Transcript Introduction - Andrew T. Duchowski

Chapter 4:
Designing for Collaboration
and Communication
Presented by Team 1:
Matt Bergstein
Kevin Clark
Carol Lawson
Angelo Mitsopoulos
Phil Townsend
Introduction
Humans are inherently social
Naturally, we need to develop interactive systems that support
different kinds of sociality
Main aims of the chapter:

what is meant by communication and collaboration

Describe the main kinds of social mechanisms that are used by
people to communicate and collaborate

Outline this range of collaborative systems that have been
developed to support this kind of social behavior

Consider how field studies and socially-based theories can
inform the design of collaborative systems.
4.2 Social Mechanisms in
Communication and Collaboration.
Fundamental aspect of everyday life: Talking

Passing of knowledge from one person to another.
Kinds of knowledge and frequency can and will vary.
Types also varies: F2F, Phone, Videophone, messaging, email, fax,
and letters.
In F2F, non-verbal clues play a big part in enhancing the
communication mechanism
Also, social mechanisms and practices have evolved to maintain
social order.
4.2 Social Mechanisms in
Communication and Collaboration.
3 Main categories of social mechanisms and explore how
technological systems have been and can be designed to
facilitate these:
1. The use of conversational mechanisms to facilitate the flow of
talking and help overcome breakdowns during it.
2. The use of coordination mechanisms to allow people to work
and interact together.
3. The use of awareness mechanisms to find out what is
happening, what others are doing and, conversely, to let other
know what is happening.
4.2.1 Conversational Mechanisms
Talking is effortless and comes naturally to most people, yet holding
a conversation is a highly skilled collaborative achievement.
What makes up a conversation:
Rules allow people to know how to start and stop.
Throughout the conversation 3 “turn-taking” rules enable people to
know when to listen, when to speak, and when to stop speaking.

Rule 1 – The current speaker chooses the next speaker by
asking an opinion, question, or request.

Rule 2 – Another person decides to start speaking.

Rule 3 – The current speaker continues talking.
The rules are assumed to be applied in the above order.
4.2.1 Conversational Mechanisms
Explicit statement or implicit clues can also be indication of change
of speaker.
Adjacency Pairs: Utterances are assumed to come in pairs in which
the first part sets up an expectation of what is to come next and
directs the way it is heard.
Conversation rules can be broken by interrupting, missed cues, etc.
Other types of breakdowns occur from ambiguous language or
misinterpretation.
Detecting breakdowns requires the other person to be attentive to
sat the other says.
“What?” “Huh?”
Kinds of Conversations
Conversation can take a variety of forms, such as argument,
discussion, heated debate, chat, etc.
Two main types are formal and informal.
In formal conversation, people assign roles to each other before the
conversation begins. Informal is chatty and laid back.
Designing Collaborative
Technologies to Support
Conversation
Challenge confronting designers: how different kinds of
communication can be used in settings where obstacles
can prevent it from occurring “naturally”.
Goal for designers: to develop a system to all people to
communicate when they are in physically different
locations. Make it so they can communicate as if the
where in the same place (even though they may be very
far apart).
Collaborative Technologies
Ex. -Email, video conferencing, videophones, computer
conferencing, chatrooms, and messaging.
Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVE) – less familiar

Virtual 3D graphical worlds where users can explore the created
world and communicate with others. (figure 4.1 color plate 5)
Media Spaces – distributed systems comprised of audio,
video, and computer systems that allow people that are
separated over space and time to communicate as if
they were physically present.
Computer Mediated Communication
(CMC)
Collaborative technologies designed to support
informal/formal and one-to-one/many-to-many
types of communication.
Three types:



Synchronous
Asynchronous
CMC combined with other activity
Synchronous Communication
Conversation in real-time by voice or typing.

Examples
voice: video phone, video conferencing, media spaces
typing: text messaging in cell phone, instant messaging, chat rooms, CVE
New Functionality


Allow users to create themselves as virtual characters in any way (different
gender) and express themselves in a way not possible in face-to-face
conversation
Instant messaging allows multitasking
Benefits



Shy people converse more
In business it allows people to keep track of goings-on in organization
Ask questions and get responses quickly (no phone-tag)
Problems



Bandwidth
Eye Contact
Behavior differs when behind created persona
Asynchronous Communication
communication that takes place remotely and at different times
not time-dependent, participants initiate communication and respond to
others when they want to

Examples
Email, bulletin boards, newsgroups, computer conferencing

New Functionality
Attachments (annotations, images, music) for email
Messages can be archived

Benefits
Can read (communicate) any place, any time
Can send same message to many people
Makes some things easier to say

Problems
Angry emails can include language that would not occur in face-to-face conversation
Too many messages
Replying whenever they feel like it or have time
CMC Combined With Other Activity
Talking while performing some other activity

(Ex. Teacher speaks to student but also writes problems on board for notes and
to solve collaboratively)
Examples



Customized electronic meeting rooms – face-to-face meetings via workstations,
large displays.
Networked classrooms
Shared authoring and drawing tools
New Functionality

New ways of collaboratively creating and editing documents
Benefits



Multitasking
Speed and Efficiency
Greater Awareness
Problems


Can be difficult to see what other people are referring to in remote locations
File conflicts by working on same text or design
New Kinds of Interaction
ClearBoard

developed to show facial expressions to others
HyperMirror

designed to make participants feel as though they
were in the same place
Coordination Mechanisms
Coordination takes place when a group of
people act or interact together to achieve
something.

