Chapter 4: Designing for Collaboration and Communication

1. Chapter 4:Designing for Collaboration and Communication Presented by Team 1: Matt Bergstein Kevin Clark Carol Lawson Angelo Mitsopoulos Phil Townsend

2. 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.

3. 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. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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?”

7. 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.

8. 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).

9. 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.

10. 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

11. 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

12. 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

13. 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

14. 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

15. 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

16. 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)

17. 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)

18. 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

19. 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

20. 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

21. 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

22. 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

23. 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

24. 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

25. 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

26. 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

27. 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

28. 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 free-form format (defeating the purpose of the system!)

29. 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

30. 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