Summary In this paper, we present the study of interactional arrangements that support the collaboration of headquarters (HQ), field responders, and a computational planning agent in a time‐critical task setting created by a mixed‐reality game. Interactional arrangements define the extent to which control is distributed between the collaborative parties. We provide 2 field trials, one to study an “on‐the‐loop” arrangement in which HQ monitors and intervenes in agent instructions to field players on demand and the other, to study a version that places HQ more tightly “in‐the‐loop.” The studies provide an understanding of the sociotechnical collaboration between players and the agent in these interactional arrangements by conducting interaction analysis of video recordings and game log data. The first field trial focuses on the collaboration of field responders with the planning agent. Findings highlight how players negotiate the agent guidance within the social interaction of the collocated teams. The second field trial focuses on the collaboration between the automated planning agent and the HQ. We find that the human coordinator and the agent can successfully work together in most cases, with human coordinators inspecting and “correcting” the agent‐proposed plans. Through this field trial‐driven development process, we generalise interaction design implications of automated planning agents around the themes of supporting common ground and mixed‐initiative planning.

The Internet of Things (IoT) promises to enable applications that foster a more efficient, sustainable, and healthy way of life. If end-users are to take full advantage of these developments we foresee the need for future IoT systems and services to include an element of autonomy and support the delegation of agency to software processes and connected devices. To inform the design of such future technology, we report on a breaching experiment designed to investigate how people integrate an unpredictable service, through the veg box scheme, in everyday life. Findings from our semi-structured interviews and a two-week diary study with 11 households reveal that agency delegation must be warranted, that it must be possible to incorporate delegated decisions into everyday activities, and that delegation is subject to constraint. We further discuss design implications on the need to support people's diverse values, and their coordinative and creative practices.

This paper proposes a set of five ethical principles, together with seven high-level messages, as a basis for responsible robotics. The Principles of Robotics were drafted in 2010 and published online in 2011. Since then the principles have influenced, and continue to influence, a number of initiatives in robot ethics but have not, to date, been formally published. This paper remedies that omission.

We present fieldwork findings from the deployment of an interactive sensing system that supports the work of energy advisors who give face-to-face advice to low-income households in the UK. We focus on how the system and the data it produced are articulated in the interactions between professional energy advisors and their clients, and how they collaboratively anticipate, rehearse, and perform data work. In addition to documenting how the system was appropriated in advisory work, we elaborate the 'overhead cost' of building collaborative action into connected devices and sensing systems, and the commensurate need to support discrete workflows and accountability systems to enable the methodical incorporation of the IoT into collaborative action. We contribute an elaboration of the social, collaborative methods of data work relevant to those who seek to design and study collaborative IoT systems.

In this paper we present the design and evaluation of the Temperature Calendar -- a visualization of temperature variation within a workplace over the course of the past week. This highlights deviation from organizational temperature policy, and aims to bring staff "into the loop" of understanding and managing heating, and so reduce energy waste. The display was deployed for three weeks in five public libraries. Analysis of interaction logs, questionnaires and interviews shows that staff used the displays to understand heating in their buildings, and took action reflecting this new understanding. Bringing together our results, we discuss design implications for workplace displays, and an analysis of carbon emissions generated in constructing and operating our design. More in general, the findings helped us to reflect on the role of policy on energy consumption, and the potential for the HCI community to engage with its application, as well as its definition or modification.

This paper presents findings from a co-design project that aims to augment the practices of professional energy advisors with environmental data from sensors deployed in clients' homes. Premised on prior ethnographic observations we prototyped a sensor platform to support the work of tailoring advice-giving to particular homes. We report on the deployment process and the findings to emerge, particularly the work involved in making sense of or accounting for the data in the course of advice-giving. Our ethnomethodological analysis focuses on the ways in which data is drawn upon as a resource in the home visit, and how understanding and advice-giving turns upon unpacking the indexical relationship of the data to the situated goings-on in the home. This insight, coupled with further design workshops with the advisors, shaped requirements for an interactive system that makes the sensor data available for visual inspection and annotation to support the situated sense-making that is key to giving energy advice.

Break activities -- deliberate and unexpected -- are common throughout the working day, playing an important role in the wellbeing of workers. This paper investigates the role of increasingly pervasive ICT in creating new opportunities for breaks at work, what impact the technology has on management of boundaries at work, and the effects these changes have on personal wellbeing. We present a study of the routines of office-workers, where we used images from participants' work-days to prompt and contextualize interviews with them. Analysis of coded photographs and interview data makes three contributions: an account of ubiquitous ICT creating new forms of micro-breaks, including the opportunity to employ previously wasted time; a description of the ways in which staff increasingly bring "home to work"; and a discussion of the emergence of "screen guilt". We evaluate our findings in relation to previous studies, and leave three research implications and questions for future work in this domain.

Notions like 'Big Data' and the 'Internet of Things' turn upon anticipated harvesting of personal data through ubiquitous computing and networked sensing systems. It is largely presumed that understandings of people's everyday interactions will be relatively easy to 'read off' of such data and that this, in turn, poses a privacy threat. An ethnographic study of how people account for sensed data to third parties uncovers serious challenges to such ideas. The study reveals that the legibility of sensor data turns upon various orders of situated reasoning involved in articulating the data and making it accountable. Articulation work is indispensable to personal data sharing and raises real requirements for networked sensing systems premised on the harvesting of personal data.

The study of agent helpers using linguistic strategies such as vague language and politeness has often come across obstacles. One of these is the quality of the agent's voice and its lack of appropriate fit for using these strategies. The first approach of this article compares human vs. synthesised voices in agents using vague language. This approach analyses the 60,000-word text corpus of participant interviews to investigate the differences of user attitudes towards the agents, their voices and their use of vague language. It discovers that while the acceptance of vague language is still met with resistance in agent instructors, using a human voice yields more positive results than the synthesised alternatives. The second approach in this article discusses the development of a novel multimodal corpus of video and text data to create multiple analyses of human-agent interaction in agent-instructed assembly tasks. The second approach analyses user spontaneous facial actions and gestures during their interaction in the tasks. It found that agents are able to elicit these facial actions and gestures and posits that further analysis of this nonverbal feedback may help to create a more adaptive agent. Finally, the approaches used in this article suggest these can contribute to furthering the understanding of what it means to interact with software agents.

