Computer Supported Cooperative Work – serie

It will also be of value to students and researchers in science and technology studies and visual culture, as a fascinating case study of the evolving use of photographs and photographic technology in Western society.

Software design is becoming increasingly complex and difficult as we move to applications that support people interacting with information and with each other over networks. Computer supported co-operative work applications are a typical example of this. The problems to be solved are no longer just technical, they are also social: how do we build systems that meet the real needs of the people who are asked to use them and that fit into their contexts of use. We can characterise these as wicked problems, where our traditional software engineering techniques for understanding requirements and driving these through into design are no longer adequate. This book presents the "Locales Framework" - and its five aspects of "locale foundations", "civic structures", "individual views", "interaction trajectory" and "mutuality" - as a way of dealing with the intertwined problem-solution space of wicked problems. A locale is based on a metaphor of place as the lived relationship between people and the spaces and resources they use in their interactions.This text provides a coherent mediating framework for ethnographers, designers, and software engineers to facilitate both understanding requirements of complex social situations and designing solutions to support these situations in all their complexity.

Public and situated display technologies can have an important impact on individual and social behaviour and present us with particular interesting new design considerations and challenges. While there is a growing body of research exploring these design considerations and social impact this work remains somewhat disparate, making it difficult to assimilate in a coherent manner. This book brings together the perspectives of key researchers in the area of public and situated display technology. The chapters detail research representing the social, technical and interactional aspects of public and situated display technologies. The underlying concern common to these chapters is how these displays can be best designed for collaboration, coordination, community building and mobility. Presenting them together allows the reader to examine everyday display activities within the context of emerging technological possibilities.This book is intended as a foundational text for researchers and practitioners in the areas of CSCW, Ubiquitous Computing and HCI as well as a useful reference for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students on HCI, psychology, information systems and computer science courses.

There are many practitioner books on different branches and styles of photography (e.g. landscape, studio, American, etc). Some of these even cover digital photography, as it exists today. However, there are very few research books on the meaning and practice of domestic photography, and almost none on the potential impact of digital technology on this important and widespread behaviour. Audiophotography combines a detailed 'user studies' approach to photography, with consumers' own critiques of new media content they have generated themselves. It is therefore a new book about domestic photography and its possible transformation with digital technology. Although it focusses on the role of sound in photography, it does so in relation to a new theory of photography which is tested and refined by empirical research. Such work is timely because of current interest in new media forms and the wide variety of new photography and video products and services emerging in the consumer market. It defines a new media type, audiophotos, and how it works, and should help readers to understand the possible benefits of other innovations in the digital photography industry.

If you read the history of any new communication medium such as the cinema, television or radio, it always happens to be bound up with advances in some underlying technology. For example, cinema was born out of the rapid projection of a series of still images on a celluloid film strip. The difficulty of synchronizing sound recordings with the resulting moving images led to about 30 years of silent films - until such time as the technical problems were solved. In between the inventions, media seem to grow and develop at a slower pace, as content producers and consumers experiment with the most satisfactory and stimulating ways of communicating with each other. In the same example, silent film-makers eventually found ways of adding dialogue through scene titles and having music played during the projection of their films. This book is about the next chapter in the history of photography, which is emerging from a relatively stable period into a chaos of new inventions. Photography as we know it is at the same point as the silent films of 1926. The transition from analog to digital photography is spawning many new ways of taking, manipulating and sharing photographs. It is also bringing photography and videography closer together by unifying sound, still and moving images in the same digital medium.

