Digitalization has motivated romance novelists to move from traditional to self-publishing online. However, engagement with flexible and responsive, yet precarious and biased algorithmic systems online pose challenges for novelists. Through surveying and interviewing the novelists, and using the lens of feminist political economy, we investigate how digitalization has impacted the novelists’ work practices. Our findings detail the increased agency afforded by self-publishing online, which comes at the expense of performing new forms of work individually, collectively, and with assistance, otherwise performed by publishing houses. We focus on the immaterial, invisible, and unpaid work that the novelists and the ecology of workers surrounding them conducted. We make recommendations for designing digital labor platforms that support the work practices of self-employed digital workers toward a more sustainable, collective, and inclusive future(s) of work.

Many romance novelists have shifted to self-publishing mediated through online technologies, such as online retailer platforms for selling novels and social media for marketing. However, engagement with such complex algorithmic systems has posed challenges, including understanding continually changing algorithms, frequently changing silently, impacting novelists' successful professionalization and monetization. We conducted surveys and interviews with romance novelists to examine how they experience, interpret, and navigate algorithms. Our findings detail interviewees' efforts to comprehend algorithms, both individually and collectively, and leverage that comprehension to navigate and manipulate algorithms. We discuss how our interviewees constructed literacy of precarious algorithms on their work platforms, suggesting implications for designing algorithmic systems supporting digital work.

With over 6 million articles and 38 million editors, English Wikipedia is one of the largest peer produced and edited encyclopedias on the Internet. Some attribute this success to the peer production process which allows many to contribute. However, not all articles are created equally, or evolve similarly, in terms of quality and amount of attention they receive from the editing community. We examine pages with geotagged content in English Wikipedia in four categories, places with Indigenous majorities (of any size), Rural places, Urban Clusters, and Urban areas. We find significant differences in quality and editor attention for articles about places with Native American majorities, as compared to other places.

Anonymity, ephemerality, and hyper-locality are an uncommon set of features in the design of online communities. However, these features were key to Yik Yak's initial success and popularity. In an interview-based study, we found that these three features deeply affected the identity of the community as a whole, the patterns of use, and the ways users committed to this community. We conducted interviews with 18 Yik Yak users on an urban American university campus and found that these three focal design features contributed to casual commitment, transitory use, and emergent community identity. We describe situated anonymity, which is the result of anonymity, ephemerality, and hyper-locality coexisting as focal design features of an online community. This work extends our understanding of use and identity-versus-bond based commitment, which has implications for the design and study of other atypical online communities.

Understanding users becomes increasingly complicated when we grapple with various overlapping attributes of an individual's identity. In this paper we introduce intersectionality as a framework for engaging with the complexity of users' "and authors" "identities", and situating these identities in relation to their contextual surroundings. We conducted a meta-review of identity representation in the CHI proceedings, collecting a corpus of 140 manuscripts on gender, ethnicity, race, class, and sexuality published between 1982-2016. Drawing on this corpus, we analyze how identity is constructed and represented in CHI research to examine intersectionality in a human-computer interaction (HCI) context. We find that previous identity-focused research tends to analyze one facet of identity at a time. Further, research on ethnicity and race lags behind research on gender and socio-economic class. We conclude this paper with recommendations for incorporating intersectionality in HCI research broadly, encouraging clear reporting of context and demographic information, inclusion of author disclosures, and deeper engagement with identity complexities.

Refugees undergoing resettlement in a new country post exile and migration face disruptive life changes. They rely on a network of individuals in the host country to help them rebuild their lives and livelihoods. We investigated whether technology could contribute to minimizing the vulnerabilities resettling refugees face. We designed Rivrtran, a messaging platform that provides 'human-in-the-loop' interpretation between individuals who don't share a common language. We report the findings from the deployment of Rivrtran to mediate communication between resettling refugee families in the United States and the American families they are paired with who serve as their mentors. Our findings suggest that scaffolding communication in such a way provides refugees one means of accessing diversified help outside their cultural group. Moreover human-in-the-loop interpretation may help to mitigate the effects of cultural barriers between those communicating. We establish the notion of designing for transient use in the development of systems to scaffold communication for short-term use by resettling refugees.