Smart systems are becoming increasingly ubiquitous and consequently transforming our lives. The level of system autonomy plays a vital role in the development of smart systems as it profoundly affects how people and these systems interact with each other. However, to date, there are very few studies on human interaction with such systems. This paper presents findings from two field studies where two different prototypes for automating energy tariff-switching were developed and evaluated in the wild. Both prototypes offer flexible autonomy by which users can shift the system's level of autonomy among three options: suggestion-only, semi-autonomy, and full autonomy, whenever they like. Our findings based on thematic analysis show that flexible autonomy is a promising way to sustain users' engagement with smart systems, despite their occasional mistakes. The findings also suggest that users take responsibility for the undesired outcomes of automated actions when delegation of autonomy can be adjusted flexibly.

While HCI has a long tradition of formally modelling task-based interactions with graphical user interfaces, there has been less progress in modelling emerging ubiquitous computing systems due in large part to their highly contextual nature and dependence on unreliable sensing systems. We present an exploration of modelling an example ubiquitous system, the Savannah game, using the mathematical formalism of bigraphs, which are based on a universal process algebra that encapsulates both dynamic and spatial behaviour of autonomous agents that interact and move among each other, or within each other. We establish a modelling approach based on four perspectives on ubiquitous systems—Computational, Physical, Human, and Technology—and explore how these interact with one another. We show how our model explains observed inconsistencies in user trials of Savannah, and then, how formal analysis reveals an incompleteness in design and guides extensions of the model and/or possible system re-design to resolve this.

In the information age, tools for examining the validity of data are invaluable. Provenance is one such tool, and the PROV model proposed by the World Wide Web Consortium in 2013 offers a means of expressing provenance in a machine readable format. In this paper, we examine from a user's standpoint notions of provenance, the accessibility of the PROV model, and the general attitudes towards history and the verifiability of information in modern data society. We do this through the medium of an online-game designed to explore these issues and present the findings of the study along with a discussion of some of its implications.

Command and control environments ranging from transport control rooms to disaster response have long been of interest to HCI and CSCW as rich sites of interactive technology use embedded in work practice. Drawing on our engagement with disaster response teams, including ethnography of their training work, we unpack the ways in which situational uncertainty is managed while a shared operational 'picture' is constituted through various practices around tabletop work. Our analysis reveals how this picture is collaboratively assembled as a socially shared object and displayed by drawing on digital and physical resources. Accordingly, we provide a range of principles implicated by our study that guide the design of systems augmenting and enriching disaster response work practices. In turn, we propose the Augmented Bird Table to illustrate how our principles can be implemented to support tabletop work.

The regulatory climate is in a process of change. Design, having been implicated for some time, is now explicitly linked to law. This paper recognises the heightened role of designers in the regulation of ambient interactive technologies. Taking account of incumbent legal requirements is difficult. Legal rules are convoluted, uncertain, and not geared towards operationalisable heuristics or development guidelines for system designers. Privacy and data protection are a particular moral, social and legal concern for technologies. This paper seeks to understand how to make emerging European data protection regulation more accessible to our community. Our approach develops and tests a series of data protection ideation cards with teams of designers. We find that, whilst wishing to protect users, regulation is viewed as a compliance issue. Subsequently we argue for the use of instruments, such as our cards, as a means to engage designers in leading a human-centered approach to regulation.

Consumer and more generally, human preferences are highly complex, depending on a multitude of factors, most of which are not crisp, but uncertain/fuzzy in nature. Thus, user selection amongst a set of items is dependent on the complex comparison of items based on a large number of imprecise item-attributes such as price, size, colour, etc. This paper proposes the mechanisms to underpin the digital replication of such complex preference-based item selection with the view to enabling improved digital item search and recommendation systems. For example, a user may query “I would like a product of similar size but at a cheaper price.” The proposed method involves splitting query-attributes into two categories; those to remain similar (e.g., size) and those to be changed in a specific direction (e.g., price - to be lower). A combination of similarity and distance measures is then used to compare and rank recommendations. Initial results are presented indicating that the proposed method is effective at ranking items according to intuition and expected user preferences.

In this paper we argue for the position that responsible safeguards for privacy and ethical treatment of human data are of vital importance to retain the public confidence and trust that is necessary for the development and future success of internet mediated research (IMR). We support our position based on the high level of popular and media attention that is currently directed at IMR, which in combination with the relative uncertainties that still exist around the ethics of various IMR methods, raises the risk that IMR might succumb to a public backlash of similar proportions to the controversy that hit genetically modified (GM) crops in Europe. Based on the lessons that came out of the GM crops controversy we discuss the ethics requirements and challenges that must be met in order to retain the public trust in IMR. We end our argument by briefly reviewing a couple of examples of “privacy protecting architectures” that are being developed for IMR.

Future energy systems that rely on renewable energy may bring about a radical shift in how we use energy in our homes. We developed and prototyped a future scenario with highly variable, real-time electricity prices due to a grid that mainly relies on renewables. We designed and deployed an agent-based interactive system that enables users to effectively operate the washing machine in this scenario. The system is used to book timeslots of washing machine use so that the agent can help to minimize the cost of a wash by charging a battery at times when electricity is cheap. We carried out a deployment in 10 households in order to uncover the socio-technical challenges around integrating new technologies into everyday routines. The findings reveal tensions that arise when deploying a rationalistic system to manage contingently and socially organized domestic practices. We discuss the trade-offs between utility and convenience inherent in smart grid applications; and illustrate how certain design choices position applications along this spectrum.

Our natural environment is complex and sensitive, and is home to a number of species on the verge of extinction. Surveying is one approach to their preservation, and can be supported by technology. This paper presents the deployment of a smartphone-based citizen science biodiversity application. Our findings from interviews with members of the biodiversity community revealed a tension between the technology and their established working practices. From our experience, we present a series of general guidelines for those designing citizen science apps.

E-books are becoming ubiquitous. Whether or not they will eventually replace books or merely complement them, there is a concern that something important might be lost in moving from print to digital books. While there is a wealth of research into the challenges and opportunities of e-reading, there is little research aiming to understand the broader role of books in everyday life. Rather than speculating on what books are in the digital age, in this paper, we wish to ask what books do. To do so, we conducted a series of in-depth interviews with ten UK households to understand everyday uses of books. Our findings suggest that books are not merely reading technologies but a resource for everyday social and personal engagements. We discuss re-framing books as social technologies and implications for the design of e-books.

Ethnographic study in two contrasting museums highlights a widespread but rarely documented challenge for CSCW design. Visitors' engagement with exhibits often ends prematurely due to the need to keep up with or attend to fellow group members. We unpack the mechanics of these kinds of phenomena revealing how the behaviours of summoning, pressurizing, herding, sidelining, and rounding up, lead to the responses of following, skimming and digging in. We show how the problem is especially challenging where young children are involved. As an initial prompt we explore two ways in which CSCW could help address this challenge: enabling a more fluid association between information and exhibits; and helping reconfigure the social nature of visiting.

