A Whirlwind Tour of CSCW Research Joseph F. McCarthy Intel Research, Seattle (Elizabeth F. Churchill FX Palo Alto Laboratory) Overview Traditional CSCW Background, Influences, Technologies Case study (Palen & Grudin) Calendar use in the workplace
Non-traditional CSCW Beyond the workplace Case Studies MusicFX: A system for Computer Supported Collaborative Workouts Proactive Displays Others What is CSCW? Computer Supported Cooperative Work The field of CSCW focuses on the use of technology to mediate interactions among people
Use: Ethnography, design, Technology: Devices, infrastructures, Interactions: Text, audio, video, People: Teams, organizations, communities, Psychology, organizational behavior, sociology, HCI vs. CSCW HCI: human-computer interaction
Individuals interactions and relationships with information technology May involve > 1 person, but not necessarily CSCW: human-computer-human interaction Individuals interactions and relationships through information technology Always > 1 person Evolution of CSCW Computer Supported Cooperative Work Work is [typically] a social activity involving > 1 person Technology can aid and abet:
Foreground: Communication, coordination, collaboration Background: Awareness Bridging time, space, organizational boundaries, Computer Supported Cooperative Whatever Beyond the workplace: increasingly available in other contexts Home, car, coffee shops, public places, private places, and applied to non-work activities Socializing, recreation, staying in touch, Trends
Convergence Computing, telephony, broadcast media Mobility ( Ubiquity) Devices: Laptops, PDAs, mobile phones Infrastructure: WiFi, {2,2.5,3}G, EDGE Communities Professional (communities of practice) Others (Ebay.com, match.com, meetup.com) Goals Efficiency vs. fun
CSCW has many influences Computer Science Engineering Sociology: macro and micro
Psychology Organisational Studies Management Studies Anthropology Communication Ethnography CSCW research has many perspectives Hard Determinism Behaviour is inevitably shaped by technology Soft Determinism
Behaviour tends to be shaped by technology Co-Determinism Technology and our intentions control in concert Non-Determinism We control the uses of technology
Dimensions of Cooperation: Time and Space Place/Space Same Time Same Different Synchronous (immediate)
technologies Synchronous (immediate) technologies Local Remote Different Asynchronous Asynchronous (delayed) technologies
(delayed) technologies Local Remote
F2F interactions Post-its Telephony Email
Newsgroups Text chat (IM, SMS) Calendar / scheduling Electronic whiteboards Audio / video conferencing App. / data sharing Group editing / annotation GDSS Dataflow, workflow Expertise location Recommendation Systems
Awareness (media spaces) See Bannon and Schmidt, 1991: CSCW: Four Characters in Search of a Context. In Bowers, J. and Benford, S. (Eds) Studies in Computer Supported Cooperative Work Theory, Practice and Design. North Holland. Thinking of activities from focused to peripheral Awareness Shared experience Social activities Informal interactions Reciprocity and symmetry are important for collaborative tasks
Locating colleagues Office sharing Meetings Focused work tasks See Harrison and Bly CSCW focuses on people working (interacting) with others Community; customers Organization Project/Teams Small Groups
Individuals HCI Networked PCs; PDAs, cellphones Workspaces; Media spaces; video conferencing GDSS; Workflow; Workspaces; Media spaces Intranets; document repositories; expertise location Internet; WWW From Grudin, 1994
CSCW Team and Small Group Characteristics Characteristics Members know each other Collaborate to achieve a common goal Highly focused, interactive Strong need for communication
Examples Software development team, proposal writing, conference program committees, small operational groups such as customer support, research project teams Support technologies include: Buddy lists, instant messaging, chat, Groove, Quickplace, BSCW, video conferencing, data conferencing See Grudin and Poltrock, Tutorial Collaboration
Technology in Teams, Organizations, and Communities Organization Characteristics Characteristics Geographically distributed Hierarchical management structure Strong need for coordination Examples Companies, governments or government agencies, non-profit organizations Support technologies include: Email, calendars, workflow, Lotus Notes, intranet
applications and webs, document management systems, broadcast video Community Characteristics Characteristics Members do not [all] know each other Common interests or preferences Loose structure & interactions Examples