Massive, Open, Online Courses (MOOCs) have been promoted as a means to revolutionize access to education. In this paper, we describe experiences with MOOCs for Liberian students who are connected to the iLab technology hub. We describe their motivations for participating as well as the challenges they encountered. We also describe the importance of the face-to-face learning environment provided by the iLab as a source of community support.

While Information and Communication Technology (ICT) access in Liberia is still low, use of PCs, mobile phones and the Internet is rising. A relatively recent option for learning ICT skills is Liberia's iLab technology hub founded in 2011 to encourage and support a local technology community. We have partnered with the iLab since its founding to offer summer courses taught by a student instructor. In this paper, we describe how the iLab's community-based learning approach has advanced from the coalescing stage, identified in earlier research, towards the maturing stage, despite obstacles. We use Lave and Wenger's Community of Practice (CoP) framework as the analytic structure to present results from our data consisting primarily of interviews with course participants. We contribute to research on technology hubs in Africa and highlight the role of community-based learning for technical skill acquisition even in resource challenged settings.

Women comprise nearly half of the immigrant population worldwide and are susceptible to a wider range of health challenges compared to immigrant men. We present the findings of four participatory design sessions with immigrant women from the Caribbean to identify health and wellness challenges they faced and to conceptualize technologies to help them manage these issues. Stress, dietary challenges (specifically obesity), mental health, and domestic abuse, as identified by the women, form the focal themes for the design sessions. Their design approaches emphasized rebuilding the support structure, reducing stressors through entertainment and relaxation and encouraging positive gradational lifestyle changes. In conceiving health and wellness technologies for immigrant women, our work highlights opportunities for HCI to consider the role of others (and who benefits) and to reflect on the role of design and the underlying values and themes designs encompass. Finally, we emphasize how the technologies conceived by these women support rather than replace social solutions to the health and wellness challenges faced by these and other immigrant women.

This paper presents a study of Nextdoor, a social media system designed to support local neighborhoods. While not the first system designed to support community engagement, Nextdoor has a number of attributes that make it distinct. Our study, across three communities in a major U.S. city, illustrates that Nextdoor inhabits an already-rich ecosystem of community-oriented social media, but is being appropriated by its users for use in different ways than these existing media. Nextdoor also raises tensions in how it defines the boundaries of neighborhoods, and in the privacy issues it raises among its users.

Technology hubs---labs committed to fostering local technology and entrepreneurship communities---are newcomers in local African ICT ecosystems. While research has focused on the organizational structure of labs, the degree to which they fuel start ups, and surrounding institutional contexts in which they operate, less is understood about how each operates as a Community of Practice (CoP) from social learning theory. And yet, the creation of such a community of practice seems central to building local ICT capacity. Drawing on data from Liberia's iLab, we describe how it functions as a CoP and identify some next steps for supporting its community.

introduction Share on Introduction to the Special Issue of "The Turn to The Wild" Guest Editors: Andy Crabtree View Profile , Alan Chamberlain View Profile , Rebecca E. Grinter View Profile , Matt Jones View Profile , Tom Rodden View Profile , Yvonne Rogers View Profile Authors Info & Claims ACM Transactions on Computer-Human InteractionVolume 20Issue 3Article No.: 13pp 1–4https://doi.org/10.1145/2491500.2491501Published:01 July 2013Publication History 80citation1,259DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations80Total Downloads1,259Last 12 Months98Last 6 weeks14 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

Bandwidth caps, a limit on the amount of data users can upload and download in a month, are common globally for both home and mobile Internet access. With caps, each bit of data consumed comes at a cost against a monthly quota or a running tab. Yet, relatively little work has considered the implications of this usage-based pricing model on the user experience. In this paper, we present results from a qualitative study of households living with bandwidth caps. Our findings suggest home users grapple with three uncertainties regarding their bandwidth usage: invisible balances, mysterious processes, and multiple users. We discuss how these uncertainties impact their usage and describe the potential for better tools to help monitor and manage data caps. We conclude that as a community we need to cater for users under Internet cost constraints.