SMS or Text is one of the most popular forms of messaging. Yet, despite its immense popularity, SMS has remained unexamined by science. Not only that, but the commercial organisations, who have been forced to offer SMS by a demanding public, have had very little idea why it has been successful. Indeed, they have, until very recently, planned to replace SMS with other messaging services such as MMS. This book is the first to bring together scientific studies into the values that ‘texting’ provides, examining both cultural variation in countries as different as the Philippines and Germany, as well as the differences between SMS and other communications channels like Instant Messaging and the traditional letter. It presents usability and design research which explores how SMS will evolve and what is likely to be the pattern of person-to-person messaging in the future. In short, The Inside Text is a fundamental resource for anyone interested in mobile communications at the start of the 21st Century.

separated by the exigencies of the design life cycle into another compartment, that makes invisible the (prior) technical work of engineers that is not directly pertinent to the application work of practitioners. More recently (and notably after the work of Greisemer and Star) the black box has been opened and infrastructure has been discussed in terms of the social relations of an extended group of actors that includes developers. Ethical and political issues are involved (cf f accountable computing). Writing broadly within this context, Day (chapter 11) proposes that the concept of 'surface' can assist us to explore space as the product of 'power and the affective and expressive role for materials', rather than the background to this. Surfaces are the 'variously textured…sites for mixtures between bodies', and are thus the 'sites for events'. The notions of 'folding' and 'foldability' and 'unfolding' are discussed at length, as metaphors that account for the interactions of bodies in space across time. Some of the contributors to this volume focus on ways in which we may experience multiple infrastructures. Dix and his colleagues, for example, in chapter 12 explore a complex of models - of spatial context, of 'mixed reality boundaries' and of human spatial understanding across a number of field projects that make up the Equator project to explain the ways in which co-existing multiple spaces are experienced.

Everyday Innovators explores the active role of people, collectively and individually, in shaping the use of information and communication technologies. It examines issues around acquiring and using that knowledge of users, how we should conceptualise the role of users and understand the forms and limitations of their participation.To what extent should we think of users as being innovative and creative?To what extent is this routine or exceptional, confined to particular group of users or part of many people’s experience of technologies?Where does the nature of the ICT or the particularities of its design impose constraints on the active role that users can play in their interaction with devices and services?Where do the horizons and orientations of the users influence or limit what they want and expect of their ICTs and how they use them?This book enables a cross-fertilisation of perspectives from different disciplines and aims to provide new insights into the role of users, drawing out both applied and theoretical implications

eLearning and Digital Publishing will occupy a unique niche in the literature accessed by library and publishing specialists, and by university teachers and planners. It examines the interfaces between the work done by four groups of university staff who have been in the past quite separate from, or only marginally related to, each other—library staff, university teachers, university policy makers, and staff who work in university publishing presses. All four groups are directly and intimately connected with the main functions of universities—the creation, management and dissemination of knowledge in a scholarly and reflective manner. This book provides a framework which clearly portrays the relationships between information literacy, eLearning and digital publishing. The structure of the book has three main sections: the first has primarily an educational focus, the second a focus on digital publishing, and the third builds on the first two sections to examine overall implications for the growth of knowledge and scholarly communication.

Avatars at Work and Play brings together contributions from leading social scientists and computer scientists who have conducted research on virtual environments used for collaboration and online gaming. They present a well-rounded and state-of-the-art overview of current applications of multi-user virtual environments, ranging from highly immersive virtual reality systems to internet-based virtual environments on personal computers. The volume is a follow-up to a previous essay collection, ‘The Social Life of Avatars’, which explored general issues in this field. This collection goes further, examining uses of shared virtual environments in practical settings such as scientific collaboration, distributed meetings, building models together, and others. It also covers online gaming in virtual environments, which has attracted hundreds of thousands of users and presents an opportunity for studying a myriad of social issues. Covering both ‘work’ and ‘play’, the volume brings together issues common to the two areas, including:What kind of avatar appearance is suitable for different kinds of interaction? How best to foster collaboration and promote usable shared virtual spaces? What kinds of activities work well in different types of virtual environments and systems?

Collects together the studies of music consumption, and developments in music technology. This book combines the perspectives of both social scientists and technology designers, uncovering how music technologies are actually being used. It is useful for those designing new music technologies, and those working in the music industry.