(ex. Team game, moving a piano, etc.)
People need to figure out how to interact with
one another to achieve a goal

Some examples would be:
Verbal and non-verbal communication
Schedules, rules and conventions
Shared external representations
Verbal and Non-Verbal
Communication
When people are working closely together they talk to
each other by:

Informal:
Issuing commands
Letting others know how they are progressing (e.g. piano example)

Formal:
Agendas
Memos
Minutes
Time Critical and Difficult to hear:


Gestures
Hand Signals (e.g. conductors, ground marshals)
Rules, Schedules, and Conventions
How can we organize?
A schedule is an excellent way however they
must adhere to certain rules and regulation in
order for them to exist efficiently.
These rules and conventions allow schedules to
exist in an orderly manner (e.g. keeping quiet in
the library, raising your hand in class)
Shared External Representations
Used in coordinating groups

(e.g. graphical charts, email reminders, dialog boxes)
How can this be used in the workplace:

Shared tables can plot who has completed what, to
whom, and when it was completed
This helps everyone visually acknowledge
where everyone is at in a project
Awareness Mechanisms
Peripheral Awareness:

Human’s ability to maintain and update their sense of
physical and social awareness
How you act at a party:




Are people in a good or bad mood
How fast food and drinks are digested
Who enters and exits the room
Is the lonely guy in the corner finally talking
Study or work environment:


If boss is slamming doors: not a good time for a raise
People allow others to monitor them:
Back in ? Signs
Open dorm room doors
Designing Collaborative
Technologies to Support
Coordination and Awareness
Coordination:
 Too little control and the system breaks down
 Too much control and the users rebel
e.g. File locking
Awareness:
 Audio-Video links
 Portholes
4.3 Ethnographic Studies of
Collaboration and Communication
Approach to determine how the design of collaborative technologies
take into account social concerns
Make observations of the setting, examining the current work and
other collaborative practices people engage in
Analyze the way existing technologies and everyday artifacts are
used
Observations provide a basis from which to consider how such
existing settings might be improved or enhanced with new
technologies
Expose problematic assumptions about how collaborative
technologies will or should be used in a setting
Two Studies by Lucy Suchman
Early study by Lucy Suchman (1983) looked at the way existing
office technologies were being designed in relation to how people
actually worked
She argued that designers should consider the actual details of work
practice
Later study by Suchman (1987) on pairs of users interacting with an
interactive help system
She stressed the need for analysis that focused on the unique
details of the user’s particular situation to improve the design of
interactive systems
http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/lsuchman.html
4.4 Conceptual Frameworks
Analytic frameworks and concepts that are more
amenable to design concerns
1) Language/Action Framework
describes how a model of the way people communicate was
used to inform the design of a collaborative technology
2) Distributed Cognition
describes a theory that is used primarily to analyze how
people carry out their work, using a variety of technologies
4.4.1 The Language/Action
Framework
Basic premise: people act through language
Developed to inform the design of systems to help
people work more effectively through improving the way
they communicate with one another
Based on various theories of how people use language
in their everyday activities
Speech Act Theory


concerned with the functions utterances have in conversations
common function is request that is asked indirectly
Five Categories of Speech Acts
Assertives

commit the speaker to something being the case
Commissives

commit the speaker to some future action
Declarations

pronounce something has happened
Directives

get the listener to do something
Expressives

express a state of affairs, such as apologizing or praising someone
CfA - Conversations for Action
Language/Action approach was developed further into a
framework called conversations for actions (CfA)
CfA describes the sequence of actions that can follow
from a speaker making a request of someone else
Conversation is a kind of “dance”
Most straightforward dance involves linear progression
(step 1 through step 5)
Conversation, in reality, is more complex where steps
may be repeated or branch off
The Coordinator
CfA framework was used as the basis of a conceptual model for the
Coordinator
Was designed to enable electronic messages to be sent between people in
the form of explicit speech acts
If the sender wanted to ask someone for something, the tag “request” was
placed in the message subject header
Sender speech act options included: request, offer, promise, inform, and
question.
Receivers that wished to respond with another labeled speech act could
choose from: acknowledge, promise, counter-offer, decline, or free form
Coordinator was designed to provide a straightforward conversational
structure
How was the Coordinator Received
by Users?
Forcing users to explicitly specify the nature of
their implicit speech acts was contrary to what
they normally do in conversation and was
therefore undesirable
Many people who tried the Coordinator System
either abandoned it or resorted to using the freeform format (defeating the purpose of the
system!)
4.4.2 Distributed Cognition
Ed Hutchins and his colleagues developed the distributed cognition
approach as a new paradigm for conceptualizing human work
activities

(see Figure 4.15 on page 133)
Describes what happens in a cognitive system

how people interact with one another and their use of artifacts and
external representations in their everyday and working activities
An example of a cognitive system is an airline cockpit where a
number of people (pilot, co-pilot, air traffic controller), artifacts
(multiple instruments) and environments (sky, runway) are involved
in the activity of flying to a higher altitude
http://hci.ucsd.edu/lab
Distributed Cognition Analysis
Involves Examining:
The distributed problem solving that takes place (including the way people
work together to solve a problem)
The role of verbal and non-verbal behavior (including what is said, what is
implied by glances, winks, etc., and what is not said)
The various coordinating mechanisms that are used (e.g., rules, procedures)
The various communicative pathways that take place as a collaborative
activity progresses
How knowledge is shared and accessed
Also important in the analysis is: identifying the problems, breakdowns, and
concomitant problem-solving processes that emerge to deal with them.
Uses: to aid in designing and evaluating new collaborative technologies