As HCI researchers have designed tools to promote wellness, disease has often been approached as a general problem. In contrast, public health research argues for an activist approach focused on how certain groups disproportionately experience disease and eliminating these disparities. Taking this activist stance, we examine how technology can reduce health inequalities by disrupting power relationships and helping communities pursue social change. We discuss our tool, Community Mosaic (CM), which allows individuals to share their healthy eating ideas with one another as a means of advocating behavior change. Our results characterize how CM helped facilitate activism (i.e., collective efforts to counter local challenges to healthy living) and shift users' attitudes regarding their role as advocates for health. We contribute to the field of HCI by using our findings to present a set of recommendations for future research focused on designing and evaluating health promotion tools using an activist lens.

Although computer-mediated family communication remains a longstanding focus of study in Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), families who face challenges in communication due to differences in technology infrastructures remain understudied. To address this gap in the literature, we interviewed 39 Kenyan migrants living in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S. who regularly communicate with friends and family members living in their homeland. The contributions of this work are primarily empirical. Findings from our study reveal how high costs, identity management, and infrastructural differences between rural and urban areas in Kenya, impact decisions families and their extended members make when using information and communication technology (ICT). We present design implications and reflect on how understanding Kenyan migrants' ICT practices can positively influence design for the broader population.

Migration of parents, in pursuit of 'a better life', has deep roots in Caribbean history and culture. However, the separation from children that results means that care gets provided through a transnational network of caregivers and devices. In this paper we describe how mobile phones in particular have entered a complex care network and while they support some communications they have also contributed to many of the difficulties associated with migration. On the basis of our observations, we conclude with a call for future Ubicomp research into family communication to look to support parenting by considering caregiving networks as wider than just the family. Moreover, this study contributes to our thinking about what 'more' means when introducing additional technologies in family and care networks and their ability to reinforce or shift power structures in the networks in which they are embedded.

With widespread broadband adoption, more households report experiencing sub-optimal speeds. Not only are slow speeds frustrating, they may indicate consumers are not receiving the services they are paying for from their internet service providers. Yet, determining the speed and source of slow-downs is difficult because few tools exist for broadband management. We report on results of a field trial with 10 households using a visual network probe designed to address these problems. We describe the results of the study and provide design implications for future tools. More importantly, we argue that tools like this can educate and empower consumers by making broadband speeds and sources of slow-downs more visible.

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

We present results from a qualitative study examining how professionals living and working in Nairobi, Kenya regularly use ICT in their everyday lives. There are two contributions of this work for the HCI community. First, we provide empirical evidence demonstrating constraints our participants encountered when using technology in an infrastructure-poor setting. These constraints are limited bandwidth, high costs, differing perceptions of responsiveness, and threats to physical and virtual security. Second, we use our findings to critically evaluate the "access, anytime and anywhere" construct shaping the design of future technologies. We present an alternative vision called deliberate interactions--a planned and purposeful interaction style that involves offline preparation and discuss ways ICT can support this online usage behavior.

We performed a content analysis of the information shared in a locally and culturally focused health application, EatWell. In EatWell, information is shared via the creation of audio recordings. Our results highlight the reflective nature of these recordings, in particular, 1) the topics discussed in these reflections as well as their tone, 2) how these reflections were contextualized (locally and culturally) and 3) how system users addressed one another in their reflections. We compare our findings with the dominant technological approach to supporting health information exchange amongst lay people: online support groups. In particular, we reflect upon why, though many of the community-building features of online support groups did not translate into EatWell, our users felt a sense of community empowerment. Based on our results, we discuss implications for designing locally and culturally focused health applications that leverage reflection as a contribution method.

Researchers have designed a variety of systems that promote wellness. However, little work has been done to examine how casual mobile games can help adults learn how to live healthfully. To explore this design space, we created OrderUP!, a game in which players learn how to make healthier meal choices. Through our field study, we found that playing OrderUP! helped participants engage in four processes of change identified by a well-established health behavior theory, the Transtheoretical Model: they improved their understanding of how to eat healthfully and engaged in nutrition-related analytical thinking, reevaluated the healthiness of their real life habits, formed helping relationships by discussing nutrition with others and started replacing unhealthy meals with more nutritious foods. Our research shows the promise of using casual mobile games to encourage adults to live healthier lifestyles.