This book encapsulates some work done in the DIRC project concerned with trust and responsibility in socio-technical systems. It brings together a range of disciplinary approaches - computer science, sociology and software engineering - to produce a socio-technical systems perspective on the issues surrounding trust in technology in complex settings. Computer systems can only bring about their purported benefits if functionality, users and usability are central to their design and deployment. Thus, technology can only be trusted in situ and in everyday use if these issues have been brought to bear on the process of technology design, implementation and use. The studies detailed in this book analyse the ways in which trust in technology is achieved and/or worked around in everyday situations in a range of settings - including hospitals, a steelworks, a public enquiry, the financial services sector and air traffic control. Whilst many of the authors here may already be known for their ethnographic work, this book moves on from accounts of 'field studies' to show how the DIRC project has utilised the data from these studies in an interdisciplinary fashion, involving computer scientists, software engineers and psychologists, as well as sociologists. Chapters draw on the empirical studies but are organised around analytical themes related to trust which are at the heart of the authors' socio-technical approach which shows the nuanced ways in which technology is used, ignored, refined and so on in everyday settings.

In the present digital revolution we often seem trapped in a Kafkaesque world of technological advances, some desired, some disliked or even feared, which we cannot influence but must accept. This book discusses the urgent need to redress this situation. The authors argue that technologies succeed or fail according to their relevance and value to people, who need to be actively engaged in order to create shared visions and influence their implementation. Strategies for citizen engagement and empowerment will enable citizens to influence and shape desirable digital futures. The book reviews the currently accepted ways of thinking about the design of systems and the reasons why these methods are no longer adequate. From an academically rigorous analysis of case histories across a wide variety of sectors, knowledge and best practice are captured in a rich, descriptive model of the contributions of citizen engagement to the design process. Finally, it provides specific practical guidance, based on sound academic research, for policy makers, administrators and ICT professionals on the strategies, methodologies, tools and techniques needed to change design practice.

This book aims at capitalizing and transmitting know-how about the design of Augmented Environments (AE) from some of the most prominent laboratories in the field worldwide. The authors belong to the RUFAE network (Research on User- Friendly Augmented Environments, founded in 2002) who meet in research seminars to share experience; Writing this book was perceived as an opportunity to look back over the last few years to sum up important findings; and formalize their approach and experience, which they never had the time or opportunity to do. Although the authors of this book have very different backgrounds, striking similarities emerge in their approach and design principles: never-endingness, activity-orientedness, continuous design, realism are some of the pillars of this approach; enabling to deal with the complex, heterogeneous, multi-user and mul- purpose constructions which AE designers have to face. The book illustrates how these principles enabled them to construct robust, ef- cient, and user-friendly Augmented Environments in spite of the many challenges to make these operational. We hope their experience will help the reader. Primary audience: Academics, Students and Professionals involved in the CHI, CSCW, Ubicomp, Cooperative Building communities. Computer Scientists int- ested by end-users and applications, Social Scientists operating in the IT domain, IT & Organization Consultants. Secondary audience: Developers of office and conferencing applications or middleware, Architects of office buildings, Space Planners, Designers; Facility Managers; IT, furniture & building Business Communities.

Every day we share encounters with others as we inhabit the space around us. In offering insights and knowledge on this increasingly important topic, this book introduces a range of empirical and theoretical approaches to the study of shared encounters. It highlights the multifaceted nature of collective experience and provides a deeper understanding of the nature and value of shared encounters in everyday life.Divided into four sections, each section comprises a set of chapters on a different topic and is introduced by a key author in the field who provides an overview of the content. The book itself is introduced by Paul Dourish, who sets the theme of shared encounters in the context of technological and social change over the last fifteen years. The four sections that follow consider the characteristics of shared encounters and describe how they can be supported in different settings: the first section, introduced by Barry Brown, looks at shared experiences. George Roussos, in the second section, presents playful encounters. Malcolm McCulloch introduces the section on spatial settings and – last but not least – Elizabeth Churchill previews the topic of social glue. The individual chapters that accompany each part offer particular perspectives on the main topic and provide detailed insights from the author’s own research background. A valuable reference for anyone designing ubiquitous media, mobile social software and LBS applications, this volume will also be useful to researchers, students and practitioners in fields ranging from computer science to urban studies.