As we find greater potential for agent instructors, we must be aware of how their language use can affect the user and interaction as a whole. This study investigates the use of intentionally imprecise or vague language as a communicative strategy to mitigate the impact of instructions. We look at the effects it has on improving the perception of agents and user performance. A series of assembly tasks were ran in which users constructed Lego models with the spoken instructions of vague and non-vague agents. Results show that though the non-vague agent was seen as more direct and authoritative, responses to other attributes and performance were much more varied. Findings suggest there is potential for vague language human-agent interaction, though there are several obstacles in agent design to overcome first.

We present an ethnographic study of energy advisors working for a charity that provides support, particularly to people in fuel poverty. Our fieldwork comprises detailed observations that reveal the collaborative, interactional work of energy advisors and clients during home visits, supplemented with interviews and a participatory design workshop with advisors. We identify opportunities for Ubicomp technologies that focus on supporting the work of the advisor, including complementing the collaborative advice giving in home visits, providing help remotely, and producing evidence in support of accounts of practices and building conditions useful for interactions with landlords, authorities and other third parties. We highlight six specific design challenges that relate the domestic fuel poverty setting to the wider Ubicomp literature. Our work echoes a shift in attention from energy use and the individual consumer, specifically to matters of advice work practices and the domestic fuel poverty setting, and to the discourse around inclusive Ubicomp technologies.

We present MultiNet, a novel method for securely associating devices with a domestic wireless network. We show that MultiNet has usability benefits over currently deployed commercial solutions while being backwards compatible with existing devices. MultiNet reduces the interaction overhead of secure association by focusing on users' interactions rather than the network's requirements. This leads to a novel architectural arrangement of the home network infrastructure: the network is dynamically re-configured to accept each pre-configured device, rather than the current norm where each device is configured to be acceptable to the pre-configured network. Assuming devices are pre-configured for a unique, device-specific network name and passphrase, MultiNet constructs an out-of-band visual channel via an intermediary network controller device to convey the device's configuration to the network. This makes the interaction to join a device to the wireless network lightweight and identical across all devices, considerably reducing the interaction overheads for users.

Terms and conditions are central in acquiring user consent by service providers. Such documents are frequently highly complex and unreadable, placing doubts on the validity of so called 'informed consent'. While readability and web accessibility have been major themes for some time in HCI, the core principles have yet to be applied beyond webpage content and are absent from the underpinning terms and conditions. Our concern is that accessible web pages will encourage consent, masking the complexities of the terms of usage.

Energy systems researchers are proposing a broad range of future "smart" energy infrastructures to promote more efficient management of energy resources. This paper considers how consumers might relate to these future smart grids within the UK. To address this challenge we exploited a combination of demonstration and animated sketches to convey the nature of a future smart energy infrastructure based on software agents. Users' reactions suggested that although they felt an obligation to engage with energy issues, they were principally disinterested. Users showed a considerable lack of trust in energy companies raising a dilemma of design. While users might welcome agents to help in engaging with complex energy infrastructures, they had little faith in those that might provide them. This suggests the need to consider how to design software agents to enhance trust in these socio-economic settings.

Ubiquitous computing systems tend to be complex, seamless, data-driven and interactive. Reacting to both context, and users' implicit actions resulting from the lived experience, they cast all traces of human life as potential 'data'. To augment users' endeavours, such systems are necessarily embedded below the line of human attention, drawing upon new and highly sensitive types of data. This begs the question, where is the moment of user consent and how can this moment be truly informed? We would argue that it is time to revisit our design principles in respect of consent and redress the balance of agency towards the user. We draw upon a series of multidisciplinary interviews with experts to (a) reframe consent for ubicomp, and (b) offer three indicative principles, supportive of consent, for designers to 'balance' against system functionality. We hope that this will afford a new prism through which designers might make value judgements.

We present a system and study of personalized energy-related recommendation. AgentSwitch utilizes electricity usage data collected from users' households over a period of time to realize a range of smart energy-related recommendations on energy tariffs, load detection and usage shifting. The web service is driven by a third party real-time energy tariff API (uSwitch), an energy data store, a set of algorithms for usage prediction, and appliance-level load disaggregation. We present the system design and user evaluation consisting of interviews and interface walkthroughs. We recruited participants from a previous study during which three months of their household's energy use was recorded to evaluate personalized recommendations in AgentSwitch. Our contributions are a) a systems architecture for personalized energy services; and b) findings from the evaluation that reveal challenges in designing energy-related recommender systems. In response to the challenges we formulate design recommendations to mitigate barriers to switching tariffs, to incentivize load shifting, and to automate energy management.

The assumed role of humans as controllers and instructors of machines is changing. As systems become more complex and incomprehensible to humans, it will be increasingly necessary for us to place confidence in intelligent interfaces and follow their instructions and recommendations. This type of relationship becomes particularly intricate when we consider significant numbers of humans and agents working together in collectives. While instruction-based interfaces and agents already exist, our understanding of them within the field of Human-Computer Interaction is still limited.

With its emphasis on ‘smart environments’, the vision of pervasive computing raises critical concerns with respect to consent. When sensors capture data about people, and digital systems interpret and respond to that data below the line of user visibility, two fundamental questions arise. First, are current notions of consent relevant in the emerging class of pervasive systems and, secondly, what are the practical consequences of dealing with consent for such environments? This paper reflects on the key principles of consent and the challenges raised by pervasive systems through a review of multidisciplinary perspectives on consent and technology. The developing complexity and decreasing visibility of pervasive computing systems, coupled with the increasing value and sensitivity of personal data, mean that it is no longer sufficient to design systems that assume users capable of making informed decisions at a single moment. In particular, the unprecedented sensitivity of contextual data, and the potential harms associated with inferences made on the basis of that data, highlights the need to revisit our design principles. Many of these discussions are nuanced and implicate a broad range of perspectives; however, it is clear that there is unlikely to be a ‘moment of consent’ in pervasive systems. In order to progress this agenda we offer the following set of recommendations to designers, as considerations for future systems design: (i) electronic consent mechanisms (ECMs) must cease to be designed around ‘moments in time’ and allow for negotiation, (ii) systems should enable establishment of user expectations and development of norms, (iii) systems should be sensitive to third-party interactions and (iv) we should move beyond designing for user control towards designing for user autonomy.