Prior research suggests that people may ask their family and friends for computer help. But what influences whether and how a "helper" will provide help? To answer this question, we conducted a qualitative investigation of people who participated in computer support activities with family and friends in the past year. We describe how factors including maintenance of one's personal identity as a computer expert and accountability to one's social network determine who receives help and the quality of help provided. We also discuss the complex, fractured relationship between the numerous stakeholders involved in the upkeep of home computing infrastructures. Based on our findings, we provide implications for the design of systems to support informal help-giving in residential settings.

We present a study of how householders personalize their domestic vacuuming robot, iRobot's Roomba". In particular, we build on Blom and Monk's [3] theory of personalization that argues that personalization does not only occur naturally but can also be induced by design choices. In this study, we created a personalization toolkit, which allowed people to customize their Roomba's appearance and distributed it to 15 households. Our observations of these households provide empirical support that personalization can facilitate positive experiences with a Roomba, and having materials to hand can increase the odds of customization. We conclude by discussing design implications for personalization.

Despite increased knowledge about how Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) are used to support religious and spiritual practices, designers know little about how to design technologies for faith-related purposes. Our research suggests incorporating sacred imagery into techno-spiritual applications can be useful in guiding development. We illustrate this through the design and evaluation of a mobile phone application developed to support Islamic prayer practices. Our contribution is to show how religious imagery can be used in the design of applications that go beyond the provision of functionality to connect people to the experience of religion.

We present results from a study examining how American Protestant Christians' faith affects their domestic life. There are two contributions of this work for the HCI community. First, we provide empirical evidence demonstrating how topics of interest to HCI researchers (e.g., material artifacts, routines, and ICT use) are used for religious purposes. Our findings show how Christians distinguish these aspects of domestic life from their secular counterparts. Second, we use our findings to reflect on current directions of future domestic ICT applications. Specifically, we critically evaluate the "problem solving approaches dominating the design of future technologies, and present extraordinary computing or systems that promote and honor the special value accorded to some aspects of domestic life.

It has long been recognized that novelty effects exist in the interaction with technologies. Despite this recognition, we still know little about the novelty effects associated with domestic robotic appliances and more importantly, what occurs after the novelty wears off. To address this gap, we undertook a longitudinal field study with 30 households to which we gave Roomba vacuuming robots and then observed use over six months. During this study, which spans over 149 home visits, we encountered methodological challenges in understanding households' usage patterns. In this paper we report on our longitudinal research, focusing particularly on the methods that we used 1) to understand human-robot interaction over time despite the constraints of privacy and temporality in the home, and 2) to uncover information when routines became less conscious to the participants themselves.

We present results from a qualitative study examining how Charismatic Pentecostals use Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) in São Paulo, Brazil. This work contributes to the growing body of research that broadens Weiser's vision by exploring technology use in novel and unfamiliar contexts. Our findings reveal how "extreme" and non-rational beliefs frame users' ICT experiences. We argue that if ubicomp is to be global and ubiquitous, accounting for alternative value systems is necessary. We discuss the implications of our findings and present issues the ubicomp community should consider when imagining a future that includes users from parts of the global south.

In this paper, we discuss a user-centered vision of future domestic robots based on 48 householders' depiction of their ideal home robots. Through users' creative responses, we aim to identify domestic tasks desired for robotic assistance, and hence guide the design effort to better reflect user needs. Our study results show that householders want domestic robots for tasks including time-consuming drudgeries, house-sitting, and personal attendance. Further, we present three design lessons we learned to increase householders' acceptance of these robots. The design of domestic robots needs to provide a certain amount of human control, be compatible with the user's domestic environment, and take gender into consideration.