Exploring Digital Design takes a multi-disciplinary look at digital design research where digital design is embedded in a larger socio-cultural context. Working from socio-technical research areas such as Participatory Design (PD), Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), the book explores how humanities offer new insights into digital design, and discusses a variety of digital design research practices, methods, and theoretical approaches spanning established disciplinary borders. The aim of the book is to explore the diversity of contemporary digital design practices in which commonly shared aspects are interpreted and integrated into different disciplinary and interdisciplinary conversations. It is the conversations and explorations with humanities that further distinguish this book within digital design research. Illustrated with real examples from digital design research practices from a variety of research projects and from a broad range of contexts Exploring Digital Design offers a basis for understanding the disciplinary roots as well as the interdisciplinary dialogues in digital design research, providing theoretical, empirical, and methodological sources for understanding digital design research. The first half of the book Exploring Digital Design is authored as a multi-disciplinary approach to digital design research, and represents novel perspectives and analyses in this research. The contributors are Gunnar Liestøl, Andrew Morrison and Christina Mörtberg in addition to the editors. Although primarily written for researchers and graduate students, digital design practioners will also find the book useful. Overall, Exploring Digital Design provides an excellent introduction to, and resource for, research into digital design.

In the future, everyday life in traffic will be intricately meshed with city life. Today motorways, cities and streets are places where we spend a considerable amount of time, and where a large number of everyday encounters between people occur. Any road user’s journey coincides with hundreds or even thousands of others. This book unpacks the details of the practical achievements involved in socially engaging with people at high speed. Although, generally speaking, these encounters are brief and interaction is slight, the recent emergence of mobile technologies offers opportunities to support drivers and passengers beyond just helping them to reach their destination. New social media could enhance interaction in traffic making life on the road more interesting and meaningful. Such innovative applications could include car stereos that share music amongst drivers; digital games that interact with the landscape passing outside the car windows, or with passengers in surrounding cars; message systems that allow drivers to help each other; and web applications that allow motorcyclists to socialize on the road.Social Media on the Road - The Future of Car Based Computing provides a bridge between research in transport planning and traffic technology, and new media areas such as Computer Human Interaction and Computer Supported Cooperative Work. Those studying and researching in the areas of human computer interaction in mobile use contexts, and those interested in developing new forms of mobile applications and services will find this book an excellent resource.Oskar Juhlin is Associate Professor and Director of the Mobile Life VinnExcellence Centre at Stockholm University and Interactive Institute.'This book represents a pioneering and key research work that examines the future of transportation being merged with communication and interactive media. It also provides a glimpse of the future potential of mixed reality entertainment for children and family onthe move. It is essential for scientists, designers, and engineers working on mobile social media, as well as for business people looking for new potential urban transport media services.' Professor Adrian D. Cheok, Graduate School of Media Design, Keio University.

Modern society has been transformed by the digital convergence towards a future where technologies embed themselves into the fabric of everyday life. This ongoing merging of social and technological infrastructures provides and necessitates new possibilities to renovate past notions, models and methods of information systems development that accommodates humans as actors within the infrastructure. This shift introduces new possibilities for information systems designers to fulfil more and more everyday functions, and to enhance their value and worth to the user.Reframing Humans in Information Systems Development aims to reframe the phenomenon of human-centered development of information systems by connecting scientific constructs produced within the field of information systems which has recently provided a plethora of multidisciplinary user views, without explicitly defining clear constructs that serve the IS field in particular.IS researchers, practitioners and students would benefit from Reframing Humans in Information Systems Development as the book provides a comprehensive view to various human-centered development methods and approaches. The representatives of the fields of Human-Computer Interaction and Computer Supported Collaborative Work will also find this book an excellent resource. A theoretical handbook and collection of practical experiences, are included along with critical discussions of the utilization methods in ISD and their implications with some interconnecting commentary viewpoints.