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

We are starting to see a paradigm shift within the field of HCI. We are witnessing researchers leaving the safety and security of their controlled, lab-based environments and moving their research out into 'the wild'. Their studies are carrying out in-situ development and extended engagement, sampling experiences and working with communities in their homes and on the streets. This research has initially focused upon understanding the impacts that technological intervention has upon our day-to-day life and is leading us to explore the ways in which in-situ design, development and evaluation can be used to understand and explore these technological interventions. Is it the case that lab-based studies, taking people out of their natural environment and designing in the lab without long term user engagement are no longer appropriate to properly understand the impacts of technology in the real world?

This paper extends the focus of current research into home networks. It represents a shift in perspective from the home network as something that is essentially understood as a technological object by the inhabitants of the home, to something that is understood by household members as a sociological object wrapped up in the organisation of their everyday lives. This shift in perspective is significant. It moves the focus of design from developing home network technologies that better support users' management of the home network and the devices that hang off it, to developing home network technologies that support household members' management of everyday life and the social activities that compose it. Through a range of ongoing ethnographic studies we elaborate this turn to the social, and a number of sensitising concerns informing the continued development of home network technologies.

An increasing number of interactive displays of very different sizes, portability, projectability and form factors are starting to become part of the display ecosystems that we make use of in our daily lives. Displays are shaped by human activity into an ecological arrangement and thus an ecology. Each combination or ecology of displays offer substantial promise for the creation of applications that effectively take advantage of the wide range of input, affordances, and output capability of these multi-display, multi-device and multi-user environments. Although the last few years have seen an increasing amount of research in this area, knowledge about this subject remains under explored, fragmented, and cuts across a set of related but heterogeneous issues. This workshop brings together researchers and practitioners interested in the challenges posed by infrastructure and design.

We argue for deliberately and systematically creating uncomfortable interactions as part of powerful cultural experiences. We identify the potential benefits of uncomfortable interactions under the general headings of entertainment, enlightenment and sociality. We then review artworks and performances that have employed discomfort, including two complementary examples from the worlds of entertainment and performance. From this, we articulate a suite of tactics for designing four primary forms of discomfort referred to as visceral, cultural, control and intimate. We discuss how moments of discomfort need to be embedded into an overall experience which requires a further consideration of the dramatic acts of exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and dénouement. Finally, we discuss an ethical framework for uncomfortable interactions which leads us to revisit key issues of consent, withdrawal, privacy and risk.

Food contributes fundamentally to our well-being: physically, mentally, and socially. Unsurprisingly then, the importance of food to our lives has long been recognized in the social sciences, and more recently, in Human-Computer Interaction. Yet, despite ongoing trends towards the digital augmentation of domestic environments, little consideration has been given to the impact of the material aspects of food consumption in the home. This paper takes an ecological approach to uncovering the role spaces, tabletops, and artefacts play in the social organization of domestic eating practices. Based on our findings of interviews with seven households in England, we discuss implications for those seeking to digitally augment domestic dining.

An ethnographic study of Irish music sessions in pubs elaborates the collaborative work involved in making traditional music. Central to this distinctive achievement is the sequencing of tunes so that they hang together and combine to form discrete "sets", which rely on a shared knowledge of musical repertoires. Our study shows how musicians develop this musical knowledge through the use of digital resources and social networks. It also reveals how musicians construct and make use of various paper props to help bring their knowledge to bear in the actual in vivo course of a session so as to maintain the moral order of making music together in a demonstrably traditional way. The social demands of musical "etiquette" sensitise CSCW to the need to design technologies to support the "situated discretion" that is essential to traditional practices. We elaborate this notion through a discussion of requirements for technologies that bridge between online resources and the collaborative sequencing of tunes during performance.

We present a workshop proposal focusing on future digital home infrastructures and systems needed to support ubiquitous computing applications and services. The workshop aims to be the premiere venue that brings together researchers and practitioners across the disciplines of Systems and Networking, Ubiquitous Computing and HCI to elaborate ways in which the current infrastructure in the digital home can be reshaped to meet the needs of users.

Ethnographic studies have played a key part in informing the design and development of a multitude of ubiquitous systems, from control room systems to pervasive games. While other papers have often focused on systems developed for urban contexts, this paper presents the initial findings of a study that focuses on a rural produce market in West Wales as a site for ubiquitous multimedia system-based intervention, digital economic considerations and co-design. The findings relate to the initial ethnographic fieldwork, digital-economic considerations for the site, the evolution of a participatory design strategy for developing a Market Portal and - importantly -- the way that these are informing the design of the ubiquitous technologies relating to the Market Portal.

This demo presents MultiNet, a novel method for joining devices to a domestic Wi-Fi network. MultiNet dynamically reconfigures the network to accept each device, rather than configuring each device to fit the network as is the norm. It does so by assuming that each device is pre-configured with a cryptographically generated WPA2 network SSID/passphrase pair, and then providing a lightweight interaction through which the user creates a new network for each device. This approach makes securely adding devices to a wireless network straightforward without compromising security or burdening the user, and maintaining backward compatibility with existing deployed standards and protocols.

This paper presents a user driven redesign of the domestic network infrastructure that draws upon a series of ethnographic studies of home networks. We present an infrastructure based around a purpose built access point that has modified the handling of protocols and services to reflect the interactive needs of the home. The developed infrastructure offers a novel measurement framework that allows a broad range of infrastructure information to be easily captured and made available to interactive applications. This is complemented by a diverse set of novel interactive control mechanisms and interfaces for the underlying infrastructure. We also briefly reflect on the technical and user issues arising from deployments.

How to motivate and support behaviour change through design is becoming of increasing interest to the CHI community. In this paper, we present our experiences of building systems that motivate people to engage in upper limb rehabilitation exercise after stroke. We report on participatory design work with four stroke survivors to develop a holistic understanding of their motivation and rehabilitation needs, and to construct and deploy engaging interactive systems that satisfy these. We reflect on the limits of motivational theories in trying to design for the lived experience of motivation and highlight lessons learnt around: helping people articulate what motivates them; balancing work, duty, fun; supporting motivation over time; and understanding the wider social context. From these we identify design guidelines that can inform a toolkit approach to support both scalability and personalisability.

Home networks have evolved to become small-scale versions of enterprise networks. The tools for visualizing and managing such networks are primitive and continue to require networked systems expertise on the part of the home user. As a result, non-expert home users must manually manage non-obvious aspects of the network - e.g., MAC address filtering, network masks, and firewall rules, using these primitive tools. The Homework information plane architecture uses stream database concepts to generate derived events from streams of raw events. This supports a variety of visualization and monitoring techniques, and also enables construction of a closed-loop, policy-based management system. This paper describes the information plane architecture and its associated policy-based management infrastructure. Exemplar visualization and closed-loop management applications enabled by the resulting system (tuned to the skills of non-expert home users) are discussed.