Householders are increasingly adopting home networking as a solution to the demands created by the presence of multiple computers, devices, and the desire to access the Internet. However, current network solutions are derived from the world of work (and initially the military) and provide poor support for the needs of the home. We present the key findings to emerge from empirical studies of home networks in the UK and US. The studies reveal two key kinds of work that effective home networking relies upon: one, the technical work of setting up and maintaining the home network, and the other, the collaborative and socially organized work of the home which the network is embedded in and supports. The two are thoroughly intertwined and rely upon one another for their realization, yet neither is adequately supported by current networking technologies and applications. Explication of the “work to make the home network work” opens up the design space for the continued integration of the home network in domestic life and elaboration of future support. Key issues for development include the development of networking facilities that do not require advanced networking knowledge, that are flexible and support the local social order of the home and the evolution of its routines, and which ultimately make the home network visible and accountable to household members.

As computing migrates from the workplace to the home, householders must tackle problems of home network maintenance. Often they lack the technical knowledge or motivation to complete these tasks, making the user experience of home network maintenance frustrating. In response to these difficulties, many householders rely on handwritten reminders or interactive networking tools that are ill-suited for the home environment. In this paper, we seek to understand how to design better home network management tools through a study of sketches created by 40 people in 18 households. In our study, we obtained information about householders' knowledge, practices and needs with respect to home networking. Based on our results, we present guidelines for transforming the user experience of home network management.

In this paper, we report on design-oriented fieldwork and design research conducted over a six-month period in urban centers in the United States and Kenya. The contributions of this work for the CHI/CSCW community are empirical and methodological. First, we describe how recent design discourse around "designing technology for religion" creates an artificial distinction between instrumental and religious ICT use, particularly in developing regions. As illustrative examples, we relate three themes developed in the course of our fieldwork, which we term mindfulness, watchfulness, and embeddedness, to both "secular" and "religious" aspects of life in the communities studied. Second, we make a methodological contribution by describing how we used design sketches of speculative design concepts to extend and complement our fieldwork. By producing these sketches and soliciting feedback, we elicited additional data about how participants viewed the relationship between religion and ICT and prompted self-reflection on our own ideas.

Low-income African American communities face a disproportionate amount of diet-related health problems in the United States. To address this issue, we developed EatWell, a system that allows people to use their cell phones to create voice memories describing how they have tried to eat healthfully in their neighborhoods (e.g., at local restaurants) and listen to the memories that others have created. In this paper, we describe the results of our field trial of EatWell, specifically characterizing how our participants were able to craft stories that were both emotive and culturally-relevant, the challenges that arose in creating these memories and finally how sharing these stories facilitated a sense of community empowerment. We conclude by presenting implications for the design of future applications that facilitate the sharing of health-related experiences.

Despite the growing body of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) research focused on domestic robots, surprisingly little is known about the demographic profile of robot owners and their influence on usage patterns. In this paper, we present the results of a survey of 379 iRobot's Roombao wners, that identified their demographic and usage trends. The outcome of the survey suggests that Roomba users are equally likely to be men or women, and they tend to be younger with high levels of education and technical backgrounds. Their adoption and use patterns illustrate the important role that gift exchange plays in adoption, and how the robot changes cleaning routines and creates non-cleaning activities. More generally, we argue that domestic robot adoption is growing, and suggest some of the factors that lead to a positive experience.

Rising global energy demands, increasing costs and limited natural resources mean that householders are more conscious about managing their domestic resource consumption. Yet, the question of what tools Ubicomp researchers can create for residential resource management remains open. To begin to address this omission, we present a qualitative study of 15 households and their current management practices around the water, electricity and natural gas systems in the home. We find that in-the-moment resource consumption is mostly invisible to householders and that they desire more real-time information to help them save money, keep their homes comfortable and be environmentally friendly. Designing for domestic sustainability therefore turns on improving the visibility of resource production and consumption costs as well as supporting both individuals and collectives in behavior change. Domestic sustainability also highlights the caveat of potentially creating a green divide by making resource management available only to those who can afford the technologies to support being green. Finally, we suggest that the Ubicomp community can contribute to the domestic and broader sustainability agenda by incorporating green values in designs and highlight the challenge of collecting data on being green.