Information technology has been used in organisational settings and for organisational purposes such as accounting, for a half century, but IT is now increasingly being used for the purposes of mediating and regulating complex activities in which multiple professional users are involved, such as in factories, hospitals, architectural offices, and so on. The economic importance of such coordination systems is enormous but their design often inadequate. The problem is that our understanding of the coordinative practices for which these systems are developed is deficient, leaving systems developers and software engineers to base their designs on commonsensical requirements analyses.The research reflected in this book addresses these very problems. It is a collection of articles which establish a conceptual foundation for the research area of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work.

From Snapshots to Social Media describes the history and future of domestic photography as mediated by technological change. Domestic photography refers to the culture of ordinary people capturing, sharing and using photographs, and is in a particular state of flux today as photos go digital. The book argues that this digital era is the third major chapter in the 170 year history of the area; following the portrait and Kodak eras of the past.  History shows that despite huge changes in photographic technology and the way it has been sold, people continue to use photographs to improve memory, support communication and reinforce identity. The future will involve a shift in the balance of these core activities and a replacement of the family album with various multimedia archives for individuals, families and communities. This raises a number of issues that should be taken into account when designing new technologies and business services in this area, including: the ownership and privacy of content, multimedia standards, home ICT infrastructure, and younger and older users of images.  The book is a must for designers and engineers of imaging technology and social media who want a better understanding of the history of domestic photography in order to shape its future. It will also be of value to students and researchers in science and technology studies and visual culture, as a fascinating case study of the evolving use of photographs and photographic technology in Western society.

Coordinative Practices in the Building Process: An Ethnographic Perspective presents the principles of the practice-oriented research programmes in the CSCW and HCI domains, explaining and examining the ideas and motivations behind basing technology design on ethnography. The focus throughout is on generating ethnographically informed accounts of the building process and discussing the concepts of cooperative work and coordinative practices in order to frame technology development. Lars Rune Christensen provides an invaluable resource for these communities in this book. Illustrated with real examples from the building process, he reports on the cooperative work and coordinative practices found, allowing readers to feel that they know, from the point of view of the people working in the building process, what it is like to coordinate and do this kind of cooperative work.

Coordinative Practices in the Building Process: An Ethnographic Perspective presents the principles of the practice-oriented research programmes in the CSCW and HCI domains, explaining and examining the ideas and motivations behind basing technology design on ethnography. The focus throughout is on generating ethnographically informed accounts of the building process and discussing the concepts of cooperative work and coordinative practices in order to frame technology development. Lars Rune Christensen provides an invaluable resource for these communities in this book. Illustrated with real examples from the building process, he reports on the cooperative work and coordinative practices found, allowing readers to feel that they know, from the point of view of the people working in the building process, what it is like to coordinate and do this kind of cooperative work.

Designing Socially Embedded Technologies in the Real-World

This book is concerned with the associated issues between the differing paradigms of academic and organizational computing infrastructures. Driven by the increasing impact Information Communication Technology (ICT) has on our working and social lives, researchers within the Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) field try and find ways to situate new hardware and software in rapidly changing socio-digital ecologies.Adopting a design-orientated research perspective, researchers from the European Society for Socially Embedded Technologies (EUSSET) elaborate on the challenges and opportunities  we face through the increasing permeation of society by ICT from  commercial, academic, design and organizational perspectives. Designing Socially Embedded Technologies in the Real-World is directed at researchers, industry practitioners and will be of great interest to any other societal actors who are involved with the design of IT systems.