The Homework project has examined redesign of existing home network infrastructures to better support the needs and requirements of actual home users. Integrating results from several ethnographic studies, we have designed and built a home networking platform providing detailed per-flow measurement and management capabilities supporting several novel management interfaces. This demo specifically shows these new visualization and control interfaces (1), and describes the broader benefits of taking an integrated view of the networking infrastructure, realised through our router's augmented measurement and control APIs (2).

The novel experience Anywhere allowed participants to explore an urban area, tying together information not normally available, new points of views and interaction embedded into physical places. Guided by 'unseen', on-the-street performers in an ongoing conversation maintained over mobile phones, they gained access to locative media and staged performances. Our analysis demonstrates how Anywhere produced engaging and uniquely personalised paths through a complex landscape of content, negotiated by the performer-participant pair around various conflicting constraints. We reflect our analysis through the lens of the key characteristics exhibited by mechanisms that support city exploration, before focussing on possible extensions to the technological support of teams of professional and amateur guides.

The idea of interactional trajectories through interfaces has emerged as a sensitizing concept from recent studies of tangible interfaces and interaction in museums and galleries. We put this concept to work as a lens to reflect on published studies of complex user experiences that extend over space and time and involve multiple roles and interfaces. We develop a conceptual framework in which trajectories explain these user experiences as journeys through hybrid structures, punctuated by transitions, and in which interactivity and collaboration are orchestrated. Our framework is intended to sensitize future studies, help distill craft knowledge into design guidelines and patterns, identify technology requirements, and provide a boundary object to connect HCI with Performance Studies.

We review the current status of ethnography in systems design. We focus particularly on new approaches to and understandings of ethnography that have emerged as the computer has moved out of the workplace. These seek to implement a different order of ethnographic study to that which has largely been employed in design to date. In doing so they reconfigure the relationship ethnography has to systems design, replacing detailed empirical studies of situated action with studies that provide cultural interpretations of action and critiques of the design process itself. We hold these new approaches to and understandings of ethnography in design up to scrutiny, with the purpose of enabling designers to appreciate the differences between new and existing approaches to ethnography in systems design and the practical implications this might have for design.

This paper presents the evolution of a tool to support the rapid prototyping of hybrid museum experiences by domain professionals. The developed tool uses visual markers to associate digital resources with physical artefacts. We present the iterative development of the tool through a user centred design process and demonstrate its use by domain experts to realise two distinct hybrid exhibits. The process of design and refinement of the tool highlights the need to adopt an experience oriented approach allowing authors to think in terms of the physical and digital "things" that comprise a hybrid experience rather than in terms of the underlying technical components.

Different kinds of computing environment effect human interaction in different kinds of ways and understanding how different environments 'work', as it were, is important to their evaluation and ongoing design. Ethnographic studies of media spaces and CVEs, for example, showed that these kinds of environment introduce asymmetry and fragment the reciprocity of perspectives that is essential to human interaction. Users are therefore obliged to engage in 'compensation work' if interaction is to proceed. However, asymmetry and fragmentation are intentional features of the hybrid ubiquitous computing environments that have emerged over recent years, which is to say that they are deliberately 'built in' to the environment through the design of heterogeneous interaction mechanisms. Interaction in hybrid ubicomp environments therefore relies upon a different order of interactional work, namely 'reconciliation work'.

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.

A proliferation of mobile devices in everyday life has increased the likelihood of technologically mediated interruptions. We examine ethnographic data from an SMS-based pervasive game in order to explicate the situated character of interruption. Ethnomethodological analysis of gameplay in the context of participants' everyday lives shows that interruption handling is shaped by its accountability to the various people or 'cohorts' whose concerns participants need to juggle simultaneously. Findings inform existing approaches to design where certain presuppositions regarding the nature of interruption prevail. Accordingly, we propose an approach to interruption handling that respects the ways in which people orient to and reason about interruptions locally in the conduct of situated action.

Remote gesture systems have been shown to provide a significant enhancement to performance in collaborative physical tasks, an effect ascribed to the ability of remote gestures to help ground deictic references. The argument that this effect works by replacing complex referential descriptions with simple pointing behaviours has been drawn into question by recent research. In this paper we significantly unpack the effects of remote gesturing on collaborative language, arguing for a more complex role for remote gestures in interaction. We demonstrate how remote gestures influence the structure of collaborative discourse, and how their use can also influence the temporal nature of the grounding process. Through generating a deeper understanding of these effects of remote gesturing on collaborative language we derive implications for the development and deployment of these technologies.

Research has focused on building technologies to support children in their transitions between home and school [9] without a developed sense of how individual families react to such technologies. We interviewed three different families about their reactions to ubiquitous computing technologies designed to support home-school transitions. We found that families were willing to use such technologies to share information among themselves, but that mechanisms for filtering this information would be a challenge for designers. Further, families were reluctant to share information with outsiders, such as teachers. We will discuss the implications of these findings for both future technologies, and further research into their design.

Mixed Reality Architecture (MRA) supports distributed teams in their everyday work activities by linking multiple physical spaces across a shared three-dimensional virtual world. User configurable audio-visual connections give the inhabitants of MRA full control over whom they want to be in contact with and when they make themselves available, as well as over the overall configuration. We report on the design of MRA, its deployment in an office environment and results from a long-term observational study. The study shows that MRA supports the management of awareness, social interaction and privacy well, that the architectural design features are crucial for this process and that the dynamic architectural topology of MRA and social interaction within it are linked in a fundamental way.

Movements of interfaces can be analyzed in terms of whether they are expected, sensed, and desired. Expected movements are those that users naturally perform; sensed are those that can be measured by a computer; and desired movements are those that are required by a given application. We show how a systematic comparison of expected, sensed, and desired movements, especially with regard to how they do not precisely overlap, can reveal potential problems with an interface and also inspire new features. We describe how this approach has been applied to the design of three interfaces: pointing flashlights at walls and posters in order to play sounds; the Augurscope II, a mobile augmented reality interface for outdoors; and the Drift Table, an item of furniture that uses load sensing to control the display of aerial photographs. We propose that this approach can help to build a bridge between the analytic and inspirational approaches to design and can help designers meet the challenges raised by a diversification of sensing technologies and interface forms, increased mobility, and an emerging focus on technologies for everyday life.