With the rapid growth of personal computer networks and the Internet, sharing files has become a central activity in computer use. The ways in which users control the what, how, and with whom of sharing are dictated by the tools they use for sharing; there are a wide range of sharing practices, and hence a wide range of tools to support these practices. In practice, users' requirements for certain sharing features may dictate their choice of tool, even though the other affordances available through that tool may not be an ideal match to the desired manner of sharing.In this paper, we explore users' current practices in file sharing and examine the tools used to share files. Based on our findings, we unpack the features and affordances of these tools into a set of dimensions along which sharing tools can be characterized. Then, we present the set of user interface features we have prototyped in an interface called a sharing palette, which provides a platform for exploration and experimentation with new modalities of sharing. We briefly present the tool as a whole and then focus on the individual features of the sharing palette that support reported styles of sharing.

Teams of therapists often provide targeted interventions for children with developmental disabilities. A common practice in these cases is one-on-one interaction between a therapist and the child together with occasional group meetings of the therapists to discuss progress and make informed decisions to modify the intervention plan. We designed a system called Abaris to support this form of collaborative decision-making for a particular intervention popular in the treatment of children with autism. Our system allows for the simultaneous use of trending data across therapy sessions and detailed session data that is automatically integrated with highly indexed video. We discuss the impact this system had on the team dynamics, the amount of collaboration, and the effect it had on the team using evidence and videos to make decisions about the care of the child.

In this paper, we report findings from a study of American Christian ministers' uses of technologies in religious practices. We focus on the use of technologies for spiritual purposes as opposed to pragmatic and logistical, but report on all. We present results about the uses of technologies in three aspects of religious work: religious study and reflection, church services, and pastoral care. We end by examining how the collaborative religious uses of technologies cross and blend work and personal life.

In the last few years, teenagers have been on the forefront of adopting short message service (SMS), a mobile phone-based text messaging system, and instant messaging (IM), a computer-based text chat system. However, while teenage adoption of SMS had led to a series of studies examining the reasons for its popularity, IM use in the teenage population remains understudied. This omission becomes significant given the increasing interest in domestic computing among human-computer interaction (HCI) and computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) researchers. Further, because of the dearth of empirical work on teenage use of IM, we find that IM and SMS are sometimes incorrectly assumed to share the same features of use. To address these concerns, we revisit our own studies of SMS and IM use and reexamine them in tandem with other published studies on teenage chat. We consider similarities and differences in styles of SMS and IM use and how chat technologies enable the pursuit of teenage independence. We examine how differences are born out of technological differences and financial cost structures. We discuss how SMS and IM are used in concert to provide increased awareness and to coordinate inter-household communications, and how privacy is regulated within the individual household as a means of maintaining these communications.

This paper presents a descriptive account of the social practices surrounding the iTunes music sharing of 13 participants in one organizational setting. Specifically, we characterize adoption, critical mass, and privacy; impression management and access control; the musical impressions of others that are created as a result of music sharing; the ways in which participants attempted to make sense of the dynamic system; and implications of the overlaid technical, musical, and corporate topologies. We interleave design implications throughout our results and relate those results to broader themes in a music sharing design space.

Texting--using a mobile phone to send text messages--has become a form of mass communication. Building on studies that described how British teenagers have incorporated text messaging into their lives, we examine the purposes and nature of the conversations themselves. We also present findings that suggest that teenagers do not have many simultaneous multiple conversations via text messaging; end most text messaging conversations by switching to another medium; and, that, despite popular beliefs, communicate with surprisingly few friends via their mobile phones. Finally we describe how and what words they shorten in their text messages.