This book looks at why ethnographic approaches have been turned to in the design of computing devices for the workplace, for the home and elsewhere. It presents a history of ethnography, both as it was practiced before computer science picked it up and since, most especially in the CSCW and HCI domains. It examines, further, the various ethnographic or ‘fieldwork’ frameworks currently popular, explaining and examining what each claims and entails. The focus of the book throughout is on the practical relationship between theory and practice, a relationship that is often misunderstood yet fundamental to successful design.The book is illustrated with real examples from the authors’ various experiences in academic and commercial settings, reporting on the use of ethnography before, during and after design innovation and implementation. The result is a book that provides the working knowledge necessary for using any kind of ethnographic approach in the design of computer technologies.

A topic of significant interest to the CSCW, IT and IS communities is the issue of how software and other technical systems come to be adopted and used. We know from considerable research that people use systems in many ways, and that the process of incorporating them in their everyday activities can require a great deal of effort. One way of understanding adoption and use is by considering artifacts as resources in people's environments."Resources, Co-Evolution and Artifacts: Theory in CSCW" looks at how resources get created, adopted, modified, and die, by using a number of theoretical and empirical studies to carefully examine and chart resources over time. It examines issues such as: how resources are tailored or otherwise changed as the situations and purposes for which they are used change; how a resource is maintained and reused within an organisation; the ways in which the value of a resource comes to be recognised and portrayed; the ways in which an artifact is transformed to enable it to function more effectively as a resource; the ways in which an artifact's usage practices evolve as it becomes recognized as a resource; how one might approach the problem of designing a resource de novo; the ways in which opportunistic use of an artifact transforms it into a new kind of resource.

‘User-designer relations’ concerns the sorts of working relationships that arise between developers and end users of IT products - the different ways designers of IT products seek to engage with users, and the ways users seek to influence product design. It is through the shifting patterns of these relations that IT products are realised. Although it has generally been accepted that achieving better user-designer relations will improve the quality of IT products, there has been little consensus on how this might be achieved. This book aims to deepen our understanding of the relationships between users and designers both as they emerge in the wild and as a consequence of our attempts to intervene. Through a series of case studies the book juxtaposes in-depth explorations of different perspectives and approaches to thinking about - and doing - user-designer relations, considering important implications for design and computer science more generally.

Information technology has been used in organisational settings and for organisational purposes such as accounting, for a half century, but IT is now increasingly being used for the purposes of mediating and regulating complex activities in which multiple professional users are involved, such as in factories, hospitals, architectural offices, and so on. The economic importance of such coordination systems is enormous but their design often inadequate. The problem is that our understanding of the coordinative practices for which these systems are developed is deficient, leaving systems developers and software engineers to base their designs on commonsensical requirements analyses.The research reflected in this book addresses these very problems. It is a collection of articles which establish a conceptual foundation for the research area of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work.

This book aims at capitalizing and transmitting know-how about the design of Augmented Environments (AE) from some of the most prominent laboratories in the field worldwide. The authors belong to the RUFAE network (Research on User- Friendly Augmented Environments, founded in 2002) who meet in research seminars to share experience; Writing this book was perceived as an opportunity to look back over the last few years to sum up important findings; and formalize their approach and experience, which they never had the time or opportunity to do. Although the authors of this book have very different backgrounds, striking similarities emerge in their approach and design principles: never-endingness, activity-orientedness, continuous design, realism are some of the pillars of this approach; enabling to deal with the complex, heterogeneous, multi-user and mul- purpose constructions which AE designers have to face. The book illustrates how these principles enabled them to construct robust, ef- cient, and user-friendly Augmented Environments in spite of the many challenges to make these operational. We hope their experience will help the reader. Primary audience: Academics, Students and Professionals involved in the CHI, CSCW, Ubicomp, Cooperative Building communities. Computer Scientists int- ested by end-users and applications, Social Scientists operating in the IT domain, IT & Organization Consultants. Secondary audience: Developers of office and conferencing applications or middleware, Architects of office buildings, Space Planners, Designers; Facility Managers; IT, furniture & building Business Communities.