This paper presents the development of a lightweight component model that allows user to manage the introduction and arrangement of new interactive services and devices in the home. The model is responsive to ethnographic studies of the interplay between the Space-plan or interior layout and Stuff or artefacts placed within the fabric of the home. Interaction techniques developed through user-participation enable household members -- rather than designers -- to configure and reconfigure interactive devices and services to meet local needs. As a result, we have developed a tablet-based editor that discovers available ubiquitous components and presents these to users as 'jigsaw pieces' that can be dynamically assembled and recombined.

Successfully staging a mixed reality game in which online players are chased through a virtual city by runners located in the real world requires extensive orchestration work. An ethnographic study shows how this concerted achievement extends beyond the control room to the runners on the street. This, in turn, suggests the need to 'decentralize' orchestration and develop support for collaboration 'on the ground'. The study leads to design proposals for orchestration interfaces for mobile experiences that augment situational awareness and surreptitious monitoring among mobile participants and support troubleshooting in situations where participants are disconnected or are unable to access positioning systems such as GPS.

We describe a user study of a large multi-user interactive surface deployed for an initial period within a real world setting. The surface was designed to enable the sharing and exchange of a wide variety of digital media. The setting for the study was the common room of a high school where students come together to mix, socialize, and collaborate throughout the day. We report on how the students use the new technology within their own established communal space. Findings show that the system was used extensively by the students in a variety of ways, including sharing of photos, video clips, and websites, and for facilitating social interaction. We discuss how the interactive shared surface was appropriated by the students and introduced into their everyday lives in ways that both mirrored and extended their existing practices within the communal space.

This paper explores the embodied interactional ways in which people naturally collaborate around and share collections of photographs. We employ ethnographic studies of paper-based photograph use to consider requirements for distributed collaboration around digital photographs. Distributed sharing is currently limited to the 'passing on' of photographs to others, by email, webpages, or mobile phones. To move beyond this, a fundamental challenge for photoware consists of developing support for the practical achievement of sharing 'at a distance'. Specifically, this entails augmenting the natural production of accounts or 'photo-talk' to support the distributed achievement of sharing.

My Grid is an e-Science Grid project that aims to help biologists and bioinformaticians to perform workflow-based in silico experiments, and help them to automate the management of such workflows through personalisation, notification of change and publication of experiments. In this paper, we describe the architecture of my Grid and how it will be used by the scientist. We then show how my Grid can benefit from agents technologies. We have identified three key uses of agent technologies in my Grid: user agents, able to customize and personalise data, agent communication languages offering a generic and portable communication medium, and negotiation allowing multiple distributed entities to reach service level agreements.

This paper considers how we may realize future ubiquitous domestic environments. Building upon previous work on how buildings evolve by Stewart Brand, we suggest the need to broaden existing considerations of interactive design for domestic environments. We identify a number of classes of research activity and the issues associated with these. We then consider the ways in which current buildings undergo continual change. In doing so we outline the stakeholders involved, the representations used and the way change is managed. We contrast our understanding of how buildings change with research activities before identifying new challenges that will need to be addressed by those involved in designing ubiquitous technologies for domestic environments.

This paper describes the design and deployment of a novel interactional workspace, intended to provide more effective support for face-to-face consultations between two parties. We focus on the initial consultations between customer and agent that take place during the development of complex products. Findings from an ethnographic study of the existing use of technological systems show the interaction during such consultations to be disjointed and not well supported. As an alternative approach, we developed a novel arrangement of multiple displays intended to promote shoulder-to-shoulder collaboration using a variety of interlinked representations and visualizations. The resulting interactional workspace was used by a travel company as part of a large international trade show attended by the general public. The many consultations that took place between agents and customers were quite different, proving to be more equitable, open, fluid and congenial.

In this paper we propose a novel way of supporting occasional meetings that take place in unfamiliar public places, which promotes lightweight, visible and fluid collaboration. Our central idea is that the sharing and exchange of information occurs across public surfaces that users can easily access and interact with. To this end, we designed and implemented Dynamo, a communal multi-user interactive surface. The surface supports the cooperative sharing and exchange of a wide range of media that can be brought to the surface by users that are remote from their familiar organizational settings.

The augurscope is a portable mixed reality interface for outdoors. A tripod-mounted display is wheeled to different locations and rotated and tilted to view a virtual environment that is aligned with the physical background. Video from an onboard camera is embedded into this virtual environment. Our design encompasses physical form, interaction and the combination of a GPS receiver, electronic compass, accelerometer and rotary encoder for tracking. An initial application involves the public exploring a medieval castle from the site of its modern replacement. Analysis of use reveals problems with lighting, movement and relating virtual and physical viewpoints, and shows how environmental factors and physical form affect interaction. We suggest that problems might be accommodated by carefully constructing virtual and physical content

This paper considers the potential of using patterns of cooperative interaction to support the development of general design principles drawn from a range of work settings. It reports on the development of patterns from ethnographic studies in a number of work environments. Our particular interest is in the possibilities surrounding the use of patterns as a means of organising, presenting and representing this growing corpus of ethnographic material and in the contribution this might make to CSCW design. In this paper we focus on outlining some of our experiences and difficulties in developing patterns from ethnographic studies and present some initial ideas towards the development of a pattern language to exploit the experience gained from a decade of field studies.

The rapid growth of the Internet has seen a range of Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) emerge that support virtual worlds, where users can interact with both objects and each other. However, little consideration has been given to the development of these environments and the provision of tools to allow users to manage them. This paper presents a web-based model for jointly authoring multi-user virtual worlds using the ideas of object ownership and division of the virtual environment at the object level. A brief description of an implementation and its more interesting features is also provided.

introduction Free Access Share on Introduction to the special issue on human-computer interaction and collaborative virtual environments Authors: Steve Benford Univ. of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK Univ. of Nottingham, Nottingham, UKView Profile , Paul Dourish Univ. of California, Irvine Univ. of California, IrvineView Profile , Tom Rodden Univ. of Lancaster, Lancaster, PA Univ. of Lancaster, Lancaster, PAView Profile Authors Info & Claims ACM Transactions on Computer-Human InteractionVolume 7Issue 4Dec. 2000 pp 439–441https://doi.org/10.1145/365058.365080Online:01 December 2000Publication History 3citation1,240DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations3Total Downloads1,240Last 12 Months31Last 6 weeks2 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteeReaderPDF

This article considers the importance of context in mobile systems. It considers a range of context-related issues and focus on location as a key issue for mobile systems. A design framework is described consisting of taxonomies of location, mobility, population, and device awareness. The design framework inorms the construction of a semantic model of space for mobile systems. The semantic model is reflected in a computational model built on a distriuted platform that allows contextual information to be shared across a number of mobile devices. The framework support the design of interactive mobile systems while the platform supports their rapid development.