In addition to providing information to individual visitors, electronic guidebooks have the potential to facilitate social interaction between visitors and their companions. However, many systems impede visitor interaction. By contrast, our electronic guidebook, Sotto Voce, has social interaction as a primary design goal. The system enables visitors to share audio information - specifically, they can hear each other's guidebook activity using a technologically mediated audio eavesdropping mechanism. We conducted a study of visitors using Sotto Voce while touring a historic house. The results indicate that visitors are able to use the system effectively, both as a conversational resource and as an information appliance. More surprisingly, our results suggest that the technologically mediated audio often cohered the visitors' conversation and activity to a far greater degree than audio delivered through the open air

This paper borrows ideas from social science to inform the design of novel "sensing" user-interfaces for computing technology. Specifically, we present five design challenges inspired by analysis of human-human communication that are mundanely addressed by traditional graphical user interface designs (GUIs). Although classic GUI conventions allow us to finesse these questions, recent research into innovative interaction techniques such as 'Ubiquitous Computing' and 'Tangible Interfaces' has begun to expose the interaction challenges and problems they pose. By making them explicit we open a discourse on how an approach similar to that used by social scientists in studying human-human interaction might inform the design of novel interaction mechanisms that can be used to handle human-computer communication accomplishments

This paper reports findings from a study of how a guidebook was used by pairs of visitors touring a historic house. We describe how the guidebook was incorporated into their visit in four ways: shared listening, independent use, following one another, and checking in on each other. We discuss how individual and groupware features were adopted in support of different visiting experiences, and illustrate how that adoption was influenced by social relationships, the nature of the current visit, and any museum visiting strategies that the couples had. Finally, we describe how the guidebook facilitated awareness between couples, and how awareness of non-guidebook users (strangers) influenced use.

Instant Messaging (IM) is being widely adopted by teenagers. In a study of 16 teenage IM users, we explore IM as an emerging feature of teen life, focusing our questions on its support of interpersonal communication and its role and salience in everyday life. We qualitatively describe the teens' IM use interpersonally, as well as its place in the domestic ecology. We also identify technology adoption conditions and discuss behaviors around privacy management. In this initial investigation, we found differences in the nature of use between high school and college teens, differences we propose are accounted for by teens' degree of autonomy as a function of domestic and scholastic obligations, the development of independent work practices, Internet connectivity access, and even transportation access. Moreover, while teen IM use is in part characterized as an optimizing choice between multiple communications media, practice is also tied to concerns around peer pressure, peer group membership and creating additional opportunities to socialize.

Recent results from usability studies of security systems have shown that end-users find them difficult to adopt and use. In this paper we argue that improving the usability of security technology is only one part of the problem, and that what is missed is the need to design usable and useful systems that provide security to end-users in terms of the applications that they use and the tasks they want to achieve. We propose alternate ways of building and integrating security technologies into applications and usability methods for evaluating how successful our prototypes are. We believe that the end results of designing usable and useful (from the end-user perspective) systems will be secure applications which will reflect the needs of users who are increasingly using computers away from the office and in a wider variety of networked configurations.

“Text messaging” — using a mobile phone to send a message — has changed how teenagers use wireless phones to communicate and coordinate. While the media reports rapid growth in text messaging, less is known about why teenagers have adopted it. In this paper, we report findings from a study of teenagers’ text messaging practices. Specifically, we show that teenagers use text messages to: arrange and adjust times to talk, coordinate with friends and family, and chat. Moreover, we argue that the reasons teenagers find text messaging quick, cheap, and easy to use, are grounded in their social context. Finally, we show that teenagers encounter three problems when text messaging: understanding evolving language, determining intent from content, and addressing messages. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Software reuse offers the promise of reducing product costs and increasing system reliability by making it possible to share code. However, software reuse in practice has proved much harder. This paper examines three cases of software reuse to understand why reuse remains elusive. The findings show that reuse encounters three coordination problems: the work required to traverse boundaries, the effects of organizational and environmental changes, and the coordination required to align and assemble multiple pieces of software.

Global software development is rapidly becoming the norm for technology companies. Previous qualitative research suggests that multi-site development may increase the development cycle time. We use both survey data and data from the source code change management system to model the extent of delay in a multi-site software development organization, and explore several possible mechanisms for this delay. We also measure differences in same-site and cross-site communication patterns, and analyze the relationship of these variables to delay. Our results show that, compared to same-site work, cross-site work takes much longer and requires more people for work of equal size and complexity. We also report a strong relationship between delay in cross-site work and the degree to which remote colleagues are perceived to help out when workloads are heavy. We discuss the implications of our findings for collaboration technology for distributed software development.