Citizens of a city or neighborhood Newsgroups Virtual world citizens Auction participants Support technologies include: web sites, chat rooms, virtual worlds Issues: reputation, accountability, anonymity Civic support often suffers from uneven participation
Lurkers Tragedy of the Commons Groupware vs. Communityware Groupware Medium for contacting and interacting with known collaborators in order to achieve a shared goal Email, Calendars, Chat, Whiteboards, Conferencing Communityware Medium for initiating contact / transactions with unknown collaborators who have similar interests and preferences
Newsgroups, Ebay, Amazon, Epinions, Meetup.com, Match.com Case Study: Shared Calendars Adoption of Groupware Managerial Mandate (decide to use) Discretionary Choice (begin to use) Effort / benefit tradeoff Benefit to managers, admins Effort required by contributors Critical mass required [nearly] all or nothing
Discretionary Adoption of Group Support Software: Lessons from Calendar Applications. L. Palen and J. Grudin, 2002. In B.E. Munkvold (Ed.), Implementing collaboration technologies in organizations, 159-180. Studies of Calendar Use Initial interviews (Microsoft) 5 subjects; different positions, departments More interviews (Sun) 40 questions 12 subjects (users, non-users) Survey (both)
20 questions 3000 people (each site) Microsoft: 30% response rate Sun: 50% response rate Similarities Widespread adoption (75% of appts) Sun: 81% Microsoft: 75% Mundane technology Part of everyday work Hard to imagine life without it
Differences Sun CalendarManager Default (82%): open calendars User name + host computer name Company rolodex Scheduling, coordinating (inferences) Microsoft Schedule+ Default (81%): free/busy (only) Scheduling only
Factors affecting adoption Peer pressure widespread expectation plus me, browse me Exclusive benefits (conf. rooms) Integration (email invitations) Interface transparency & efficiency Technical support
Case Study: Intel intel.com vs. intel-research.net Case Study: Shared Environment MusicFX Proactive Displays Displays that can sense and respond appropriately to the people and activities taking place in their vicinity
Displays Sensors Contexts Content Interaction Models Ambient Displays Dangling String (PARC) Bus Mobile (UC Berkeley)
Proactive Displays in the Large Sunset @ 200MHz (PARC) Love Board (Hachiko Crossing) Proactive Displays in the Large Alaris E-boards (www.alaris.net) Proactive Displays at a Conference AutoSpeakerID
Ticket2Talk Neighborhood Window - Q/A session - Photo,name,affiliation - Coffee break - Explicit content - One person (at a time) - Lounge area - Implicit content - Multiple people
Experience UbiComp Project Desire for mutual revelation show & tell about you & your work; learn about others & their work Restricted contexts Paper / panel sessions Demo / poster sessions Reception / breaks Available content Explicit: registration info Implicit: homepage data mining
Stakeholders people who influence, and are influenced by, displayed content UbiComp 2003 Deployment Register (create profile) www.proactivedisplays.org WiFi available throughout conference Activate Associate profile with RFID tag (kiosk)
Participate Insert RFID tag into badge sleeve Approach a Proactive Display Opt out at any time Delete information / profile Remove RFID tag Registration Activation
Evaluation Survey (as of Nov. 6, 2003) 500 attendees 250 participants 70 respondents (48 were participants) AutoSpeakerID Ticket2Talk Neighborhood Window Positive 52 30
17 Negative 5 3 2 No Impact 11 26 28 No Response 2
11 23 Experiences AutoSpeakerID 50% of questioners tags detected Oral only, visual only, visual + oral Fun with picture, name and/or affiliation Im the real Ticket2Talk Conversations, awareness about new & old
Whos ?! Neighborhood Window Similar to T2T, though more of a novelty factor (and more noise) red bishops Death Valley PlasmaPoster Churchill, et al., FXPAL An interactive display poster board / bulletin board / billboard
content as conversational props complement/spur to online interaction social networks and social capital GroupWear Nametags GroupWear Nametags Richard Borovoy, Fred Martin, Mitch Resnick, Brian Silverman (MIT Media Lab) CHI 98
Interpersonal augmentation facilitating interaction between people, not people & machines interpersonal displays: display for other people Q&A: programmed by dunking in bucket kiosks issue: how to augment but not distract lights indicate percentage of similar views, not identifying individual questions nTAGs Networking Applications
Common Ground Idea Sharing Card Exchange Network Tracking and Visualizations Networking Games Event Management Applications
Lead Capture Polls and Surveys Attendance Tracking and Security Digital Tickets Event Information Message Delivery
www.ntag.com i-balls Folk Computing: Revisiting Oral Histories as a Scaffold for Co-Present Communities Rick Borovoy, et al., MIT Media Lab CHI 2001 i-balls: key-chain computer programs Key-chain-sized video game devices (SEGA / DreamCast) Animations, games, etc. Hot potatoes, Quests, Randomizers, Hitchers, Secret i-balls, Multi-author i-balls Create, trade, track, teach (everyone, everywhere)
i-balls Familiar Stranger http://berkeley.intel-research.net/paulos/research/familiarstranger/ Media Spaces Media Spaces: Environments for Informal Multimedia Interaction PARC, EuroPARC, 1980s-90s Support for informal, unplanned and unstructured interactions Summary paper by Wendy Mackay
In Michel Beaudouin-Lafon, editor, ComputerSupported Cooperative Work, Trends in Software Series. John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 1999 http://www-ihm.lri.fr/~mackay/pdffiles/ TRENDS99.Mediaspaces.pdf RAVE Portholes Passive awareness Distributed workgroups No explicit video connections Hole-In-Space
http://www.ecafe.com/getty/HIS/ Norm While (Telephonic Arm Wrestling, 1986) A collaborative telecommunications project to allow contestants in two different cities to arm-wrestle, using motorized force-transmitting systems interconnected by a telephone data link. First succcessfully exhibited during a 1986 link-up between the Canadian Cultural Centre, Paris, and the Artculture Resource Centre, Toronto. Sponsored by the McLuhan Programme (Director: Prof. Derrick DeKerkhove), University of Toronto. Materials: Steel, Plexiglas, motors, custom electronics, see http://www.normill.com/artpage.html RobotPHONE (RUI for Interpersonal Communication)
Dairoku Sekiguchi, et al., Univ. of Tokyo RobotPHONE: RUI for Interpersonal Communication CHI 2001 Extended Abstracts http://www.star.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/ Tele-existence RobotPHONE Shape-sharing Snakes Teddy Bears
PRoPs PRoP: Personal Roving Presence Eric Paulos & John Canny, UCB http://www.prop.org Tele-embodiment in a remote real place casual, unstructured, spontaneous interactions, away from PC simple, inexpensive, internet-controlled, untethered tele-robots mobile physical proxy (vs. image / voice on stationary screen)
Two prototypes Space Browser (blimp): 600 grams color video camera, microphone, speaker, wireless radio, batteries Surface Cruiser (cart) remote-control vehicle (dampened), 1.5m vertical pole same equipment as blimp + LCD screen & pointer The Brain Ball BrainBall is a game unlike others. The
"winner" is the player who can relax under stress rather than the player who is the most aggressive. Brain waves recorded from the scalp of the players are processed to extract the alpha activity, which reflects a relaxed state of mind. The motion of a ball on the table is controlled by the difference in the alpha activity between the two players. BrainBall By Moberg Research, Inc. http://smart.interactiveinstitute.se/smart/projects/brainball/index_en.html Interactive Institute Stockholm
Brainball PingPongPlus PingPongPlus Craig Wisneski, Julian Orbanes, Hiroshi Ishii Things That Think, Digital Life (MIT Media Lab) CHI 98 http://tangible.media.mit.edu/projects/PingPongPlus/PingPongPlus.html Computer Supported Collaborative Play augmented reality + tangible bits, in athletic scenario
a computer game in the physical world transforms game: competition --> collaboration ball tracking via microphone array + sound source localization (1) water ripple, blackout, thunderstorm, painting, comets SIGGRAPH 98 another project: BilliardsPlus The BabySense Environment The BabySense Environment Gili Weinberg, Rich Fletcher, Seum-Lim Gan Hyperinstruments Group, Physics & Media Group
(MIT Media Lab) CHI 98 http://web.media.mit.edu/~gili/research/projects.html#7 Toys to Grow With, Toys to Communicate With self-enrichment, monitoring, interaction Enhance infants sensory-motor experience Pressure sensor mattress (fabric electrodes) Mobile sculpture (with lights & sound)
Foreground display: toy panda bear (lights & sound) Background display: kinesthetic sculpture (lights) Infant interaction Move one toy, other toy (in another crib) responds For more information Joe McCarthy seattleweb.intel-reseach.net/people/mccarthy [email protected] Proactive Displays www.proactivedisplays.org
UbiComp 2003 ubicomp.org/ubicomp2003 Thanks! Questions?