As cooperative virtual environments have become more prominent as a means of allowing users to work together so has the need for users to understand the nature of these environments. This paper presents the development of a set of techniques to allow users to understand the properties of virtual environments as they move between different environments. The development of these techniques is informed by an ethnographic study of a multimedia art museum containing a wide range of different virtual environments.

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

This paper reflects on the emerging results of a long-standing ethnographic study of everyday work in a large retail Bank. While customers as economic actors have often been overlooked in studies of computer supported work they are generally and necessarily the focus of commercial organisational life. The paper explicates the developing relationship between technology use and these organisational concerns through the notion of 'the customer in the machine.' Features of the contingent and skilful nature of everyday work are documented and used to comment on aspects of working with the 'customer in the machine' or 'virtual customers' within a rapidly changing commercial organisation.

Requirements engineering (RE) is an inherently social process, involving the contribution of individuals working in an organizational context. Further, failures in the RE process will potentially lead to systematic failures in the products that are produced as a result. Consequently, the RE process for dependable systems development should itself be considered as a dependable process, and therefore subject to greater scrutiny for vulnerabilities to error. Research on human error has typically focused on the work of individual actors from a cognitive perspective. This paper presents a survey which broadens the view on what contributes to human error by also examining work from the social and organizational literature. This review was conducted to inform efforts to improve the systems development process for dependable systems, and in particular their requirements engineering process

The rapid growth and development of the Internet and the resulting growth in interest in access to network facilities highlight an increasing prominence of computer technology in the home.In this article we report on a study of the social organization of a number of domestic environments in the northwest of England and consider the ways in which an understanding of the nature of the home is of interest to the developers of future interactive technology.Thus, in the first half of the article we consider the everyday nature of home life, and in the second half we report on an ethnographically based evaluation of a prototype set top box for the provision of digital services to the home.In addition to reflecting on the nature of activities in the home we conclude by considering the design implications that can be drawn from an examination of these activities.

Article Free Access Share on Exploring the design space for notification servers Authors: Devina Ramduny School of Computing, Staffordshire University, Stafford ST18 ODG UK School of Computing, Staffordshire University, Stafford ST18 ODG UKView Profile , Alan Dix School of Computing, Staffordshire University, Stafford ST18 ODG UK School of Computing, Staffordshire University, Stafford ST18 ODG UKView Profile , Tom Rodden Computing Department SECaMS, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YR UK Computing Department SECaMS, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YR UKView Profile Authors Info & Claims CSCW '98: Proceedings of the 1998 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative workNovember 1998 Pages 227–235https://doi.org/10.1145/289444.289497Published:01 November 1998Publication History 25citation519DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations25Total Downloads519Last 12 Months21Last 6 weeks7 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

The growth in interest in virturd environments in CSCW has focused on cwopemtion within these environments.Lltie consideration has been given to how users manage these environments and their movement between them.h this paper we present a session management architecture that supports the management of_ environments.The developed architecture is built upon them protocol and is sufficiently geneti to Mow it to support a range of CSCW application.We present the architecture and its use to support both tid environments and more generic cooperative applications.

This paper addresses the design of Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs).More specifically, it considers key design issues concerning the use of either real world 'facsimile' representations or more abstracted means of delivering CVEs.We suggest that the use of ethnographic studies of the context-of-use of the CVE under development is a useful means of informing these design issues in contrast to more in-principle means of drawing conclusions.This approach is illustrated by informing the development of a virtual environment from and ethnographic study of work.

Article Recognising "success" and "failure": evaluating groupware in a commercial context Share on Authors: Steve Blythin Project Manager, Support Services and Design, NatWest Bank Plc. Network Strategy & Development, 101-117 Finsbury Pavement, London EC2A 1EH Project Manager, Support Services and Design, NatWest Bank Plc. Network Strategy & Development, 101-117 Finsbury Pavement, London EC2A 1EHView Profile , John A. Hughes Computing and Sociology Departments, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YR, UK Computing and Sociology Departments, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YR, UKView Profile , Steinar Kristoffersen Computing and Sociology Departments, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YR, UK Computing and Sociology Departments, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YR, UKView Profile , Tom Rodden Computing and Sociology Departments, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YR, UK Computing and Sociology Departments, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YR, UKView Profile , Mark Rouncefield Computing and Sociology Departments, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YR, UK Computing and Sociology Departments, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YR, UKView Profile Authors Info & Claims GROUP '97: Proceedings of the international ACM SIGGROUP conference on Supporting group work: the integration challengeNovember 1997 Pages 39–46https://doi.org/10.1145/266838.266852Published:16 November 1997 16citation904DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations16Total Downloads904Last 12 Months3Last 6 weeks0 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

Article A protocol for user awareness on the World Wide Web Share on Authors: Kevin Palfreyman Lancaster University, Lancaster, LA1 4YR, UK. Lancaster University, Lancaster, LA1 4YR, UK.View Profile , Tom Rodden Lancaster University, Lancaster, LA1 4YR, UK. Lancaster University, Lancaster, LA1 4YR, UK.View Profile Authors Info & Claims CSCW '96: Proceedings of the 1996 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative workNovember 1996 Pages 130–139https://doi.org/10.1145/240080.240236Online:16 November 1996Publication History 44citation728DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations44Total Downloads728Last 12 Months9Last 6 weeks2 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

Article Free Access Share on Populating the application: a model of awareness for cooperative applications Author: Tom Rodden Computing Department, Lancaster University, Lancaster, LA1 4YR, UK. Computing Department, Lancaster University, Lancaster, LA1 4YR, UK.View Profile Authors Info & Claims CSCW '96: Proceedings of the 1996 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative workNovember 1996 Pages 87–96https://doi.org/10.1145/240080.240200Published:16 November 1996Publication History 141citation1,336DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations141Total Downloads1,336Last 12 Months65Last 6 weeks8 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

This paper examines the importance of sharing within cooperative systems and argues for a specialized service to support the cooperative aspects of information sharing. An investigation into the current information models used by Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) applications is presented. This is complemented by highlighting the problems faced by traditional database mechanisms in supporting cooperative applications. From this we form a set of requirements for CSCW information systems, and this analysis is used directly in the creation of new software concepts and an associated framework. Rather than present a detailed design, we propose a set of novel and viable design concepts, and the beginnings of an architectural framework for providing shared object services for CSCW systems. The relationship between the cooperative shared object service and existing services is briefly examined. A number of services of particular importance to CSCW systems are identified. More detailed consideration is given for a selection of service elements. The paper presents both the need for these services and the means of realizing the shared object service by augmenting existing object facilities.