We describe a speech-based interface to an information visualization (infoVis) system. Users ask natural-language questions about a given data domain. Our interface then maps the questions into infoVis operations, which result in the display of data visualizations that address the questions. Users can interact with these views via speech or direct manipulation. If users give incomplete information, our interface guides them in clarifying their questions. The intelligence behind our interface is encapsulated in a service logic that embodies domain knowledge about both the data being explored and the infoVis system. This allows users to focus on answering questions, rather than on the mechanics of accessing data and creating views.

Collaborations over distance must contend with the loss of the rich, subtle interactions that co-located teams use to coordinate their work. Previous research has suggested that one consequence of this loss is that cross-site work will take longer than comparable single-site work. We use both survey data and data from the change management system to measure the extent of delay in a multi-site software development organization. We also measure site interdependence, differences in same-site and cross-site communication patterns, and analyze the relationship of these variables to delay. Our results show a significant relationship between delay in cross-site work and the degree to which remote colleagues are perceived to help out when workloads are heavy. This result is particularly troubling in light of the finding that workers generally believed they were as helpful to their remote colleagues as to their local colleagues. We discuss implications of our findings for collaboration technology for distributed organizations.

Geographically distributed development creates new questions about how to coordinate multi-site work. In this paper, we present four methods product development organizations used to coordinate their work: functional areas of expertise, product structure, process steps, and customization. We describe the benefits and difficulties with each model. Finally, we discuss two difficulties that occur irrespective of the model used: consequences of unequal distribution of project mass, and finding expertise.

It is widely acknowledged that coordination of large scale software development is an extremely difficult and persistent problem. Since the structure of the code mirrors the structure of the organization, one might expect that splitting the organization across time zones, cultures, and (natural) languages would make it difficult to assemble the components. This paper presents a case study of what indeed turned out to be the most difficult part of a geographically distributed software project, i.e., integration. Coordination problems were greatly exaggerated across sites, largely because of the breakdown of informal communication channels. The results imply that multi-site development can benefit to some extent from stable plans, processes, and specifications. The inherently unpredictable aspects of projects, however, require communication channels that can be invoked spontaneously, by developers, as needed. These results shed light on the problems and mechanisms underlying the coordination needs of development projects generally, be they co-located or distributed.

Together Again ' "building sofivare from the Perspectiveof the coordinationDesign and development work have become increasingly interesting to CSCW researchers.This paper introduces a new perspective for extimg that work.decomposition.Decomposition focuses on the activities required to coordinate the assembly of an artifacL Using examples drawn from a study of three software development organizations, I show how decomposition is a form of articulation work I describe how that articulation work influences the product produce~and how the product itseK influences the coordination required-I discuss the implications of a decomposition view for CSCW research.

A corporate-wide metrics program faces enormous and poorly understood challenges as its implementation spreads out from the centralized planning body across many organizational boundaries into the sites where the data collection actually occurs. This paper presents a case study of the implementation of one corporate-wide program, focusing particularly on the unexpected difficulties of collecting a small number of straightforward metrics. Several mechanisms causing these difficulties are identified, including attenuated communication across organizational boundaries, inertia created by existing data collection systems, and the perceptions, expectations, and fears about how the data will be used. We describe how these factors influence the interpretation of the definitions of the measurements and influence the degree of conformance that is actually achieved. We conclude with lessons learned about both content and mechanisms to help in navigating the tricky waters of organizational dynamics in implementing a company-wide program.

Article Free Access Share on From workplace to development: what have we learned so far and where do we go? Author: Rebecca E. Grinter Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, 1000 East Warrenville Road, 1Q-327, Naperville, IL Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, 1000 East Warrenville Road, 1Q-327, Naperville, ILView Profile Authors Info & Claims GROUP '97: Proceedings of the 1997 ACM International Conference on Supporting Group WorkNovember 1997 Pages 231–240https://doi.org/10.1145/266838.266917Published:16 November 1997Publication History 6citation862DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations6Total Downloads862Last 12 Months11Last 6 weeks1 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteeReaderPDF