, we conducted an interview study with 30 BlindTokers (the nickname of blind TikTokers). Our study aimed to explore the various activities of BlindTokers on TikTok, including everyday entertainment, professional development, and community engagement. The widespread usage of TikTok among participants demonstrated that they considered TikTok and its associated experiences as the infrastructure for their activities. Additionally, participants reported experiencing breakdowns in this infrastructure due to accessibility issues. They had to carry out infrastructuring work to resolve the breakdowns. Blind users' various practices on TikTok also foregrounded their perceptions of independence. We then discussed blind users' nuanced understanding of the TikTok-mediated independence; we also critically examined BlindTokers' infrastructuring work for such independence.

Identity work in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) has examined the asset-based design of marginalized groups who use technology to improve their quality of life. Our study illuminates the identity work of people with disabilities, specifically, visual impairments. We interviewed 45 BlindTokers (blind users on TikTok) from various backgrounds to understand their identity work from a positive design perspective. We found that BlindTokers leverage the affordance of the platform to create positive content, express their identities, and build communities with the desire to flourish. We proposed flourishing labor to present the work conducted by BlindTokers for their community's flourishing with implications to support the flourishing labor. This work contributes to understanding blind users' experience in short video platforms and highlights that flourishing is not just an activity for any single blind user but also a collective effort that necessitates serious and committed contributions from platforms and the communities they serve.

Virtual Reality (VR) has the capacity to offer unparalleled immersive experiences, particularly in the domain of horror gaming. However, creating both practical and enjoyable VR applications necessitates a nuanced understanding of user emotions and behaviors. To fill this gap, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 25 participants who engaged in VR horror games, specifically exploring their emotional responses to fear-inducing stimuli and their coping strategies. The results revealed the motivations behind users' behaviors in response to different types of fear, highlighting the need to understand and manage negative emotions in VR environments, and provides insights into user needs and design methodologies in VR horror games.

Remote Sighted Assistance (RSA) is a popular smartphone-mediated aid for people with blindness, where a sighted individual converses with a blind individual in a one-on-one (1:1) session. Since sighted assistants outnumber blind individuals (13:1), this paper investigates what happens when more than one sighted individual assists a single blind individual in a session. Specifically, we propose paired-volunteer RSA, a new paradigm where two sighted volunteers assist a single user with blindness. We investigate the feasibility, desirability, and challenges of this paradigm and explore its opportunities. Our study with 8 sighted volunteers and 9 blind users reveals that the proposed paradigm extends the one-on-one RSA to cover a broader range of more intellectual and experiential tasks, providing new and distinctive opportunities in supporting complex, open-ended tasks (e.g., pursuing hobbies, appreciating arts, and seeking entertainment). These opportunities can not only enrich the blind users' quality of life and independence but also offer a fun and engaging experience for the sighted volunteers. The study also reveals the costs of extended collaboration in this paradigm. Finally, we synthesize a taxonomy of tasks where the proposed RSA paradigm can succeed and outline how HCI researchers and system designers can realize this paradigm.

COVID-19 changed society in terms of employment, food security, and mental health, affecting all segments of the population. Surging demands for a wide range of support could not be met solely by government-led disaster assistance that experienced breakdowns in the initial phase of the pandemic. The nature of the pandemic as a global, long-haul disaster necessitated sustained, diverse, and extensive civic disaster relief to complement government response. In this paper, we explore how civic disaster relief groups carry out online and offline coordination activities to engage different actors and their positive effects on individuals and local communities, drawing on interviews with civic disaster relief organizers and volunteers in the United States. We interpret our findings with the lens of coproduction that can increase the sustainability, diversity, and extent of civic relief efforts. We then suggest design implications for coproducing disaster relief and discuss the importance and benefits of involving stakeholders who are less likely to be engaged in producing relief.

., agents, provide real-time assistance to blind users via video-chat-like communication. Prior work identified several challenges for the agents to provide navigational assistance to users and proposed computer vision-mediated RSA service to address those challenges. We present an interactive system implementing a high-fidelity prototype of RSA service using augmented reality (AR) maps with localization and virtual elements placement capabilities. The paper also presents a confederate-based study design to evaluate the effects of AR maps with 13 untrained agents. The study revealed that, compared to baseline RSA, agents were significantly faster in providing indoor navigational assistance to a confederate playing the role of users, and agents' mental workload was significantly reduced-all indicate the feasibility and scalability of AR maps in RSA services.

Digital contact tracing is an ICT approach for controlling public health crises. It identifies users’ risk of infection based on their healthcare and travel information. In the COVID-19 pandemic, many countries implemented digital contact tracing to contain the coronavirus outbreak. However, the adoption rates vary significantly across different countries. In this study, we investigate Chinese people’s adoption of digital contact tracing. We aim at finding the influence of Chinese culture on people’s attitudes and behaviors toward the technology. We interviewed 26 Chinese participants and used thematic analysis to interpret the data. Our findings showed that Chinese culture shaped citizens’ interactions with the digital contact tracing at multiple levels; driven by the culture, Chinese citizens accepted digital contact tracing and contributed to making digital contact tracing a socio-technical infrastructure of people’s daily lives. We also discuss such cultural influences with the growing literature of human infrastructure and crisis informatics.

Remote sighted assistance (RSA) has emerged as a conversational assistive technology for people with visual impairments (VI), where remote sighted agents provide realtime navigational assistance to users with visual impairments via video-chat-like communication. In this paper, we conducted a literature review and interviewed 12 RSA users to comprehensively understand technical and navigational challenges in RSA for both the agents and users. Technical challenges are organized into four categories: agents' difficulties in orienting and localizing the users; acquiring the users' surroundings and detecting obstacles; delivering information and understanding user-specific situations; and coping with a poor network connection. Navigational challenges are presented in 15 real-world scenarios (8 outdoor, 7 indoor) for the users. Prior work indicates that computer vision (CV) technologies, especially interactive 3D maps and realtime localization, can address a subset of these challenges. However, we argue that addressing the full spectrum of these challenges warrants new development in Human-CV collaboration, which we formalize as five emerging problems: making object recognition and obstacle avoidance algorithms blind-aware; localizing users under poor networks; recognizing digital content on LCD screens; recognizing texts on irregular surfaces; and predicting the trajectory of out-of-frame pedestrians or objects. Addressing these problems can advance computer vision research and usher into the next generation of RSA service.

Starting from the spring of 2020, higher institutions in the US underwent a rapid shift from in-person classes to emergency remote education, in response to the COVID-19 outbreak. Under this circumstance, a variety of video conferencing tools (e.g., Zoom) have been adopted for distance education, which pose a set of new challenges arising from synchronous online classes. Among these, one significant issue was students' unwillingness to open cameras, resulting in a lack of non-verbal cues that instructors could rely on to gauge students' understanding and adjust their teachings. Towards addressing this issue, our qualitative study aims at investigating the rationales behind students' camera avoidance. Through a series of semi-structured interviews on undergraduate students in the U.S, we identified prominent factors -- namely the class size, lecture style, level of interactivity and privacy concerns -- that influenced students' motivation for opening their cameras. At the same time, we uncovered several difficulties, such as heightened self-awareness, feeling of minority and academic perspective, that discouraged students from opening camera, with more substantial impacts on international students. We conclude with actionable insights into the design of online classes, video-conferencing platforms and camera technology that can promote camera usage, thereby contributing to scalable and inclusive interventions for facilitating the transition into remote education.

Hancock (this issue) identifies potential adverse consequences of emerging autonomous agent technology. He is not talking about Roomba and Waymo, but about future systems that could be more capable...

Volunteers in non-profit groups are a valuable workforce that contributes to economic development and supports people in need in the U.S. However, many non-profit groups face challenges including engaging and sustaining volunteer participation, as well as increasing visibility of their work in the community. To support non-profit groups' service, we explored how engaging community members in the volunteer-acknowledgment process may have an impact. We set up workstations and invited community members to write thank-you cards to volunteers in non-profit groups. We conducted 14 interviews with volunteers and community members, collected and analyzed 25 thank-you cards. We found that the acknowledgment activity can help circulate social goods through multiple stakeholders, that authenticity was valued in the acknowledgment process, and that non-profit groups intended to distribute, reuse, and publicize the acknowledgments to utilize them to a fuller extent. Our contributions include expanding knowledge on experiences, needs, and impact of community acknowledgment from different stakeholders, as well as presenting design opportunities.

Citizen science project leaders collecting field data in a hyperlocal community often face common socio-technical challenges, which can potentially be addressed by sharing innovations across different groups through peer-to-peer collaboration. However, most citizen science groups practice in isolation, and end up re-inventing the wheel when it comes to addressing these common challenges. This study seeks to investigate distributed collaboration between different water monitoring citizen science groups. We discovered a unique social network application called Water Reporter that mediated distributed collaboration by creating more visibility and transparency between groups using the app. We interviewed 8 citizen science project leaders who were users of this app, and 6 other citizen science project leaders to understand how distributed collaboration mediated by this app differed from collaborative practices of Non Water Reporter users. We found that distributed collaboration was an important goal for both user groups, however, the tasks that support these collaboration activities differed for the two user groups.

The COVID-19 global pandemic brought forth wide-ranging, unanticipated changes in human interaction, as communities rushed to slow the spread of the coronavirus. In response, local geographic community members created grassroots care-mongering groups on social media to facilitate acts of kindness, otherwise known as care-mongering. In this paper, we are interested in understanding the types of care-mongering that take place and how such care-mongering might contribute to community collective efficacy (CCE) and community resilience during a long-haul global pandemic. We conducted a content analysis of a care-mongering group on Facebook to understand how local community members innovated and developed care-mongering practices online. We observed three facets of care-mongering: showing appreciation for helpers, coming up with ways of supporting one another's needs, and continuing social interactions online and present design recommendations for further augmenting care-mongering practices for local disaster relief in online groups.

Remote sighted assistance (RSA) is an emerging navigational aid for people with visual impairments (PVI). Using scenario-based design to illustrate our ideas, we developed a prototype showcasing potential applications for computer vision to support RSA interactions. We reviewed the prototype demonstrating real-world navigation scenarios with an RSA expert, and then iteratively refined the prototype based on feedback. We reviewed the refined prototype with 12 RSA professionals to evaluate the desirability and feasibility of the prototyped computer vision concepts. The RSA expert and professionals were engaged by, and reacted insightfully and constructively to the proposed design ideas. We discuss what we learned about key resources, goals, and challenges of the RSA prosthetic practice through our iterative prototype review, as well as implications for the design of RSA systems and the integration of computer vision technologies into RSA.

Online symptom checkers (OSC) are widely used intelligent systems in health contexts such as primary care, remote healthcare, and epidemic control. OSCs use algorithms such as machine learning to facilitate self-diagnosis and triage based on symptoms input by healthcare consumers. However, intelligent systems’ lack of transparency and comprehensibility could lead to unintended consequences such as misleading users, especially in high-stakes areas such as healthcare. In this paper, we attempt to enhance diagnostic transparency by augmenting OSCs with explanations. We first conducted an interview study (N=25) to specify user needs for explanations from users of existing OSCs. Then, we designed a COVID-19 OSC that was enhanced with three types of explanations. Our lab-controlled user study (N=20) found that explanations can significantly improve user experience in multiple aspects. We discuss how explanations are interwoven into conversation flow and present implications for future OSC designs.

The notion of "independence'' is frequently used to motivate technology design in the HCI sub-field of accessible and assistive technology for people with disabilities. Despite the term's pervasive use, the literature lacks a recent articulation of its meaning in the context of assistive technology. What does independence really mean? Scoping the study to people with visual impairments (PVI), we posed this question to 10 individuals from diverse backgrounds through in-depth, semi-structured interviews. Our findings reveal that PVI have internal experiences of independence and social experiences of independence, with surprising insights into the roles that people and technology play in supporting independence. We also discuss new ways to design for independence.

Studies have shown that interpersonal relationships such as families and friends are an important source of support and encouragement to those who seek to engage in healthier habits. However, challenges related to geographic distance may hinder those relationships from fully collaborating and engaging in healthy living together. To explore this domain, we developed and deployed a lightweight photo-based application called PhamilySpace with a week-long intervention. Our goal is to examine family members' and friends' engagement and awareness on healthy behaviors while living apart. Our analysis of the semi-structured interviews, pre/post-intervention instruments, and application logs suggests three main benefits of interventions for health promotion in this context: (1) increased awareness on acts of health; (2) reciprocal sharing of health information supports social accountability over distance; and (3) positive dialogue around health enhances support on healthy living. By providing insights into distributed family/friends interactions and experiences with the application, we identify benefits, challenges, and opportunities for future design interventions that promote healthy behaviors.

Crisis informatics research has examined geographically bounded crises, such as natural or man-made disasters, identifying the critical role of local and hyper-local information focused on one geographic area in crisis communication. The COVID-19 pandemic represents an understudied kind of crisis that simultaneously hits locales across the globe, engendering an emergent form of crisis communication, which we term cross-local communication. Cross-local communication is the exchange of crisis information between geographically dispersed locales to facilitate local crisis response. To unpack this notion, we present a qualitative study of an online migrant community of overseas Taiwanese who supported fellow Taiwanese from afar. We detail four distinctive types of cross-local communication: situational updates, risk communication, medical consultation, and coordination. We discuss how the current pandemic situation brings new understandings to crisis informatics and online health community literature, and what role digital technologies could play in supporting cross-local communication.

Locating and grasping objects is a critical task in people’s daily lives. For people with visual impairments, this task can be a daily struggle. The support of augmented reality frameworks in smartphones has the potential to overcome the limitations of current object detection applications designed for people with visual impairments. We present AIGuide, a self-contained offline smartphone application that leverages augmented reality technology to help users locate and pick up objects around them. We conducted a user study to validate its effectiveness at providing guidance, compare it to other assistive technology form factors, evaluate the use of multimodal feedback, and provide feedback about the overall experience. Our results show that AIGuide is a promising technology to help people with visual impairments locate and acquire objects in their daily routine.

People with visual impairments (PVI) must interact with a world they cannot see. Remote sighted assistance (RSA) has emerged as a conversational assistive technology. We interviewed RSA assistants ("agents") who provide assistance to PVI via a conversational prosthetic called Aira (https://aira.io/) to understand their professional practice. We identified four types of support provided: scene description, navigation, task performance, and social engagement. We discovered that RSA provides an opportunity for PVI to appropriate the system as a richer conversational/social support tool. We studied and identified patterns in how agents provide assistance and how they interact with PVI as well as the challenges and strategies associated with each context. We found that conversational interaction is highly context-dependent. We also discuss implications for design.

Facial appearance is significant for everyday interactions, but hundreds of thousands of people have interactions negatively affected by facial paralysis (FP) annually. FP treatment utilizes multiple components and requires significant collaboration amongst multidisciplinary specialists and patients. Complex interactions in these contexts offer ample challenges for designers to technologically support healthcare providers in their processes. We conduct a formative case study, employing 20 clinic observations and 11 interviews, to investigate FP treatment workflow. We use cognitive authority theory (CAT) to understand relational factors in patient-provider collaboration. We then pinpoint structural and relational components of workflow challenges and discuss the utility of these distinctions; notably, we identify that patient adherence lapses caused by perceived plateaus may be primarily relational and caused by unmet expectations. Our work adds to patient-provider interaction literature and sheds light upon technology design for healthcare team contexts with significant patient obligations.

Millions of surgeries are performed in the US annually, and numbers are trending upwards. Traditional rehabilitative interventions are struggling to meet current demands, and researchers have turned to pre-operative interventions, or prehabilitation, to improve patient functions. However, existing literature primarily discusses efficacy or the use of commercial sensing devices, and lacks a clear comprehension of healthcare professionals' (HPs') needs and perspectives. User-centered stakeholder understandings are crucial for a technology's adoption, but prehabilitation literature lacks such understandings. Therefore we conduct semi-structured interviews with 12 prehabilitation healthcare professionals (HPs) to offer descriptions of care challenges, tool usage, and perspectives regarding suitable and effective technologies. These data can assist designers in fostering prehabilitation processes via tailored prehabilitation tools which meet HPs' needs and expectations.

In many families, there are obstacles to support and collaborate with one another around positive health outcomes. One obstacle in providing support to one another occurs when family members are unaware of the need. In this study, we examine aspects of family conversations about health that affect family members’ decision to share (or not to share) information within the family, specifically information about sleep behaviors and medication intake. We conducted an interview study with independent living elderly parents (n = 11) and adult children (n = 14). We present factors that motivate and discourage family members from talking about sleep and medication within the family. We identified that some family members shift sharing behaviors following life changes that we characterize as “inciting incidents.” We elaborate the concept of inciting incidents as a resource for design ideas and contribute with a synthesis of design insights for developing family-centered health technologies.

Incorporating health personas for older adults into design processes can help designers accurately represent older adults by evoking empathy, facilitating consideration of health issues and needs, and reducing stereotype reliance. Toward this goal, we create a two-level quantitative methodology for constructing persona skeletons from imbalanced datasets. We demonstrate our methodology by constructing a set of 4 care-management personas for U.S. older adults via filtering and analyzing demographic, behavior risk factor, and chronic health conditions from 170,704 randomly sampled older adults in a national survey with imbalanced coverage (i.e. between unconditional & conditional questions). We obtain 4 cluster centers for unconditional questions through K-means and iteratively dropping irrelevant features. Within each cluster, we analyze selected respondents for conditional questions. We synthesize results into persona narratives and provide a weighting scheme to quantitatively measure each persona's significance. We contribute a robust persona construction methodology, here applied towards representing older adults.

People express their creativity through something that they enjoy doing. Through engagement in creative work, creators cultivate their identity, enhance problem-solving skills, and speak their thoughts and feelings. In this paper, we look into how a community of practice supports members in legitimizing their creativity. We conducted a user study with members of a home brewing community to understand their creative beer-crafting practice. We first interviewed 11 home brewers, nine of which are members of a home brew club and two who did not belong to any home brewing organization. We then observed club members as they participated in club activities. Our findings suggest that two types of resource sharing are key in supporting different aspects of creativity in a community of practice. Based on these findings, we propose design strategies for supporting sharing in a creative community of practice.

We used content analysis of in-app driver survey responses, customer support tickets, and tweets, and face-to-face interviews of DHH Uber drivers to better understand the DHH driver experience. Here we describe challenges DHH drivers experience and how they address those difficulties via Uber's accessibility features and their own workarounds. We also identify and discuss design and product opportunities to improve the DHH driver experience on Uber.

Understanding user behaviors and social relations in social media has been an important topic in Human-Computer Interaction research. In this paper, we look at an emerging form of social media, Event-based Social Networks (EBSNs), which support a special type of hybrid community where people are connected online to organize themselves for offline gatherings. EBSN users are labeled as either organizers or members on existing platforms, and their behavioral and relationship patterns in offline events have not been described systematically. To understand participation dynamics in EBSNs, we present an interview study with 12 Meetup users and categorize a variety of social roles beyond organizers and members. We identify that different types of organizers, classical leaders and delegated leaders, have different relationship patterns with various types of members, including active contributors, active followers, newcomers and occasional visitors. By comparing these roles with purely offline or online communities, we discuss how participation dynamics in EBSNs reflect the intertwined impacts of hybrid community and implications of our findings for technology designs.

Abstract Access to clean water is a critical challenge and opportunity for community-level collaboration. People rely on local water sources, but awareness of water quality and participation in water management is often limited. Lack of community engagement can increase risks of water catastrophes, such as those in Flint, Michigan, and Cape Town, South Africa. We investigated water quality practices in a watershed system serving c.100 000 people in the United States. We identified a range of entities including government and nonprofit citizen groups that gather water quality data. Many of these data are accessible in principle to citizens. However, the data are scattered and diverse; information infrastructures are primitive and not integrated. Water quality data and data practices are hidden in plain sight. Based on fieldwork, we consider sociotechnical courses of action, drawing on best practices in human–computer interaction and community informatics, data and environmental systems management.

Adoption rates of parental control applications ("apps") for teens' mobile devices are low, but little is known about the characteristics of parents (or teens) who use these apps. We conducted a web-based survey of 215 parents and their teens (ages 13-17) using two separate logistic regression models (parent and teen) to examine the factors that predicted parental use of technical monitoring apps on their teens' mobile devices. Both parent and teen models confirmed that low autonomy granting (e.g., authoritarian) parents were the most likely to use parental control apps. The teen model revealed additional nuance, indicating that teens who were victimized online and had peer problems were more likely to be monitored by their parents. Overall, increased parental control was associated with more (not fewer) online risks. We discuss the implications of these findings and provide design recommendations for mobile apps that promote online safety through engaged, instead of restrictive, parenting.

Research questions about community among online learners are gaining importance as enrollments in online programs explode. However, what community means for this context has not been studied in a comprehensive way. We contribute a quantitative study of learners' feelings and behavior expectations about online community, adapting scales for sense of community (SOC) and developing an instrument to assess community collective efficacy (CCE). Our analysis of students' responses to these scales revealed two factors underlying SOC (shared identity and interpersonal friendship) and three factors underlying CCE (identity regulation, coordination and social support). We used these factors to discuss contrasting definitions of community (shared identity versus ego networks). Exploratory data analyses also revealed relationships to other student variables that begin to articulate roles and mechanisms for online students' felt community, and raise design implications about what we might do with and for the community structure.