We argue that the industrial development of interactive systems has to recognise the social dimension of work if these systems are to fully meet the real needs of their users. Under current approaches this depends on whether an individual requirements engineer implicitly applies a user centred approach, recognises the importance of cooperation and is sufficiently sympathetic and intuitive to understand the work and reflect this in the system requirements. We wish to move beyond this by allowing for the provision of a more systematic incorporation of the social dimensions of work. To this end we focus on developing a novel approach to the presentation of ethnographic material. Our approach is based on the use of number of viewpoints and is embodied within a general hypertext tool.

Ethnography has gained considerable prominence as a technique for informing CSCW systems development of the nature of work. Experiences of ethnography reported to date have focused on the use of prolonged on-going enthnography to inform systems design. A considerable number of these studies have taken place within constrained and focused work domain. This paper reflects more generally on the experiences of using ethnography across a number of different projects and in a variety of domains of study. We identify a number of ways in which we have used ethnography to inform design and consider the benefits and problems of each.

Ethnographic studies of CSCW have often seemed to involve the investigation of relatively large-scale and highly specific systems, consequently ignoring the small office within which many people spend much of their working lives and which is a major site for the introduction and implementation of IT. This paper is concerned with a “quick and dirty” ethnographic study of a small office that was considering the introduction of greater levels of IT. Generic features of office work are outlined: the process of work in a small office and its recurrent features, notably the massive volume of paperwork; the importance of local knowledge in the accomplishment of work; and the phenomenon of “constant interruption.” This paper suggests that despite the obvious contrasts with work settings analysed in other ethnographic studies, similar features of cooperative work can be observed in the small office. It further suggests that the issues of cooperation and the sociality of work cannot be ignored even in small-scale system design.

This paper examines the importance of providing effective management of sharing in cooperative systems and argues for a specialised service to support the cooperative aspects of information sharing. The relationship between features of the cooperative shared object service and existing services is briefly examined. A number of management services of particular importance to CSCW systems are identified. The paper presents a technique of realising a shared object service by augmenting existing object facilities to provide management of their cooperative use. These facilities are realised through object adapters that provide additional cooperative facilities and greater control over the supporting infrastructure.

This paper explores the use of multi-actor virtual reality systems to support communication and cooperation between groups of people. In particular, it introduces a spatial model of interaction which aims to support people in using their natural social communication skills when working together. First, we briefly review some of the social science background which has informed the development of this model. Next, we define the model's main concepts, i.e. aura, awareness, focus, nimbus, adapters and boundaries. We also explore the issues of user embodiment and spatial structure, the latter leading to the concept of Populated Information Terrains. We then show how a few simplifying assumptions results in the notion of awareness states and discuss how these link to the results of previous studies of cooperative work. Following this, we present some early prototypes which realise our concepts within the DIVE distributed virtual reality system. In the first of these, a simple discrete version of the spatial model has been constructed based on the notion of awareness states. The second, Q-PIT, demonstrates an early Populated Information Terrain. Finally, we briefly reflect on the relationship between this work and other CSCW systems based on the metaphor of shared space.

This paper discusses an innovative experiment where sociologists were actively involved in the requirements analysis for an interactive software system to support the work of air traffic controllers. Air traffic control is intrinsically cooperative and our work involved an analysis of that process from a social perspective and the development of a prototype user interface for air traffic controllers’ interaction with a flight information system. As part of the analysis process, sociologists were involved in ethnographic studies of work and discovered subtle and complex patterns of cooperation which, we suspect, would not have been discovered using structured methods for requirements analysis. From a software development perspective, we describe how the input from the sociologists was essential for understanding the real automation requirements, discuss the difficulties of inter-disciplinary cooperative working and suggest how social analysis can be integrated in the interactive systems design process.

Experiences from an interdisciplinary project involving software engineers and sociologists are reported. The project is concerned with discovering the requirements of a user interface to a flight database which is used to provide real-time information to air-traffic controllers. The sociologists are conducting an ethnographic analysis of the activity of air-traffic control, and this is being used for the development of a prototype system. An overview of the project is given, the contribution of sociologists to requirements engineering is discussed, and tool support which will allow ethnographic observations to be integrated into the requirements engineering process is suggested.>

This paper relates experiences of a project where an ethnographic study of air traffic controllers is being used to inform the design of the controllers' interface to the flight data base. We outline the current UK air traffic control system, discuss the ethnographic work we have undertaken studying air traffic control as a cooperative activity, describe some of the difficulties in collaboration between software developers and sociologists and show how the ethnographic studies have influenced the systems design process. Our conclusions are that ethnographic studies are helpful in informing the systems design process and may produce insights which contradict conventional thinking in systems design. KEYWORDS Air Traffic Control, Systems Design, Ethnography INTRODUCTION One of the most significant influences of CSCW has been to lend a respectability amongst software developers to sociological methods of empirical research. The contribution of sociology, and anthropology, is through the de...

A range of architectures have emerged which support realtime cooperative user interfaces. These architectures have tended to centralise the management of the interface and thus provide only limited support for user-centred development and interface tailoring. This paper considers the problems associated with the development of tailorable cooperative interfaces and proposes an architecture which allows such interfaces to be developed using an incremental, user-centred approach. The architecture presented in this paper has emerged within the context of a project investigating cooperative interface development for UK air traffic control. We conclude that the architecture is equally applicable to other Command and Control domains, where a shared information space forms the focus for the work taking place. KEYWORDS Multi-user interfaces, CSCW architectures, Command and Control systems, Database visualisation. INTRODUCTION The merging of computer and communications technology and the develop...

The need for open computer support for cooperative work (CSCW) systems is examined. Their requirements and impact on distributed systems are discussed. The Mocca project for developing an environment which will support open CSCW systems is described. It is shown that the open distributed systems (ODP) experience and approach can be a valuable tool in realizing open CSCW systems. Similarly, the ODP standardization effort can benefit both from the experience of CSCW application developers and from the requirements which CSCW systems place on their distributed platform.>

Over the last decade, computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) has emerged as an identifiable research area that focuses on the role of the computer in group work. CSCW is a generic term which combines the understanding of the nature of group working with the enabling technologies of computer networking, systems support and applications. The paper examines the classes of system which have emerged to support cooperative working. A framework for characterising and describing CSCW systems is presented and four major classes of cooperative system identified. Each of these classes of cooperative system are examined highlighting their general characteristics and applicability to CSCW.