The field of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) has long recognized a socio-technical gap complicating the design of technologies that can sustainably meet social needs. In response, a growing body of research advocates for assets-based design, an approach that seeks to build upon what the individuals and community already have. The emphasis on positioning assets rather than needs at the center of the process can complicate designers' decisions on what activities to foster, how to conduct them, and what outcomes to expect. In this paper, we reflect on two different assets-based design endeavors with vulnerable populations. Our reflections present assets-based design as an ongoing process that prioritizes the formation and evolution of a collective of assets-based thinkers who continually learn about their assets and ways to use them to attain desirable change. From that reflection, we contribute three methodological commitments for assets-based design to the growing CSCW scholarship on supporting vulnerable communities to attain emancipatory transformations: (1) embedding trust-building elements throughout the journey; (2) facilitating the formation of an interdependent collective; and (3) making moves towards incremental transformations. Further, we contribute a discussion on the change of perspective that entails for researchers and designers interested in undertaking assets-based design. In particular, we underscore the need to recognize the value of work before the work, to see technology as an intermediary rather than an inevitable end, and embrace impact in the shape of slow incremental transformation.

In Nepal, sex-trafficking survivors and the organizations that support them have limited resources to assist the survivors in their on-going journey towards reintegration. We take an asset-based approach wherein we identify and build on the strengths possessed by such groups. In this work, we present reflections from introducing a voice-annotated web application to a group of survivors. The web application tapped into and built upon two elements of pre-existing strengths possessed by the survivors — the social bond between them and knowledge of crafting as taught to them by the organization. Our findings provide insight into the array of factors influencing how the survivors act in relation to one another as they created novel use practices and adapted the technology. Experience with the application seemed to open knowledge of computing as a potential source of strength. Finally, we articulate three design desiderata that could help promote communal spaces: make activity perceptible to the group, create appropriable steps, and build in fun choices.

Families separated by distance face the challenge of limited bonding, affecting their opportunities to connect and sustain their relationships. FamilySong is a domestic Media Space that fosters feelings of togetherness via synchronized music-listening. FamilySong was used in an experiment that ran for six months, with six distributed families. Detailed data collection, e.g. interaction routines and music sharing patterns, was gathered through the system. These data provide interesting insights into the social behavior of families separated by distance and how they connect over those distances. In this work, we built software to analyze the experiment's data. The procedures and insights described in this paper will be useful for other researchers and practitioners involved in Information and Communications Technologies projects, making the FamilySong analysis with this software an exemplar for efficient data analysis.

We present reflections based on qualitative analysis of data from the CHEM+C Project which promotes computational thinking (CT) in classrooms through integration with science classes. The curriculum utilizes multiple representations, requiring students to work with physical phenomena, chemical equations, digital simulations, and modifiable code-based representations. Much CT focus on abstraction naturally emphasizes (1) extraction of a set of features from an object or process, and (2) finding commonality between objects and processes. But Rosen encourages us to think about abstraction as also including the production of new concepts or actions. Integrating CT into science offers the possibility of enhancing this aspect of abstraction. Changing the representational affordances available to the students allows them to take their CT thinking beyond learning-to-abstract towards learning-through-abstraction. This perspective moves computation from an internally focused exercise into the expression of valued ideas in a computational medium.

FamilySong aims to connect internationally distributed family groups via synchronized music-listening. It fosters feelings of togetherness and mutual belonging, that is, connection and culture. We conceptualize it as a domestic Media Space with no live audio or video. It emphasizes intimacy without intrusion, and lives within an existing ecology of interactive technologies. The design journey includes both autobiographical and research-through-design components with similarly-structured family groups (very young children with parents located in the United States and grandparents in Ecuador). Parents, children and grandparents all participated both in the moment and in subsequent interaction grounded in the FamilySong experience. Grandparents took the lead in expressing the importance of the values and goals they saw embedded in the system. This work presents a design that illuminates what it means to connect like a family in which values, needs and priorities are interdependent, and joy and delight are important.

This note presents an analysis of videos containing narrative stories of eight women in Nepal who had experienced domestic violence. The analysis highlights multifaceted issues and dependencies that coerced the survivors1 to stay in the abusive environment. Further, we present cases where the legal system failed to support the survivor because it overlooked the survivor's unique and complex situation. We contrast those cases with agency-supporting cases where the survivors had more control and could decide when and how they wanted to engage resources. We argue that designed systems, whether they be technologies or public policies, need to support the survivor's agency rather than seeing them as victims needing to be saved.

This Workshop is intended to be a generative space for participants to create a module on ethics in a Computer Science course of their choice. Participants will choose an existing course in the typical CS curriculum; and coalesce around common themes to create a module that integrates critical reflection on ethical choices and societal impact of computing with the practice of computing. The workshop will offer a space to collaboratively work on designing an ethics module for a CS course chosen by the participants. The ethics module would integrate teaching specific concepts and practices in computing alongside a critical reflection of these practices. Ideally, these modules would be flexible enough to fit into curricula at various institutions.

We report on an initial ethnographic exploration of the situation of sex-trafficking survivors in Nepal. In the course of studying trafficking survivors in a protected-living situation created by a non-governmental organization in Nepal, we adapted photo-elicitation to hear the voices of the survivors by making the technique more communal. Bringing sociality to the forefront of the method reduced the pressure on survivors to assert voices as individuals, allowing them to speak. We make three contributions to research. First, we propose a communal form of photo-elicitation as a method to elicit values in sensitive settings. Second, we present the complex circumstances of the survivors as they undergo rehabilitation and move towards life with a "new normal". Third, our work adds to HCI and CSCW literature on understanding specific concerns of trafficking survivors and aims to inform designs that can support reintegration of survivors in society. The values that the survivors hold and their notion of future opportunities suggest possession of limited but important social capital in some domains that could be leveraged to aid reintegration.

There is a growing need to use computers to formulate problems and their solutions across domains. It has thus become imperative that students across the globe be able to work with computing to express themselves. However, teaching computer science in a traditional way may not be possible in all settings. We studied a method to integrate computational thinking, the ability to express problems and their solutions to a computing device, into an existing science classroom with the goal of deepening learning in both science and computational thinking in a low-resource setting in Nepal. In this note, we present findings from the study. The proposed curricular method acknowledges local differences and presents a way to adapt to those differences through adaptable multiple layers of activities and representational variability. We hope that interested educators and development practitioners would try our method in classrooms.

This special issue on ethical matter(s) contains innovative and reflective scholarship focused on questions of ethics with human computer interaction (HCI) design research. Through this introductory piece, we articulate three trends influencing contemporary design research which are creating spaces of discomfort for many scholars as they acknowledge their positionality and responsibility. We introduce the articles developed for this special issue through the framing of ethical difficulties, dilemmas and paradoxes, recognizing that some issues may not be immediately resolvable. We argue that no matter which structures, principles or heuristics you commit to at the start of an HCI project, ethical conundrums are likely to develop. Through this piece, we are not suggesting that anyone is trying to achieve the status of moral saint within HCI design research. Rather, we offer you work crafted by scholars striving to improve their scholarship, working to address the question of ethical action in HCI research.

We investigate collocated triads as they play a collaborative, problem-solving game using distributed technology on laptops. We examine how different triads attain and maintain mutual understanding in triple-space--when working on a hard problem, with communicating technologies and face-to-face interaction. We present qualitative and quantitative evidence that demonstrates the descriptive adequacy of a model of triadic interaction in triple space. We use that model to argue that the notion of good-enoughness is not a group attribute, but rather tied to each dyadic pair. This intellectual framework allows us to examine how non- response operates within these triple-space interactions when interaction is supported by different media. The results related to non-response raise the possibility that different media may result in subtle influence on the balance of participant goals.

Much CSCW research predominantly focuses on investigating how distributed, mediated interactions are different from collocated interactions, but rarely looks at how the use of technologies affect collocated people. We argue that the needs for studying the impact of mediating technologies among collo

Previous research reports a number of different variables that affect group processes. We examine situations in "triple space", in which people must manage (1) complex problem-solving tasks, (2) social interaction, and (3) the meaning making process of the changing representation created by others on shared mediums. In this case, the complex problem-solving task is solving a shared Sudoku puzzle. Two findings follow from the current study. People in both the laptop and tablet conditions talked less than people in the paper-control condition, but only people in the laptop condition experienced a significant decrease in positive emotion.

The capacity to use information technology at levels required for functioning well in society is important for accessing employment and education opportunities, health information, and civic engagement. Low capacity levels are closely associated with low socioeconomic status (SES), as measured by education, literacy levels, and income. In a world in which many employers of low-skill workers, such as Walmart, require an online application, lack of information technology competence is truly a handicap. Nonetheless, an opening exists that may help to address this problem: A growing number of people with low SES already possess and use simple computing devices in the form of cell (i.e., mobile) phones. This article uses an interpretive frames approach to explain why some U.S. adults, primarily indigenous to Appalachian Virginia, with low SES and low computer literacy might be able to learn basic computing skills and knowledge through the use of their cell phones. The study explored these ideas through short questionnaires and interviews with a small group of low SES Appalachian adults as they participated in a few sessions of traditional-style basic computer training. This exploratory work falls into the area of determining interpretive frames used by local populations and is intended to help design larger studies leading to interface design and computer learning strategies and materials for low SES Appalachian groups that are culturally and cognitively sensitive to frame bridging theoretical approaches.

Socio-cultural analysis [18], design practice [20], and philosophy, stretching back at least to Rogoff, Rittle, and Heidegger, all point out that we arrive at different pictures of difficult problems depending on the frames within which we examine them [16]. Yet after all this time, this truism remains difficult to approach. What can we make of these different perspectives? This paper explores how one system, for classroom mathematics education, looks different from experimental, ethnographic, and ethnomethodological frames during the investigation and different again as we try to put the frames into relationship with one another, that is, as we create a framespace. These different frames contend with one another in defining the meaning and the design brief going forward. We coin the term framespace to describe the constituent set of frames and the relationships between them that must be understood to describe the summative results of the project.

Technologies increasingly inhabit evermore mundane and personal settings, a fact that has caused some designers to reflect upon the emergent, inaccessible nature of context. We present the notion of processlessness as a design value. The examples given here are intended to provoke thought about current design priorities and practices, and spur design discourse regarding the issue of context. Two cases illustrate how the absence of process in mediating artifacts can make room for users to discover, construct, and reconfigure context through and around their technologies. This argument is related to the notion of Zensign, that what we omit from technology designs is as important as what we put in; by adding features to computational systems, designers might be removing interactional possibilities.

Legacy web tools attempt to build on information that uses have when they originally conduct web research. In contrast, we examine the information that they have at the time when they attempt to recreate their past. We interviewed 11 non-expert users twice a week for eight weeks in their own physical and computational environments. We used both Google web histories and the prototype Research Trails system as prompts to probe how the participants viewed their past web experiences and how they reconstructed them. The Research Trails system lets users utilize information about both time and topic to help themselves remember and resume everyday research tasks. Based on these observations, a model of users' perceived past web activities informed the iterative refinement of the Research Trails system. The user may see a past action as belonging to multiple categories at the same time or as in different categories at different times.

This paper investigates whether and how digitally mediated social touch (remote touch) may influence the sense of connectedness toward a speaker and the emotional experience of what is being communicated. We employ an 'augmented' storytelling methodology where we manipulate the modality of an 'emotive' channel that accompanies the speech, and the contextual expectation of the listener. Comparing a remote upper-arm touch against a similarly timed flashing light, we explore the importance of the touch modality in affect conveyance. Our second manipulation involves two cover stories where the listener is told that the touch or flashing light is triggered either by the storyteller expressively squeezing a touch input device while speaking, or by measured 'high points' in the mental state of the storyteller. Our results show that the story accompanied by communicative touch resulted in a significant increase in the sense of connectedness with the storyteller over the speech-only condition, and a trend toward greater affective conveyance.

How is it that groups of people can complete joint tasks without the expected observable markers of "successful" coordination? The relationship between micro-level, situated actions and broader outcomes such as opportunities for learning is under-explored. We investigated co-located groups as they played a collaborative, problem-solving game using distributed technology on laptops. There was considerable variety in how groups accomplished the work. Some satisfied groups talked a lot but other satisfied groups did not. Talk was diagnostic of satisfaction but lack of talk was not diagnostic of dissatisfaction. In fact, groups that had little or no discourse differed considerably from one another. One kind of group completes the joint tasks very well without observable markers frequently associated with success. Others are less successful in the task goal but man-age difficult interpersonal situations.

Experience with the first offering of a computational thinking course for computer science (CT4CS) students is reported. The course is grounded in student interaction with fundamental, recurring concepts suggested by comparison with two sets of computer science principles. By using specialized, freely available tools and physical simulations it is possible to provide concrete, tangible learning experiences that neither require knowledge of nor the overhead of programming. Student end-of-term reflections indicate that the course deepened and broadened their understanding of computer science even when they had previously encountered a topic, and improved their computer science vocabulary.

Parallel thinking is a mindset that allows people to create support for activities that happen concurrently in a program. It crosscuts extant computer science boundaries, including parallel processing, network programming and multi-user systems, indeed, any system that involves the distribution and reintegration of work. Recent efforts to integrate parallelism across the CS curriculum begin to address the support of parallel thinking. We approach the pedagogy of parallel thinking by teaching students to model coordination explicitly using a specialized coordination language. We report a study of an experimental class taking this approach, finding that advanced CS students lack a good understanding of coordination but that the explicit modeling of coordination can address this lack.

Epistemological issues have long been debated by feminist philosophers aiming to answer the question, ''what difference does it make to take gendered points of view seriously in the construction of knowledge?'' Coming out of this history, a strand of work in feminist science studies has argued for the necessity of ''successor science:'' new forms of science based in standpoint epistemology, i.e. a recognition of the necessarily situated points of view of scientific knowledge-makers. In this paper, we argue that such a successor science has already come into being within the field of HCI, though it is perhaps not recognized as such by its practitioners. In particular, we identify a cluster of research we term the 'third paradigm.' This cluster of research cuts across HCI research areas as typically organized by topic area. Instead, this research shares an underlying epistemological orientation closely aligned with standpoint epistemology, focused around an acknowledgment of the social, cultural, and physical situatedness of both users and analysts. Feminist philosophers of science argue that a logical outcome of standpoint epistemology is the need for science to reflexively grapple with the limitations of its own ways of knowing; we conclude such an outcome may also be in store for the third paradigm.

Collaborative drumming is a creative human activity that requires a high degree of coordination among the participants. In this study, inexperienced drummer and experienced drummer participants were paired with a computer or experienced human drummer counterpart and given the task of producing musical rhythms on the fly. We found differing patterns of music production across the computer and human conditions. Participants intentionally and unintentionally assumed leadership roles depending on the dyad dynamic. Also noted were differences in the needs of inexperienced and experienced participants for visual and verbal cues for coordination. In our study, participants did not treat computers as other humans, but seemed to engage a more complex evaluation of the situation. This study contributes to the growing body of knowledge on how people respond to and interact with technology to accomplish complex, collaborative tasks.

A successful collaborative tool designed to aid discussion must be flexible, maintain the user's coordinative agency, and be appropriable in many contexts. We have developed a tool, called ThoughtSwap, to help widen and deepen the scope of participation in facilitated discussions while supporting, not supplanting, discussants' coordination. By driving the design of ThoughtSwap toward a simpler mechanism, we were able to create a more versatile, high-impact tool. We design for an educational setting, but see wider possible use.

From a design point of view, coordination is radically undertheorized and under-explored. Arguably, playground games are the universal, cross-cultural venue in which people learn about and explore coordination between one another, and between the worlds of articulated rules and the worlds of experience and action. They can therefore (1) teach us about the processes inherent in human coordination, (2) provide a model of desirable coordinative possibilities, and (3) act as a design framework from which to explore the relationship between game and game play---or, to put it in terms of an inherent tension in human-computer interaction, between plans and situated actions. When brought together with a computer language for coordination that helps us pare down coordinative complexity to essential components, we can create systems that have highly distributed control structures. In this paper, we present the design of four such student-created collaborative, distributed, interactive systems for face-to-face use. These take their inspiration from playground games with respect to who can play (plurality), how (appropriability) and to what ends (acompetitiveness). As it happens, our sample systems are themselves games; however, taking playground games as our model helps us create systems that support game play featuring not enforcement of plans but emergence of rules, roles, and turn taking.

This article introduces the notion of design tensions as a paradigm. The concept of design tensions advances design decisions as a focus for analysis and reflection. It admits many paradigms of analysis but emphasizes the balancing of considerations in producing an entire system, emphasizing user or user group experience. This paradigm is presented in relationship to a particular design arena, the design of NetCalc, a system of handheld, wirelessly connected tools for math teaching/learning in classroom settings. Six intertwined project tensions are presented and explored for their technical, social, and cognitive antecedents and consequences, as they play out in relationship to achieving goals and system potential. Design tensions differ from design spaces in that they do not set boundaries or simplify the problem but rather provide a framework for creating a space of relevance.

What does a student need to know to be a designer? Beyond a list of separate skills, what mindset does a student need to develop for designerly action now and into the future? In the excitement of the cognitive revolution, Simon proposed a way of thinking about design that promised to make it more manageable and cognitive: to think of design as a planning problem [11, 29]. Yet, as Suchman argued long ago [32], planning accounts may be applied to problems that are not at base accomplished by planning, to the detriment of design vision. This paper reports on a pedagogy that takes Suchman's criticism to heart and avoids dressing up design methods as more systematic and predictive than they in fact are. The idea is to teach design through exposure to not just one, but rather, many methods---that is, sets of rules or behaviors that produce artifacts for further reflection and development. By introducing a large number of design methods, decoupled from theories, models or frameworks, we teach (a) important cross-methodological regularities in competence as a designer, (b) that the practice of design can itself be designed and (c) that method choice affects design outcomes. This provides a rich and productive notion of design particularly necessary for the world of pervasive and ubiquitous computing.

Article Free Access Share on Video: Data for studying human-computer interaction Authors: W. E. Mackay Massachusetts Istitute of Technology Massachusetts Istitute of TechnologyView Profile , R. Guindon Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation Microelectronics and Computer Technology CorporationView Profile , M. M. Mantel Electric Data Systems Corporation Electric Data Systems CorporationView Profile , L. Suchman Xerox Palo Alto Research Center Xerox Palo Alto Research CenterView Profile , D. G. Tatar Xerox Palo Alto Research Center Xerox Palo Alto Research CenterView Profile Authors Info & Claims CHI '88: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing SystemsMay 1988 Pages 133–137https://doi.org/10.1145/57167.57189Published:01 May 1988Publication History 15citation544DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations15Total Downloads544Last 12 Months56Last 6 weeks6 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

WYSIWIS (What You See Is What I See) is a foundational abstraction for multiuser interfaces that expresses many of the characteristics of a chalkboard in face-to-face meetings. In its strictest interpretation, it means that everyone can also see the same written information and also see where anyone else is pointing. In our attempts to build software support for collaboration in meetings, we have discovered that WYSIWIS is crucial, yet too inflexible when strictly enforced. This paper is about the design issues and choices that arose in our first generation of meeting tools based on WYSIWIS. Several examples of multiuser interfaces that start from this abstraction are presented. These tools illustrate that there are inherent conflicts between the needs of a group and the needs of individuals, since user interfaces compete for the same display space and meeting time. To help minimize the effect of these conflicts, constraints were relaxed along four key dimensions of WYSIWIS: display space, time of display, subgroup population, and congruence of view. Meeting tools must be designed to support the changing needs of information sharing during process transitions, as subgroups are formed and dissolved, as individuals shift their focus of activity, and as the group shifts from multiple parallel activities to a single focused activity and back again.

WYSIWIS (What You See Is What I See) is a foundational abstraction for multi-user interfaces that expresses many of the characteristics of a chalkboard in face-to-face meetings. In its strictest interpretation, it means that everyone can see the same written information and also where anyone else is pointing. We present several examples of multi-user interfaces that start from the WYSIWIS abstraction. In our attempts to build software support for collaboration in meetings, we have discovered that WYSIWIS is at once crucial and too inflexible in its strictest sense. WYSIWIS must be relaxed for all our software tools to better accommodate important interactions in meetings. Relaxations to WYSIWIS are characterized in terms of constraints on its four key dimensions: display space, time of display, subgroup population, and congruence of view.