We report an investigation of how older adults engage in social activities and community events in support of their mental, physical, and emotional health. We focus on personal and collaborative agency in a community context, and construe health as an outcome that is coproduced by a person and other engaged community members. Using qualitative methods, we investigated the coproduction of health among members of retirement communities and people who are ageing in place. We found that our participants, irrespective of living arrangements, engaged in a diverse range of coproduction activities, including physical, socialising, service, discussion, and interest-based activities. We also identified desired but less-supported coproduction opportunities, such as opportunistic activities and the need to better appropriate social resources to enable coproductions. We draw from these findings to consider design implications of technological support for facilitating older adults to coproduce.

We present a comprehensive and structured review of 132 peer-reviewed publications between the years of 2008 and 2015 to inform Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) researchers and interaction designers about the current and multi-disciplinary knowledge on the topic of adolescent online safety and risks. Overall, we found that the existing literature has deeply studied the phenomena around adolescent online safety through an in-depth examination of the prevalence, perceptions, behaviors, characteristics, and outcomes associated with various online risk experiences. However, very few studies have moved beyond formative evaluations that inform design to novel design interventions or summative evaluations of new designs that serve to effectively change the status quo.

We present a lab study of multiple feedback designs for guiding small-scale arm-and-hand movement for people with visual impairments (PVI), so that they can reach out to and grasp an item on a shelf. Little attention has been paid to the guidance of small-scale arm-and-hand movements by PVI, yet this is an essential element of product acquisition in a grocery shopping task and other similar daily activities. We developed a feedback interface that allowed us to explore two types of auditory feedback (speech and tones), haptic vibration feedback, and a combination of both. The result of the study demonstrated that the multi-modal navigational feedback, specifically speech and haptic, was the most effective and preferred mode for small-scale navigation.

We conducted a structured, qualitative feature analysis of 75 Android mobile apps designed for the purpose of promoting adolescent online safety. Through this analysis we identified 42 unique features that mapped to a theoretically derived conceptual framework of teen online safety strategies balanced between parental control strategies (through monitoring, restriction, and active mediation) and teen self-regulation strategies (through self-monitoring, impulse control, and risk-coping). We found that the apps strongly favored features that promote parental control through monitoring and restricting teens' online behaviors over teen self-regulation or more communicative and collaborative practices between parents and teens. We use the lens of value sensitive design to discuss the implications of our results and identify opportunities for designing mobile apps for online safety that embed more positive family values.

Past research has shown that parents tend to underestimate the frequency with which their teens experience online risks. However, little is known about whether and how teens communicate with their parents when online risks do occur. In a two-month, web-based diary study of 68 teen-parent pairs, participants provided separate accounts of the teens' weekly online risk experiences. We found that most teens had little or no communication with their parents regarding their online risk experiences, and parents and teens shared very different perceptions and reactions when risks were reported, helping explain why communication was so poor. We discuss the implications of our results and make recommendations for how researchers and designers may work to improve the state of family communication regarding adolescent online risks in the future.

Collaborative learning technology has been widely applied in various disciplines in support of dialectical discourse and argumentation. Technologies not only allow multiple users to concurrently analyze and edit documents in the same virtual space but also present richer cues for collaboration awareness. However, researchers still know very little about how the synching mechanisms work together to support small group collaborative argument creation. This study investigates the experiences of 14 dyads that worked together in Critical Thinker, a web application that enables learners to collaborate on an argumentative task with a juxtaposed argumentation structure and multiple synchronous collaboration affordances. Our qualitative data showed that the learners are able to leverage different synching mechanisms in a complementary manner and appropriate the dialectic structure for collaborative argumentation.

Cross-sectional research suggests that online risk exposure (e.g., cyberbullying, sexual solicitations, and explicit content) may negatively impact teens, increasing concerns over the risks teens are exposed to online. Yet, there has been little research as to how these experiences impact teens' mood over time, or how long these effects may last. To examine the effects of online risk exposure on mood, we asked 68 teens to report their weekly online risk experiences, emotions, and sense of well-being for two months. We found that teens experienced more negative emotions the week that they reported cyberbullying and exposure to explicit content, but these effects were gone one week later. In addition, teens reported a slight in crease in positive emotions and mental well-being during weeks they were exposed to other risks. Our results suggest that most of the risks teens in our study experienced online only pose brief negative effects, if any, and initiates a discussion on how our society may overly problematize the negative effects of online risk exposure on teens.

It is important to support independent living for people with visual impairments (PVI). Part of this can be accomplished with individual assistive technologies. However, in this paper we emphasize the social and collaborative needs for PVI to fully integrate into society as equals. The study assesses how PVI collaborate with different types of sighted partners when shopping together. We chose to study grocery shopping because it is a critical and challenging task for PVI. We conducted field observations and in-depth interviews with five PVI and their sighted shopping partners, including spouses, caseworkers, and store-provided courtesy shoppers. We found several factors that modulated these collaborations with varying forms of common ground: 1) knowledge about how to assist PVI; 2) interpersonal knowledge resulting from common experience and interpersonal relationship history; and 3) knowledge of shopping as a practice. We discuss our findings with respect to the implications for designing collaborative interactions.

Timebanking is a growing type of peer-to-peer service exchange, but is hampered by the effort of finding good transaction partners. We seek to reduce this effort by using a Matching Algorithm for Service Transactions (MAST). MAST matches transaction partners in terms of similarity of interests and complementarity of abilities and needs. We present an experiment involving data and participants from a real timebanking network, that evaluates the acceptability of MAST, and shows that such an algorithm can retrieve matches that are subjectively better than matches based on matching the category of people's historical offers or requests to the category of a current transaction request.

In our study, 68 teens spend two months reflecting on their weekly online experiences and report 207 separate risk events involving information breaches, online harassment, sexual solicitations, and exposure to explicit content. We conduct a structured, qualitative analysis to characterize the salient dimensions of their risk experiences, such as severity, level of agency, coping strategies, and whether the teens felt like the situation had been resolved. Overall, we found that teens can potentially benefit from lower risk online situations, which allow them to develop crucial interpersonal skills, such as boundary setting, conflict resolution, and empathy. We can also use the dimensions of risk described in this paper to identify potentially harmful risk trajectories before they become high-risk situations. Our end goal is to find a way to empower and protect teens so that they can benefit from online engagement.

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have experienced rapid growth and attracted significant attention within aca-demia. However, despite widespread acceptance of MOOCs as a unique opportunity to transform educational practices, many questions remain regarding their sustainability, given the high dropout rates and challenges related to collabora-tive learning support [12]. Recent research has attempted to address these concerns by analyzing students' MOOC expe-riences and how MOOCs may fall short in meeting students' learning needs [41]. However, very little research has approached the problem from an instructor perspective. We report an interview study of 14 MOOC instructors in which we used grounded theory to uncover the complex processes, motivations, and challenges associated with teaching a MOOC. A key finding is that we should provide support through the whole instruction process. By enhancing sup-port for instructors and their MOOC collaborators, we may improve outcomes for all MOOC stakeholders, including students.

The Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) have experienced rapid development. However, high dropout rate has become a salient issue. Many studies have attempted to understand this phenomenon; other have explored mechanisms for enhancing retention. For instance, social media has been used to improve student engagement and retention. However there is a lack of (1) empirical studies of social media use and engagement compared to embedded MOOC forums; and (2) rationales for social media use from both instructors' and students' perspectives. We addressed these open issues through the collection and analysis of real usage data from three MOOC forums and their associated social media (i.e., Facebook) groups as well as conducting interviews of instructors and students. We found that students show higher engagement and retention in social media than in MOOC forums, and identified both instructors' and students' perspectives that lead to the results. We discuss design implications for future MOOC platforms.

Isolation and loneliness has been shown to be a significant cause of disease and mortality among elderly adults. The coproduction of activity is one potential method of prevention, through the promotion of social interaction and community engagement. The present study aims to facilitate coproduction in a continuing care retirement community, promoting health and wellness in elderly adults. To achieve this, we engage in the participatory design of a public interactive display for organizing community activity. We explore design needs and usability concerns from elderly residents, and discuss the trajectory of co-design work to realize this technological intervention.

Understanding the impacts and consequences of information and communications technology in local communities through theoretical and practical approaches has long been studied. Among different types of technologies, mobile technology suggests new opportunities for community informatics because a growing number of people across different age groups have adopted smartphones, which have become an indispensable part of people's daily lives. Because mobile technology transcends the limitations of time and place, it expands the ways of accessing and interacting with local community information and lowers the barrier to participation. In this paper, we present our ongoing initiatives in community informatics including digital cultural heritage and local volunteer efforts mediated by mobile technology. We highlight how mobile technology, together with increased mobility, immediacy and social presence, shows a significant influence on local communities with respect to community identity, awareness and participation and also social support networks.

The increasing popularity of the Internet and social media is creating new and unique challenges for parents and adolescents regarding the boundaries between parental control and adolescent autonomy in virtual spaces. Drawing on developmental psychology and Communication Privacy Management (CPM) theory, we conduct a qualitative study to examine the challenge between parental concern for adolescent online safety and teens' desire to independently regulate their own online experiences. Analysis of 12 parent–teen pairs revealed five distinct challenges: (a) increased teen autonomy and decreased parental control resulting from teens' direct and unmediated access to virtual spaces, (b) the shift in power to teens who are often more knowledgeable about online spaces and technology, (c) the use of physical boundaries by parents as a means to control virtual spaces, (d) an increase in indirect boundary control strategies such as covert monitoring, and (e) the blurring of lines in virtual spaces between parents' teens and teens' friends.

This paper reports on a study of motivations for the use of peer-to-peer or sharing economy services. We interviewed both users and providers of these systems to obtain different perspectives and to determine if providers are matching their system designs to the most important drivers of use. We found that the motivational models implicit in providers' explanations of their systems' designs do not match well with what really seems to motivate users. Providers place great emphasis on idealistic motivations such as creating a better community and increasing sustainability. Users, on the other hand are looking for services that provide what they need whilst increasing value and convenience. We discuss the divergent models of providers and users and offer design implications for peer system providers.

Timebanking is a service-based community currency, built on the principle that everyone's time is valued equally. It has potential for community building and reenergizing neighborhoods, but it faces several adoption challenges. We report on the largest investigation of timebanking practices to date by analyzing a combination of service exchange records from the three largest hOurworld timebanks with over 3,500 members with 33,000 completed service exchanges, and a survey of 446 members of over 120 hOurworld timebanks. Our findings suggest that the ideal of 'equal time, equal value' that is at the foundation of timebanking is a source of tension between members with instrumental versus idealistic and altruistic motivations. We suggest that future peer-to-peer systems must incorporate different rewards and incentives in order to accommodate users with different motivations.

We cannot fully protect adolescents from experiencing online risks; however, we can aim to better understand how online risk experiences impact teens, factors that contribute to or prevent teens from exposure to risk, as well as factors that can protect teens from psychological harm in spite of online risk exposure. Through a web-based survey study of 75 adolescents in the US, we develop and empirically validate a theoretical model of adolescent resilience in the presence of online risks. We show evidence that resilience is a key factor in protecting teens from experiencing online risks, even when teens exhibit high levels of Internet addiction. Resilience also neutralizes the negative psychological effects associated with Internet addiction and online risk exposure. Therefore, we emphasize the importance of design solutions that foster teen resilience and strength building, as opposed to solutions targeted toward parents that often focus on restriction and risk prevention.

Paradigms for the collaborative creation of value through trade and exchange have developed over millennia. Thus, coins emerged in response to a set of challenges in barter and gift exchange. The development of paradigms for trade and exchange continues today, and is accelerating due both to crises in the mainstream global economy, and to new possibilities enabled by information technology. In this discussion paper, we consider alternative and complementary currency and exchange innovations, including local/community currencies, timebanks, crypto-currencies, and person-to-person collaborative economy microenterprises, as a technology design space for currency and exchange. We consider the consequences and trajectories of the rapidly evolving currency ecosystem, particularly with respect to research and development opportunities for CSCW.

Through a secondary data analysis of a nationally representative Pew survey [35-36], we empirically test the validity of two contrasting theoretical models of adolescent information privacy behaviors. Our results suggest that in seeking to understand the underlying processes of teens' privacy risk-taking and risk-coping behaviors within social media, a "risk-centric" framework may be more useful than a traditional "concern-centric" framework that emphasizes privacy antecedents and outcomes. Our newly proposed and validated "risk-centric" framework implies a possible risk escalation process wherein teens make online disclosures and render themselves more susceptible to experiences of risky online interactions; in turn, these risky experiences are associated with higher levels of teen privacy concern. Higher levels of teen privacy concern predict both advice-seeking and remedy/corrective risk-coping behaviors. Drawing on theories of information privacy and developmental psychology, we discuss these findings from the perspective of allowing teens to experience some level of online risk so that they can learn how to navigate the dangers and reap the benefits of online engagement.

Through an empirical, secondary analysis of 588 teens (ages 12 - 17) and one of their parents living in the USA, we present useful insights into how parental privacy concerns for their teens and different parental mediation strategies (direct intervention versus active mediation) influence teen privacy concerns and privacy risk-taking and risk-coping privacy behaviors in social media. Our results suggest that the use of direct intervention by itself may have a suppressive effect on teens, reducing their exposure to online risks but also their ability to engage with others online and to learn how to effectively cope with online risks. Therefore, it may be beneficial for parents to combine active mediation with direct intervention so that they can protect their teens from severe online risks while empowering teens to engage with others online and learn to make good online privacy choices.

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have recently experienced rapid development and garnered significant attention from various populations. Despite the wide recognition of MOOCs as an important opportunity within educational practices, there are still many questions as to how we might satisfy students' needs, as evidenced by very high dropout rates. Researchers lack a solid understanding of what student needs are being addressed by MOOCs, and how well MOOCs now address (or fail to address) these needs. To help in building such an understanding, we conducted in-depth interviews probing student motivations, learning perceptions and experiences towards MOOCs, paying special attention to the MOOC affordances and experiences that might lead to high drop rates. Our study identified learning motivations, learning patterns, and a number of factors that appear to influence student retention. We proposed that the issue of retention should be addressed from two perspectives: retention as a problem but also retention as an opportunity.

Recently, curation practices start to develop in GitHub, where developers systematically put efforts to select, evaluate, and organize existing artifacts for the purposes of preservation and future use in software development. Curation practices in social media sites, such as Twitter and Pinterest, have been investigated, raising questions about the nature of collaborative curation in a professional/product-oriented site. In this study, we identify and characterize curation projects hosted on GitHub, and compare curation projects with software projects to study how this practice takes place and how it is different from the original use of GitHub. We find that curation has emerged as a highly popular category of GitHub project, which is directed to learning and professional development, and curation practice leverages collaborative tools and practices native to GitHub. Although curation projects and software projects use the same set of activities for development, they are different from each other in terms of the quantity of each type of activity performed by developers.

The Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) paradigm has developed rapidly and achieved significant attention from a broad range of populations. However, many people who enroll in MOOCs do not have successful learning experiences. For example, some studies suggest that the relatively weak feelings of community and meager opportunities for collaboration may be contributing to a high dropout rate in MOOCs. In light of such problems, we are exploring new design features that could support enhanced social interactions, collaborative learning and feelings of community. We present our design ideas through a set of activity design scenarios, along with an analysis of possible benefits and negative consequences of our design.

Commercial peer-to-peer service exchange businesses, such as AirBnB, Lyft and TaskRabbit, are expanding rapidly, but their non-profit counterparts are lagging behind. We conducted a field study of the most prominent of these, timebanking; a system in which 'time dollars' are earned and spent by people providing services for and receiving them from each other. Our study exposed problems with the very metaphor of banking itself, which deter participation. In this paper we discuss how these problems can be tackled with user experience design for systems supporting timebanking. Our design ideas emphasize the personal and social benefits of participation, and avoid such unappealing concepts as debt and neediness that the timebanking metaphor falls afoul of.

One goal of local communities is to create and reinforce community identity by connecting residents to their local heritage. Technologies have enabled and facilitated the creation and consumption of digitized history content provided by official history institutions as well as individuals. Although much research has been conducted to understand technical and social aspects of digital cultural heritage, little empirical research has investigated how people perceive, experience, and interact with community content that is socially generated and tied to locations, particularly with respect to building community heritage. To address this, we developed a mobile application called Lost State College (LSC) and conducted a user study with 34 local residents. The study results indicate that meaningful historic places evoked special attention from the participants, and that those who have lived in the community longer tended to contribute more to the community heritage effort. Participants utilized social features as a way of learning local history, reflecting personal experiences and stories, and co-creating rich layers of local history information from their perspectives.

Adolescence is characterized by heightened risk-taking and independence from parents; these tendencies seem to be magnified by the opportunities afforded through online interactions. Drawing on Kohlberg's Cognitive Moral Development (CMD) theory, we conduct a qualitative study of 12 parent-adolescent dyads that examines the interplay between parenting behaviors and adolescent moral development. We show an association between adolescent moral judgment and online behavior, and we illustrate how parenting style and mediation strategies influence the teen's moral growth and decision making about online behaviors. We also note that parental mediation strategies are moderated by parents' digital literacy: reduced digital literacy is associated with more restrictive or indulgent strategies; while more digitally competent parents are more likely to monitor and mediate their teen's behaviors as they engage online. We also found that experience, not restriction, facilitates the teen's moral growth.

In this paper, patterns of communication are examined in order to unpack the extent to which verbal equity is a critical factor in determining group success. A microanalysis of 20 teams working to complete a complex, information dependent, collaborative task was conducted. Interaction analysis methods were used as means to determine patterns of interaction and the sophistication of cognitive activity that teams engaged in. Findings suggest that verbal equity may not be as important as previous research indicates. A more critical variable may be cognitive specialization. The authors explain their findings by drawing on theories of cognition, thereby contributing to a better understanding of collective intelligence.

Social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook are commonly used to disseminate up-to-date news information, but they also contain a lot of noise and irrelevant content. The contents of social media platforms are typically filtered by followship or friendship oriented relationships, and is almost always driven by trending news topics at the national scale, making it difficult for users to gather useful information that is most pertinent to a local community context. Research has utilized content analysis techniques to gain insights on the sentiment expressed about political topics on social media sites. However, there has been little attempt to understand how users would perceive this information if opinions and sentiments about news topics were externalized and made aware to them. We designed Community Poll, a smartphone application that aggregates local news feeds with relevant tweets about the local news topics. A Public Attitude Meter is calculated based on the sentiment score of the tweets for each of the local news topic presented in the system. We conducted a 2-week deployment with 16 users about their perception of the system. The users reported that Community Poll helps them digest locally relevant news topics, and quickly gather public opinions associated with the topics. They reported that being aware of public sentiment encouraged them to more actively participate in discussions on social media. Curiosity about a score-based representation is an important element that drove them to consume local news topics that they wouldn’t otherwise be exposed to. Interestingly, although being aware of public sentiment served to reaffirm people’s positions on the local topics, users expressed concerns about how sentiment awareness might bias other people’s judgments regarding news topics.

The design of artifacts and how designers make them have garnered renewed societal interest as interactive technologies create new opportunities and challenges. The world we experience has never be...

Being aware of local community information is critical to maintaining civic engagement and participation. The use of online news and microblog content to create and disseminate community information has long been studied. However, interactions in the online spaces dedicated to local communities tend to only garner very limited usage, and people often do not consider microblog content as a meaningful source of local community information. Local News Chatter (LNC) was designed to address these challenges by augmenting local news feeds with microblog content and presenting them in a tag cloud that displays news topics of varying popularity with different tag sizes. Our study with 30 local residents highlights that LNC increases the visibility of hyperlocal community news information and successfully utilizes microblog as an additional information layer. LNC also increases one’s community awareness and shows the potential for leveraging community knowledge as a deliberation platform for local topics.

To better understand end users' security compliance behaviors, we designed an experimental study to investigate how fear appeals and point of reference manipulations could influence end users' security behavioral intentions. The findings suggest that fear appeals and point of reference collectively influence users' perceived persuasiveness of the IT security communication messages. Specifically, higher fear messages are generally more persuasive than low fear ones when the messages are self-referenced. However, in other-referenced messages, the levels of fear appeals do not make differences. Further, our results indicate that users regard IT security issues as peripheral for them and it is suggested that personalized IT security communications might have greater potential in successfully persuading end users for security compliance.

For 3 years, the authors of this article and several other colleagues have worked with 11 nonprofit community groups to help them take greater control of their information technology in terms of technology acceptance, adoption, and literacy through a research project. As part of this project, the authors explored informal learning methods that the groups could benefit from and practiced them with the community representatives who played key roles in the daily life of the organizations. In the present article, the authors reflect on the developmental trajectories observed for two individuals, each from a different nonprofit organization, with respect to information technology efficacy and ability. The authors analyze these trajectories as a sequence of the following four technology‐related roles—technology consumers, technology planners, technology doers, and technology sustainers. The authors describe these roles, the methods used to promote informal learning, and implications for other researchers studying informal learning in communities.

HCI can “turn to the wild” but still stay home. Local community life presents a rich context for understanding challenges and possibilities of information technology. We summarize and reflect upon a program of participatory design research in which we facilitated activities and experiences of our neighbors through developing a series of community-oriented programs and information systems through the past two decades. We organize these reflections around five overlapping themes: visibility of community actors, creation of community information infrastructures, the role of place-based identity and activity in community, the effectiveness of participatory relationships, and the research designs and methods appropriate. We frame these reflections around a conceptual model of community, and the suggestion that the local community can be a living laboratory for HCI in the wild.

In this paper we present findings from a laboratory study of teams of three, collaborating to complete a complex information sharing, synthesis, decision-making task. We use interaction analysis, communication analysis, and task analysis methods to identify the primary activities teams engaged in as they solved a complex information dependant decision-making task. These activities serve as the foundation to present findings related to common team problems and patterns of interaction associated with team performance. We found differences between high and low performing teams related to verbal equity and how they shared and synthesized information.

An emerging trend in classroom technology research is the use of computer mediated communication (CMC) tools in classrooms to encourage students' in-class participation. As part of this research thread, we have been investigating the potential of public digital backchannels for building feelings of community among students in university courses. We designed, deployed and evaluated such a tool in a 15-week field study of two undergraduate classes. We found students found using public backchannel during the class is of little distraction, that teachers' attention to the content posted on the channel influence students' tendency to use tools of this kind. Further, we found that the relevance of the content shared is predictive of students' use of ClasCommons in the classroom; these feelings in turn are related to students' perceptions of self-efficacy, collective efficacy and course-specific social support. We also analyzed the content posted in the public backchannel and considered the benefits and drawbacks of the public digital from both students' and teachers' perspectives. We conclude with suggestions for improving the design and deployment of course-related backchannels.

Bug fixing is an important collaborative practice of open source software development. Creative collaborative bug fixing---collectively generating new and useful solutions to improve software quality---is important especially when bugs are difficult to fix. We find bug fixing practices are unavoidably creative by studying Mozilla and Python. We characterize their bug fixing process as four common subprocesses, problem identification, preparation, solution generation, and solution evaluation. We discuss the key challenges of creative collaboration during each subprocess, and recommend design implications to enhance creative collaborative bug fixing processes, including support for establishment of common ground, externalization of social networks, awareness of resolving progress, and articulation of design rationale.

Researchers have been working to understand the factors that may be contributing to low rates of participation by women and other minorities in the computer and information sciences (CIS). We describe a multivariate investigation of male and female university students’ orientation to CIS careers. We focus on the roles of self-efficacy and peer-based social support as social-cognitive variables in the students’ learning process. We explore these variables and their impact on career orientation through a set of overlapping regression models. In general, we find that strong social support and high self-efficacy are associated with strong orientation toward careers in CIS careers. However the influences of perceived self-efficacy and social support appear to differ for men and women: while low self-efficacy is tied to less social support for males, we see no similar tendency for females. In fact many females who report themselves as low in self-efficacy consider themselves to have high social support among their peers. We discuss the implications of our findings for programs aimed at outreach to both males and females regarding CIS education and careers.

We present a design research project on knowledge sharing and activity awareness in distributed emergency management planning. In three experiments we studied groups using three different prototypes, respectively: a paper-prototype in a collocated work setting, a first software prototype in a distributed setting, and a second, enhanced software prototype in a distributed setting. In this series of studies we tried to better understand the processes of knowledge sharing and activity awareness in complex cooperative work by developing and investigating new tools that can support these processes. We explicate the design rationale behind each prototype and report the results of each experiment investigating it. We discuss how the results from each prototyping phase brought us closer to defining properties of a system that facilitate the sharing and awareness of both content and process knowledge. Our designs enhanced aspects of distributed group performance, in some respects beyond that of comparable face-to-face groups.

Design patterns document successful solutions to recurrent problems in a specific software development domain. However, finding the patterns you need can be difficult, often requiring the designer to comprehend a long narrative description to understand the benefits, implications and trade-offs of each pattern and of its relationships with others. In this paper we propose a visual notation supported by a software tool that may help to identify patterns that could satisfy a designer’s goals, as well as conveying the positive and negative relations among patterns, including dependencies and collisions among patterns selected for a specific problem. This work extends the concept of Softgoal Interdependency Graphs (SIG) enhancing them with a number of visual clues and interaction capabilities to help designers realize the contributions and trade-offs of their design ideas and the complexity of the solution space they are building up.

In many college classrooms, students are passive spectators and the transmittal model of teaching is prevalent in most classes. In contrast, Vygotsky's social-constructivist view emphasizes the importance of making students become active learners. Many active learning techniques have been developed, primarily focused on making students active participants in various kinds of in class activities like discussion, writing and talking. However, there is evidence that the typical university classroom setting presents some obstacles for realizing maximum effectiveness of class wide discussion. These obstacles include the effects of production blocking, the hierarchical power structures within the classroom and the lack of sense of community. Having realized the great potential of Web 2.0 social software in meeting these challenges, the objective in the proposed research is to build an active learning environment by bring backchannel discussion up front using CMC tools. A design based research method will be used to explore effects of using this tool in classes.

Student engagement is a pervasive and persistent goal for educators. In previous work we have reported that activities like public real-time commenting on videos can enhance student participation and engagement. However, these events occur over a limited period of time. Thus a more challenging question is how to increase and sustain student engagement. In this paper we describe the iterative development of Class Commons, a public commenting system with which students can post questions/comments that are shared through a public display in the classroom. The system was used in a senior undergraduate class in the spring semester of 2009. Our findings suggest that students were interested in this system. Students with different self-construal (independent vs. interdependent) appropriate this system for slightly different purposes. In the long run, we speculate that by having the teacher involved more in using this system (responding more quickly, helping structuring the discussions), it has potential for promoting sustained student engagement.

We describe our case-based, usability engineering teaching practice and a design of online workspace system that supports various class activities.

Journal Article Conceptualizing a possible discipline of human–computer interaction Get access John M. Carroll John M. Carroll Center for Human–Computer Interaction and College of Information Sciences and Technology, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA E-mail address:[email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Interacting with Computers, Volume 22, Issue 1, January 2010, Pages 3–12, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intcom.2009.11.008 Published: 27 November 2009 Article history Received: 19 May 2009 Revision received: 07 November 2009 Accepted: 20 November 2009 Published: 27 November 2009

We present design concepts and related mockups that support the user experience for projects hosted on CodePlex, an open source project hosting website. Rationale for the design concepts is grounded in the open source literature and a thirteen-week study with the CodePlex team. We propose that fostering ways to build trust, providing opportunities for merit, supporting crossover of work activities, and supporting user experience (UX) best practices in CodePlex will help dismantle the social and technological barriers for UX and encourage UX designer participation. We address UX designer motivation as a challenge for participation and conclude that the mockups presented are a first step in furthering the user experience in open source software development.

We build on our prior work with computer-supported teams performing a complex decision-making task on maps, where the distinction between content and process common ground is proposed. In this paper we describe a distributed geo-collaboration software prototype. The system design rationale was gleaned from fieldwork, literature on team cognition, and an earlier lab study introducing a reference task with face-to-face teams. We report on a controlled experiment that evaluates this design rationale. Distinct sets of measures show that that the prototype supported both content and process common ground, offsetting the costs imposed by the distributed setting. We interpret the results in relation to prior work on common ground and draw implications for moving beyond current models of sharing and coordination.

We report results from interviews with HCI design researchers on their perceptions of how their research relates to the more traditional scientific goal of providing explanations. Theories of explanation are prominent in the physical and natural sciences, psychology, the social sciences, and engineering. Little work though has so-far addressed the special case of how results from reflective design of interactive systems can help provide explanations. We found conceptions of explanation in design research to be broader and more inclusive than those commonly found in the philosophy of science. We synthesized concepts from the interviews into a framework which may help researchers understand how their contributions relate to both classical and emergent conceptions of explanation.

This study explores the characteristics of rationale development in a complex group decision making task and considers design implications for better supporting rationale development in group decision making. Twelve three-person, multi-role teams performed three instances of a collaborative decision making task with physical maps. We used rhetorical structure theory to analyze the structure of their decision making discourse. We found that groups begin their reasoning processing by stating and relating information and finish their reasoning through a point-counterpoint discussion. We also found that established groups reduced their need to analyze information during the last moments of a decision. Implications for the design of group decision support systems to encourage rationale development are presented.

In this paper we describe the design and first deployment experiences of a platform-independent, interactive video commenting system, ClassCommons, using a large public display in two sections of a large-enrollment university class. Our preliminary evaluation suggests that students enjoyed the activity of commenting, that they participated a great deal, and that their sense of community was greater after using the system. Further analysis revealed that reading the comments and posting relevant comments are associated with increases in community members' sense of community. We discuss lessons learned and describe further work we are planning using this and similar interactive activities.

Teams of specialized experts, such as emergency management planning teams, while making decisions need to efficiently pool domain-specific knowledge, synthesize relevant information, and keep track of collaborators activities at a low interaction cost. This requires tools that allow monitoring both low-level information (e.g., individual actions and external events) and higher-order activities (e.g., how members contribute to groupwork). This paper presents design of CIVIL, a system prototype developed to support map-based decision-making. We report our empirical evaluation of the effects of visualizations on the decision process and the final product.

We describe a scenario of tag use and an empirical study of tags as socio-cognitive artifacts providing information scent. We articulated a three-step use scenario of tags, and used it to conceptualize tag "quality" as determined by use. We designed and conducted a user study to explore what attributes of tags and taggers predict the user-rated "quality" of tags. We found that frequency best predicted tag quality, while information entropy provided further refinement. We found that people rated our identified quality tags as higher in quality than general tags. But these identified quality tags were not perceived as better than self-generated tags. We derived a regression model for tag quality and discussed implications for social computing.

We describe work on developing workshop activities that are part of wConnect, a project that is building an online community of women in computer and information science. The workshops are designed by college women for high school girls, with hands-on construction of dynamic web sites. Because of limited workshop time, the activities use scaffolding to help girls achieve the in-tended learning objectives. In this paper we describe the design of the activities, their formative evaluation in a series of four work-shops, and how we are using these results in the larger project.

We study the development of common ground in an emergency management planning task. Twelve three-person multi-role teams performed the task with a paper prototype in a controlled setting; each team completed three versions of the task. We use converging measures to document the development of common ground in the teams and present an in-depth analysis of the characteristics of the common ground development process. Our findings indicate that in complex collaborative work, process common ground increases, thus diminishing the need for acts like information querying or strategy discussions about how to organize the collaborative activities. However, content common ground is created and tested throughout the three runs; in fact dialogue acts used to clarify this content increase over time. Discussion of the implications of these findings for the theory of common ground and the design of collaborative systems follows.

Through the past two decades, education in computer and information science and technology (CISE) has moved toward a model that pervasively incorporates programming projects and other engaging student activity. Realistic activities and materials are intrinsically motivating because they vividly remind learners of the possibilities for meaningfully applying knowledge and skills in the world beyond the classroom. A realistic activity, however, does not ipso facto reveal its own rationales, deeper lessons, cultural meanings and origins, or its roles in a coherent professional practice. In order for realistic activities to serve as effective learning opportunities, underlying rationale and expert thinking behind problem solving, core concepts and techniques must be made available to students (Collins, 1991; Brown & Collins, 1989).

We describe our work on seeding and building a developmental learning community for recruiting and retaining women in educational programs and careers related to computing and information science (CIS). Our approach is explicitly participatory: we work with young women to better understand how they view and approach CIS and to build activities that may attract women who would otherwise be disinclined toward computing. In this paper we focus primarily on the software tools aspects of this research project.

Constructivist learning theorists believe that it is important to encourage reflexivity, helping learners to think about how they approach problems, and how they look for and find solutions. A rationale is an explanation of the reasons underlying decisions, conclusions, and interpretations. In this study, requiring and supporting rationale sharing within the group is proposed as one way of promoting reflective thinking during collaborative learning activities. A collaborative learning activity was designed and implemented in an undergraduate project management course, requiring the documentation and sharing of decision rationales. A collaborative tool was developed to support the activity. The results of the study show that engaging in the process of documenting decision rationales potentially helped the participants to articulate their thoughts and ideas, effectively explore the course concepts, and engage in higher order thinking. Participantspsila feedback on the design of the collaborative space for rationale sharing was collected and design implications elicited.

We studied the process of sharing and managing knowledge (common ground process) in three-member teams performing emergency management planning tasks on shared maps. We built a reference task and a role-based multi-view prototype for studying this process. In this paper we empirically test the claim that common ground increases through joint experience on a task over time. We model the common ground process using a realistic task, a controlled setting, and multiple measures. We present findings from the analysis of questionnaires, communication transcripts, videos, and artifacts.

Based on qualitative analysis of three groups collaborating on a research task in a distributed setting, we identify four breakdowns in creativity: (1) Minority ideas were under-considered; (2) Novel ideas were easily lost; (3) There was a lack of critical evaluation of perspectives; (4) Reflexivity was weak during convergence. We propose two design strategies, illustrated with mock-ups, to support creativity with awareness: (1) Automatically summarize and recommend ideational activities from system logs; (2) Allow collaborators to enter status of work activity, making these activity updates visible on social and temporal dimensions. Our analysis also suggests an integrated framework of metrics to evaluate creativity as a long-term collaborative activity.

To improve existing social bookmarking systems and to design new ones, researchers and practitioners need to understand how to evaluate tagging behavior. In this paper, we analyze over two years of data from CiteULike, a social bookmarking system for tagging academic papers. We propose six tag metrics-tag growth, tag reuse, tag non-obviousness, tag discrimination, tag frequency, and tag patterns-to understand the characteristics of a social bookmarking system. Using these metrics, we suggest possible design heuristics to implement a social bookmarking system for CiteSeer, a popular online scholarly digital library for computer science. We believe that these metrics and design heuristics can be applied to social bookmarking systems in other domains.

The workforce is ageing as older workers re-enter the workforce or delay retirement. One consequence is that work groups are increasingly becoming intergenerational. Because group work relies on many collaborative tools (e.g. email, shared calendars), it is essential to understand the special requirements that intergenerational groups have for groupware. Can we design collaborative tools that leverage the differing abilities and contributions of older and younger workers in groups? We focus on how best to support intergenerational groups, offering an analytical framework that combines ideas from the theory of small groups and activity theory. We consider design implications for computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) and outline design principles for groupware that supports intergenerational groups. Finally, we discuss methodological issues that arise when studying intergenerational cooperative work.

Community computing supports human – computer interaction among neighbours in geographical or place-based community organizations. Using a case study of such an organization, we investigate the process of designing their website. Our long-term participatory design approach, integrating developmental informal learning, allowed us to understand how this community organization adopts, evaluates, and sustains website technology. Based on our case study analysis, we present three design heuristics for developing community-based technology: align and afford new possibilities for participation, dynamically manage organizational knowledge and learning, and enhance social capital within community organizations and with the broader community.

Computer technologies develop at a challenging fast pace. Formal education should not only teach students basic computer skills to meet current computer needs, but also foster student development of informal learning ability for a lifelong learning process. On the other hand, students growing up in the digital world are often more skilled with computer technologies than their teachers. We describe an online course design project in which a group of students designed an online health course for their middle school, and teachers played the roles of facilitators and learners. We suggest fostering an informal learning community of computer technologies at school as a supplemental method of formal computer education to address the shift in educational context and as a place offering opportunities for students to work on real-life projects and solve real-life problems.

(2006). Introduction to This Special Issue on Foundations of Design in HCI. Human–Computer Interaction: Vol. 21, Foundations of Design in HCI, pp. 1-3.

Journal Article Awareness and teamwork in computer-supported collaborations Get access John M. Carroll, John M. Carroll * School of Information Sciences and Technology and Center for Human–Computer Interaction, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA * Corresponding author. Tel.: +1 8148632476; fax: +1 8146353556. E-mail address:[email protected] (J.M. Carroll). Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Mary Beth Rosson, Mary Beth Rosson School of Information Sciences and Technology and Center for Human–Computer Interaction, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Gregorio Convertino, Gregorio Convertino School of Information Sciences and Technology and Center for Human–Computer Interaction, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Craig H. Ganoe Craig H. Ganoe School of Information Sciences and Technology and Center for Human–Computer Interaction, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Interacting with Computers, Volume 18, Issue 1, January 2006, Pages 21–46, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intcom.2005.05.005 Published: 14 July 2005 Article history Received: 24 April 2005 Accepted: 17 May 2005 Published: 14 July 2005

As human-computer interaction increasingly focuses on mediated interactions among groups of individuals, there is a need to develop techniques for measurement and analysis of groups that have been scoped at the level of the group. Bandura's construct of perceived self-efficacy has been used to understand individual behavior as a function of domain-specific beliefs about personal capacities. The construct of collective efficacy extends self-efficacy to organizations and groups, referring to beliefs about collective capacities in specific domains. We describe the development and refinement of a collective efficacy scale, the factor analysis of the construct, and its external validation in path models of community-oriented attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors.

We are interested in supporting creativity in distributed scientific communities through socio-technical interventions. Based on a synthetic literature analysis of creativity and collaborative groups, we present and justify three requirements for supporting creativity: support for divergent and convergent thinking, development of shared objectives, and reflexivity. We discuss our collaboratory prototype and its existing functionality to support creativity. We propose three design implications to support creativity in CSCW: integrate support for individual, dyadic, and group brainstorming, leverage cognitive conflict by preserving and reflecting on minority dissent, and support flexibility in granularity of planning.

A community computer network facilitates civic participation by providing pervasive local resources online and by connecting people to local communication and discussion channels, public and non-profit organization leaders and members, and many other civic resources. We present findings from longitudinal data (two rounds between 2001 and 2002) of a stratified random survey of 100 households in a mature community network, the Blacksburg Electronic Village (BEV). We offer exploratory and confirmatory analyses, including a ‘civic effects’ model, that show demographic characteristics (education, age) and psychological factors (extroversion) explain staying informed, collective efficacy, group membership, activism, and using the Internet for civic and political purposes. The model further explains differences in respondents' involvement in local issues once they go online. Informed activists with multiple group memberships become more involved in local issues once going online, whereas informed non-activists become less involved once online. Our study suggests that in order to play a constructive role in creating a more civil society, community networks should explicitly pursue strategies that encourage community activism. One way to do this, given the strong role of association membership in activism, is for ISPs to offer bundled standard Internet applications at low cost to non-profit community groups (e.g. email for leadership, online discussion for members, web space). Community networks should also promote and support the use by local groups of innovative tools for non-experts, such as easy collaborative web-based tools for information production and collaboration.

Case studies of professional software development practices describe how real (or realistic) projects are planned and executed. Cases provide engaging models of the activities and materials of software development to students and other novice practitioners. They vividly remind learners of the possibilities for meaningfully applying knowledge and skills in the world beyond the classroom. During the past six years, we have developed and used a collection of usability engineering case studies for teaching human-computer interaction, primarily to upper-level undergraduates in computer science and in information sciences and technology. In this article we describe the rationale for this approach, the structural schema and browser that we developed for case studies, the case-based activities we employ in courses, and the experiences of instructors and students who have used the cases.

We report a case study of designing a mobile phone of the future, involving participatory requirements elicitation using a form of scenario-based design. Participants took photographs and wrote essays that illustrate their personal interests and perspectives on given themes. They then analyzed the photos and essays. They created scenarios and posed questions about the scenarios to envision contexts of future use. The participants produced novel design concepts and provided design insights even though they had no design training.

Communities are social entities whose actors share common needs, interests, or practices: they constitute the basic units of social experience. With regard to communities, social capital captures the structural, relational and cognitive aspects of the relationships among their members. Social capital is defined as a set of properties of a social entity (e.g. norms, level of trust, and intensive social networking) which enables joint activities and cooperation for mutual benefit. It can be understood as the glue which holds communities together. On this panel we will discuss whether and how information technology can strengthen communities by fostering social capital.

Evaluating distributed CSCW applications is a difficult endeavor. Frameworks and methodologies for structuring this type of evaluation have become a central concern for CSCW researchers. In this paper we describe the problems involved in evaluating remote collaborations, and we review some of the more prominent conceptual frameworks of group interaction that have driven CSCW evaluation in the past. A multifaceted evaluation framework is presented that approaches the problem from the relationships underlying joint awareness, communication, collaboration, coordination, and work coupling. Finally, recommendations for carrying out multifaceted evaluations of remote interaction are provided.

A challenge in teaching usability engineering is providing appropriate hands-on project experience. Students need projects that are realistic enough to address meaningful issues, but manageable within one semester. We describe our use of online case studies to motivate and model course projects in usability engineering. The cases illustrate scenario-based usability methods, and are accessed via a custom browser. We summarize the content and organization of the case studies, several case-based learning activities, and students' reactions to the activities. We conclude with a discussion of future directions for case studies in HCI education.

Classroom BRIDGE supports activity awareness by facilitating planning and goal revision in collaborative, project-based middle school science. It integrates large-screen and desktop views of project times to support incidental creation of awareness information through routine document transactions, integrated presentation of awareness information as part of workspace views, and public access to subgroup activity. It demonstrates and develops an object replication approach to integrating synchronous and asynchronous distributed work for a platform incorporating both desktop and large-screen devices. This paper describes an implementation of these concepts with preliminary evaluation data, using timeline-based user interfaces.

We seek to provide a theoretical basis for the development of problem solving environments that support creativity. This paper combines flow theory, the systems model of creativity, and a newly developed workflow of problem solving to produce a theory of the creative problem solving user, WorkFlow. It extends the definition of usability to include creativity and identifies key areas and methods for the support of creativity in problem solving.

Scenarios of human activity are widely used in many facets of the design of software systems. This methodological development can be understood in terms of design cognition: Scenarios support and enhance the solution-first strategy which is typical of, and perhaps fundamental to, expert problem-solving for "ill-defined" problems like design and planning.

I am pleased and honored that such an impressive group of commentators considered my book Making Use(Carroll, 2000) worthy of discussion and analysis. I would not expect, nor even prefer really, to have everyone agree with me. What would bother me, what would bother any author, is to not be read at all. Dan Diaper's critical review and the commentaries by David Benyon/Catriona Macaulay, Tom Carey, and Fabio Paternò, will help to make that less likely! Many important themes are raised in Diaper (2002) review and in the commentaries. In this response I want to concentrate on refining a few of the main issues and distinctions. First, I briefly consider contrasts in values. I think that preferences for scenario-based design versus traditional task analytic methods reflect differences in the underlying world views and values of designers and researchers. To some extent, therefore, the issues in this discussion are not just technical, but paradigmatic and moral. Second, I consider the state of design practices in HCI and its implications for where onus lies in contemporary methodological argumentation and for what sorts of data are pertinent and required to address outstanding methodological issues. Finally, I consider the question of how task analysis, in the sense of structured task decomposition, might be reconstructed in the emerging paradigm of scenario-based design.

This is a perspective paper on community networks - socio-technical infrastructures supporting villages, towns, and neighborhoods. Community networking is well-established, world wide, and addresses critical societal issues, such as the “crisis of community” and the sociality of the Internet. However, community network projects have not emphasized evaluation. Relatively little is known about the economic, social, and psychological consequences of community networks for the individuals, groups, and communities served. Evaluating community networks is a momentous mutual opportunity for the development of CHI evaluation methodologies and for bringing technical CHI expertise to bear on societal issues.

There is too little engagement between community computing and human - computer interaction. In the future there should be more. Better integrating community computing and human - computer interaction can help to make HCI richer and more comprehensive, conceptually and methodologically. It can help HCI to have more of an impact on society and on everyday collective life. Six examples are briefly discussed.

The World Wide Web has served as a medium for collaboration since its inception. Web-based collaboration has, however, been dominated by systems supporting asynchronous activities such as sharing documents and participating in discussion forums. Supporting interactive, synchronous collaboration on the Web has proven much more challenging. In this paper we describe three of the challenges encountered in the context of supporting network-based collaboration among middle and high school science students: integrating synchronous and asynchronous modes of interaction, minimizing consumption of bandwidth, and adapting non-collaborative software components for collaborative use. We then present the Content Object Replication Kit, a toolkit for building interactive Java-based collaborative systems for use on the Web.

A common computer-based collaborative learning approach is to simply introduce contemporary computermediated communication technology into the classroom to support prescribed learning activities. This approach assumes that all students collaborate in similar ways and that presentday technology is sufficient to accommodate all collaboration forms. This view is superficial and limiting. Students collaborate in different ways at different levels on different learning activities. A more detailed articulation of collaboration in learning is crucial to understanding and extending the pedagogical capabilities and usefulness of collaborative technologies. A model is presented for a more finely articulated form of analysis that enumerates types of collaborative learning activities and evaluates how these activities may be supported through different design options. The analysis is based on actual classroom scenarios and the collaboration requirements that emerge from them. The authors have successfully applied this analysis model in the design of a computer-based collaborative learning environment for science education.

Scenarios are informal narrative descriptions. They are stories about human activity. They have long been used in the humanities and the social sciences to describe and to analyze human behavior—in folktales and myths, in accounts of dreams and rituals, in vignettes of rational economics and the Cold War, to name a few. Scenario descriptions of user interactions are now widely employed in the design and development of computer systems and applications (e.g. Weidenhaupt et al. (1998)). For example, scenarios are used in strategic management to concretize the complex uncertainties that inhere in planning for alternative futures, and to render envisioned futures more vivid and auditable. Scenarios are used in requirements engineering to uncover hidden requirements and tradeoffs, to verify and validate requirements, and to integrate analysis of functional and nonfunctional requirements. Scenarios are used in human–computer interaction to rapidly and inexpensively prototype and assess user tasks, to conduct analysis and design in a vocabulary that permits end-user participation, and to provide an orienting design representation couched in the actions and experiences of the people who will ultimately use the technology.

Scenarios of human–computer interaction help us to understand and to create computer systems and applications as artifacts of human activity—as things to learn from, as tools to use in one's work, as media for interacting with other people. Scenario-based design of information technology addresses five technical challenges: scenarios evoke reflection in the content of design work, helping developers coordinate design action and reflection. Scenarios are at once concrete and flexible, helping developers manage the fluidity of design situations. Scenarios afford multiple views of an interaction, diverse kinds and amounts of detailing, helping developers manage the many consequences entailed by any given design move. Scenarios can also be abstracted and categorized, helping designers to recognize, capture and reuse generalizations and to address the challenge that technical knowledge often lags the needs of technical design. Finally, scenarios promote work-oriented communication among stakeholders, helping to make design activities more accessible to the great variety of expertise that can contribute to design, and addressing the challenge that external constraints designers and clients face often distract attention from the needs and concerns of the people who will use the technology.

"On an experimental evaluation of claim analysis." Behaviour & Information Technology, 17(4), pp. 242–243

We describe and analyze the process of requirements development in scenario based design through consideration of a case study. In our project, a group of teachers and system developers initially set out to create a virtual physics laboratory. Our design work centered on the collaborative development of a series of scenarios describing current and future classroom activities. We observed classroom scenarios to assess needs and opportunities, and envisioned future scenarios to specify and analyze possible design moves. We employed claims analysis to evaluate design trade-offs implicit in these scenarios, to codify the specific advantages and disadvantages in achieving requirements. Through the course of this process, the nature of our project requirements has evolved, providing more information but also more kinds of information. We discuss the utility of managing requirements development through an evolving set of scenarios, and the generality of the scenario stages from this case study.

Participatory design typically focuses on envisionment and evaluation activities.We explored a method for pushing the participatory activities further "upstream" in the design process, to the initial analysis of requirements.We used a variant of the task-artifact fi-arnework, carrying out a participatory claims analysis during a design workshop fm a project addressing collaborative science education.The analysis used videotaped classroom sessions as source material.The participant-teachers were highly engaged by the analysis process and contributed significantly to the analysis results.We conclude that the method has promise as a technique for evoking self-reflection and analysis in a participatory design setting.

Scenarios of use support the integration of cognitive and organizational approaches to human-computer interaction HCI by providing a rich representation of activity from which cognitive and organizational perspectives can be developed. In this paper, a 'cognitive' approach to scenario-based analysis and design-one focused on causal relationships implicit in episodes of individual problem-solving and learning-is extended by emphasizing an organizational work view of social causes and effects.

(1996). Encountering Others: Reciprocal Openings in Participatory Design and User-Centered Design. Human–Computer Interaction: Vol. 11, Current Perspectives on Participatory Design, pp. 285-290.

Software reuse, a long-standing and refractory issue in software technology, has been specifically emphasized as an advantage of the object-oriented programming paradigm. We report an empirical study of expert Smalltalk programmers reusing user interface classes in small graphical applications. Our primary goal was to develop a qualitative characterization of expert reuse strategies that could be used to identify requirements for teaching and supporting reuse programming. A secondary interest was to demonstrate to these experts the Reuse View Matcher—a prototype reuse tool—and to collect some initial observations of this tool in use during reuse programming. We observed extensive “reuse of uses” in the programmers' work: they relied heavily on code in expample applications that provided an implicit specification for reuse of the target class. We called this implicit specification a “usage context.” The programmers searched for relevant usage contexts early. They repeatedly evaluated the contextualized information to develop solution plans, and they borrowed and adapted it when the sample context suited their immediate reuse goals. The process of code development was highly dynamic and incremental; analysis and implementation were tightly interleaved, frequently driven by testing and debugging. These results are considered in terms of the tradeoffs that inhere in the reuse of uses and the teaching and tool support that might improve the efficiency and accuracy of this approach to reuse.

Article Free Access Share on Integrating task and software development for object-oriented applications Authors: Mary Beth Rosson Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VAView Profile , John M. Carroll Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VAView Profile Authors Info & Claims CHI '95: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing SystemsMay 1995 Pages 377–384https://doi.org/10.1145/223904.223953Published:01 May 1995Publication History 30citation499DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations30Total Downloads499Last 12 Months61Last 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 SiteView all FormatsPDF

We describe the Smalltalk Gurus, components of the MoleHill intelligent tutoring system for Smalltalk programming. The Gurus offer help on plans for achieving goals in the Smalltalk environment, as well as remediation for students' incorrect and less-than-optimal plans. The Gurus' assistance is provided via the multimodal media of animation and voice-over audio. MoleHill employs multiple Gurus to deliver advice and instruction concerning disparate information domains, thus facilitating learners' cognitive organization and assimilation of new knowledge and information. We have labelled the approach instantiated by the Smalltalk Gurus the guru instructional model, one which is generally applicable to computer-based advisory systems.

Raison d'Etre is a hypermedia design history application.It provides access to a database of video clips containing stories and ersonal perspectives of desi 1 r team members recorde at various times through t e course of a project.The system is intended to provide a simple framework for recording and organizing the informal history and rationale that design teams create and share in the course of their collaboration.This paper describes (1) the scenarios of use we are trying to support, (2) the methods we used collecting and organizing the database, and (3) the status of our prototype,

Em irical usability evaluations (particularly forrna~ive J ev uations [13]) hinge on observing and interpreting critical incidents [8] of use.We proposed [3,5] augmenting critical incident methods by analysis of what we called critical threads: sets of causally related user episodes that, taken together, define major usability themes.This paper extents this work to the comparative usability analysis of a related artifact.We discuss how our earlier claims analysis was used to orient and simplify our current evaluation efforts.

ODE: A SELF-GUIDED, SCENARIO-BASED LEARNING ENVIRONMENT FOR OBJECT-ORIENTED DESIGN PRINCIPLES Scott P. Robertson,* John M. Carroll,* Robert L. Mack, Mary Beth Rosson,* Sherman R. Alpert, Jurgen Koenemann-Belliveau” IBM Research T. J. Watson Research Center 30 Saw Mill River Road Hawthorne, NY 10532 Internet:

An increasingly important task of computer science is to support the analysis and design of computers as things to learn from, as tools to use in one's work, as media for interacting with other people. Human-computer interaction (HCI) is the speciality area that addresses this task. Through the past two decades, HCI has pursued a broad and ambitious scientific agenda, progressively integrating its research concerns with the contexts of system development and use. This has created an unprecedented opportunity to manage the emergence of new technology so as to support socially responsive objectives.

We are developing an “action science” approach to human-computer interaction (HCI), seeking to better integrate activities directed at understanding with those directed at design. The approach leverages development practices of current HCI with methods and concepts to support a shift toward using broad and explicit design rationale to reify where we are in a design process, why we are there, and to guide reasoning about where we might go from there. We represent a designed artifact as the set of user scenarios supported by that artifact and more finely by causal schemas detailing the underlying psychological rationale. These schemas, called claims , unpack wherefores and whys of the scenarios. In this paper, we stand back from several empirical projects to clarify our commitments and practices.

A prime attraction of object-oriented programming lan~ages M the posslbdit~of reusing code, We examme the support provided by Smalltalk to pro-~ammers attemptin to incorporate an existing class f mto a new.design, .ocussing on issues of usage examples, object-spec~lc analysis, how-to-use-it information, and ob"ect connections.We then describe a i" View Matcher or reuse, a tool that documents reusable classes through a set of coordinated views onto concrete usage examples;in three scenarios, we illustrate how the tool addresses the issues raised in our analysis of reuse in Smalltallc.

No abstract available.

A variety of theoretical approaches to HCI have been proposed in recent years.HCI theories not only have to account predictively for the observed phenomena in interaction but should also be able to demonstrate their utility in improving the design quality of HCI products.The key question to be addressed in this panel is how HCI theories can, and possibly do, influence the design process.Three approaches will be examined.First is the emulation-based theory of design developed by John Carroll and his group at IBM, Yorktown heights.This proposes that designed artifacts (i.e.successful designs and systems) effective embody HCI theory as it is practiced in the field.Design is advanced by generation, evaluation and evolution of artifacts.The second approach, advocated by Richard Young and his colleagues at the Applied Psychology Unit in Cambridge, is to apply cognitive models and architectures to HCI design.This approach will explore how cognitive simulation models can be applied to the design process and the properties required by such theoretical-based models so that they are tractable and usable by designers.The third approach, proposed by John Long and his colleagues at the Ergonomics Unit, University College, London, proposes the development of prescriptive engineering design principles, both substantive and methodological, which in the long term would support practices seeking solutions to the general design problem of HCI.The principles would derive from an engineering conception of HCI, which in the short term supports the development of techniques and methods for effective design.The proponents will discuss how their approaches can support design practice and the ways in which theories are made available to the designer, either as artifact-products, predictive models, prescriptive guidelines and methods, or simply as designers' "tools for thought". THE PANELISTSJohn Carroll is manger of User Interface Theory and design at the IBM Watson Research Centre in Yorktown Height, New York.His research is in the analysis of learning, problem solving and language capacities that underlie endeavour and experience, especially human interaction with computers.

By default, we attempt to define practical areas of technological endeavor as “applications.” For example, the applied psychology of human-computer interaction has characteristically been defined in terms of the methods and concepts basic psychology can provide. This has not worked well. An alternative approach is to begin from a characterization of current practice, to take seriously the requirements of the domain of endeavor, and to define areas of “science” and “application” as possible and appropriate in that context.

The View Matcher is a structured browser for Smalltalk/V. It presents a set of integrated and dynamic views of a running application, intended to coordinate and rationalize a programmer's early understanding of Smalltalk and its environment. We describe the system through two user scenarios involving exploration of the model-view-controller paradigm.

A curriculum was developed to introduce users to the Smalltalk object-oriented programming language. Applying the Minimalist model of instruction [3], we developed a set of example-based learning scenarios aimed at supporting real work, getting started fast, reasoning and improvising, coordinating system and text, supporting error recognition and recovery, and exploiting prior knowledge. We describe our initial curriculum design as well as the significant changes that have taken place as we have observed it in use.

This paper presents an empirical study comparing the effectiveness of four different versions of an on-line database tutorial, each of which calls upon the student to perform a different kind of inference. The general-to-specific version presents instructions in the form of general rules, from which the students expected to infer how to apply the rule in the give context. The explanation-to-specific version supplies information about the functional organization of the database program in addition to general rules. The specific-to-specific condition gives an example of the use of a command; the student must infer how to apply the command in a slightly different context. The control version gives explicit instructions. The best performance on a post-test consisting of realistic tasks was obtained from the general-to-specific and explanation-to-specific conditions.

We suggest hat HCI designs characteristically em-body multiple, distinct psychological c aims, that vir-tually every aspect of a system's usability is overdetermined by independent psychological ration-ales inherent in its design. These myriad claims cohere in being implemented together in a running system. Thus, ItCI artifacts themselves are perhaps the most effective medium for theory development in ItCI. We advance a framework for articulating the psychological claims embodied by artifacts. This proposal reconciles the contrasting perspectives of theory-based esign and hermeneutics, and clarifies the apparent paradox of ItCI application leading HCI theory.

article Free Access Share on The role of laboratory experiments in HCI: help, hindrance, or ho-hum? Authors: C. G. Wolf IBM Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY IBM Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NYView Profile , J. M. Carroll IBM Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY IBM Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NYView Profile , T. K. Landauer Bellcore, Morristown, NJ Bellcore, Morristown, NJView Profile , B. E. John Carnegie Mellon Univ., Pittsburgh, PA Carnegie Mellon Univ., Pittsburgh, PAView Profile , J. Whiteside Digital Equipment Corporation Digital Equipment CorporationView Profile Authors Info & Claims ACM SIGCHI BulletinVolume 20Issue SIMarch 1989 pp 265–268https://doi.org/10.1145/67450.67500Online:01 March 1989Publication History 8citation0DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations8Total Downloads0Last 12 Months0Last 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

Approaches to integrating human factors or user interface knowledge and expertise with software development are still exploratory and evolving. The human-computer interface provides a broader range of user interface challenges than earlier technology, but human factors is only now starting to be widely recognized as a distinct discipline requiring integration with system development. Devoting human and computer resources to user interface enhancement has been considered a luxury, and in many places still is, but the falling cost of computational power and the growing user resistance to poor interfaces, as well as a rising need for product differentiation in the marketplace, insure that human factors will become a necessity where it has not already. The need to develop organizational approaches to support the integration of human factors or user interface expertise with product development is thus a relatively new concern. The integration problems that have been identified include some that are shared with more established support activities such as technical writing, and others that are particular to human factors or result from the relative unfamiliarity of the discipline.

A database of 150 interactions conducted via electronic mail was analyzed. The database had been constructed as an on-line tool for users and advisors, but the interactions can also be regarded as modelling intelligent help dialog in which posing a query and providing a response are each accomplished in “one-shot”. The types of questions users ask and the advisory strategies employed for imcomplete queries without follow-up questioning are described. The goal is to understand this new on-line tool for advising and its implications as a model of one-shot intelligent help dialogs.

A Training Wheels interface creates a reduced functionality system intended to prevent new users from suffering the consequences of certain types of common errors when they exercise system functions and procedures. This has been shown to be an effective training system design for learning basic text editing functions [4]. We extend this result by examining the extent to which training wheels learners can transfer their skills to interaction with the full-function system. The experiment reported here indicates that training wheels subjects were better able to perform advanced full-system editing functions than subjects who were trained on the full system itself.

The Minimal Manual was designed to address difficulties people have with state-of-the-art self-instruction manuals in learning to use powerful computing devices. It is briefer; it helps learners to coordinate their attention between the system and the manual; it specifically trains error recognition and recovery; it better supports reference use after training. In two experiments, the Minimal Manual was shown to afford more efficient learning progress than an otherwise comparable, commercially developed self-instruction manual, and was superior in the specific areas predicted by its design.

Several hours of advisory protocols from a consultant for Personal Computing were taped and analysed in terms of the role which the advisor played in the interaction. The advisor's role was determined by the user's initial approach and the advisor's perception of the needs of the user: informing the user about available information, defining terms or procedures, indexing into appropriate solution sources or methods for more complex problems or structuring a nebulous or poorly understood problem. A taxonomy of stages of information exchange is outlined and the patterns of alternation within each advisor role is described. We suggest implications of this study for the design of advisory systems.

A source of intellectual overhead periodically encountered by scientists is the call to be "hard," to ensure good science by imposing severe methodological strictures. Newel1 and Card (1985) undertook to impose such strictures on the psychology of human-computer interaction. Although their discussion contributes to theoretical debate in human-computer interaction by setting a reference point, their specific argument fails. Their program is unmotivated, is severely limited, and suffers from these limitations in principle. A top priority for the psychology of human-computer interaction should be the articulation of an alternative explanatory program, one that takes as its starting point the need to understand the real problems involved in providing better computer tools for people to use.

The recent technical literature abounds with a variety of studies documenting and analyzing the problems people encounter in learning to use contemporary computer equipment. This has been a major focus of the recent work in our laboratory ([6], [9]). The project such work must entrain is the development of design approaches to these problems. We have been and are developing alternate designs for training manuals and for in-system training ([2], [4], [5], [7]).

Studies of people learning to use contemporary word-processing equipment suggest that effective learning is often "active," proceeding by self-initiated problem solving. The instructional manuals that accompany current word-processing systems often penalize and impede active learning. A set of instructional materials was constructed for a commercial word processor, specifically designed to support and encourage an active learning orientation. These "guided exploration (GE) materials are modular, task oriented, procedurally incomplete, and address error recognition and recovery. Learners using the GE materials spent substantially less time yet still performed better on a transfer of learning posttest than learners using commercially developed self-study materials. Qualitative analysis of aspects of the learning protocols of participants suggested that active learning mechanisms may underlie this advantage.

Computer text editors are powerful, but complex, tools.Particularly in the early stages of learning, the complexity of these tools can cause serious problems for users who are not experienced with computers.The problems of new users were studied by asking the users to think out loud while learning to use word-processing systems.In this paper several of the most typical and debilitating problems these users had understanding and following directions in using training manuals, as well as problems understanding and using interface functions to accomplish word processing tasks, are taxonomized and analyzed.Approaches for improving design features of the interface functions and the training methods used for learning are discussed.

In learning, people develop new cognitive structures by metaphorically extending old ones. The metaphors spontaneously generated by new users will predict the ease with which they can master a computer system. Systems which through their interface suggest inefficacious metaphors will accordingly be more difficult to learn and to that extent unacceptable.