The emergence of ubiquitous computing as a new design paradigm poses significant challenges for HCI and interaction design. Traditionally, human-computer interaction has taken place within a constrained and well-understood domain of experience – single users sitting at desks and interacting with conventionally-designed computers employing screens, keyboards and mice for interaction. New opportunities have engendered considerable interest in “context-aware computing” – computational systems that can sense and respond to aspects of the settings in which they are used. However, considerable confusion surrounds the notion of “context” – what it means, what it includes, and what role it plays in interactive systems. This paper suggests that the representational stance implied by conventional interpretations of “context” misinterprets the role of context in everyday human activity, and proposes an alternative model that suggests different directions for design.

Activities are located behaviors, taking time, conceived as socially meaningful, and usually involving interaction with tools and the environment. In modeling human cognition as a form of problem solving (goal-directed search and operator sequencing), cognitive science researchers have not adequately studied "off-task" activities (e.g., waiting), non-intellectual motives (e.g., hunger), sustaining a goal state (e.g., playful interaction), and coupled perceptual-motor dynamics (e.g., following someone). These aspects of human behavior have been considered in bits and pieces in past research, identified as scripts, human factors, behavior settings, ensemble, flow experience, and situated action. More broadly, activity theory provides a comprehensive framework relating motives, goals, and operations. This paper ties these ideas together, using examples from work life in a Canadian High Arctic research station. The emphasis is on simulating human behavior as it naturally occurs, such that "working" is understood as an aspect of living. The result is a synthesis of previously unrelated analytic perspectives and a broader appreciation of the nature of human cognition. Simulating activities in this comprehensive way is useful for understanding work practice, promoting learning, and designing better tools, including human-robot systems.

Computer system administrators are the unsung heroes of the information age, working behind the scenes to configure, maintain, and troubleshoot the computer infrastructure that underlies much of modern life. However, little can be found in the literature about the practices and problems of these highly specialized computer users. We conducted a series of field studies in large corporate data centers, observing organizations, work practices, tools, and problem-solving strategies of system administrators. We found system administrators operate within large-scale, complex environments that present significant technical, social, cognitive, and business challenges. In this paper, we describe system administrator tool use in critical, high-cost, labor-intensive work through observational, survey, and interview data. We discuss our findings concerning administrator needs for coordinating work, maintaining situation awareness, planning and rehearsing complex procedures, building tools, and supporting complicated interleaved workflows.

Patterns of Cooperative Interaction are regularities in the organisation of work, activity, and interaction amongst participants, and with, through and around artefacts. These patterns are organised around a framework and are inspired by how such regularities are highlighted in ethnomethodologically-informed ethnographic studies of work and technology. They comprise a high level description and two or more comparable examples drawn from specific studies. Our contention is that these patterns form a useful resource for re-using findings from previous field studies, for enabling analysis and considering design in new settings. Previous work on the relationship between ethnomethodology and design has been concerned primarily in providing presentation frameworks and mechanisms, practical advice, schematisations of the ethnomethodologist's role, different possibilities of input at different stages in development, and various conceptualisations of the relationship between study and design. In contrast, this paper seeks to firstly discuss the position of patterns relative to emergent major topics of interest of these studies. Subsequently it seeks to describe the case for the collection of patterns based on findings, their comparison across studies and their general implications for design problems, rather than the concerns of practical and methodological interest outlined in the other work. Special attention is paid to our evaluations and to how they inform how the patterns collection may be read, used and contributed to, as well as to reflections on the composition of the collection as it has emerged. The paper finishes, firstly, with a discussion of how our work relates to other work on patterns, before some closing comments are made on the role of our patterns and ethnomethodology in systems design.

This paper is also based on interviews with 11 families in the Boston area in 1997, conducted by the first author. They were designed specifically to examine the location and use of the home PC by difference members of the family. All families owned a multimedia PC and had children living at home, but represented a spread of income levels (between $20-100+k per year), housing types (private house, condominium, apartment) and locations (urban, suburban, rural). Eight of the 11 families had an Internet connection. Transcripts of both sets of interviews were coded to indicate discussion of topics relevant to the dynamics of computer and Internet use. The resulting topic collections were surprisingly large for both studies, indicating that families had a lot to say about constituent issues such as the location of the computer, and the way it is shared and managed within the family. In the following sections of the chapter we step through the major findings in this collection as they relate to the groups of questions raised in the previous section. Where necessary, we cite relevant quantitative findings to back-up the qualitative analysis. We preserve the same ordering of issues and questions as before, addressing the timing, location and shared use of the home computer in turn

The need to understand the social context within which work to be supported by computer-based systems takes place is broadly recognised within the RE community. Ethnographic studies have been used in particular to inform the requirements process from a social perspective. To make this accessible to requirements engineers, work in this area has focused on how to integrate and communicate ethnographic findings on a per project basis but scant attention has been paid to how findings from individual studies may be generalised and re-used for the purposes of RE in new settings. This paper is intended to introduce our resource of Patterns of Cooperative Interaction to the RE community. These patterns specifically compare and contrast a variety of ethnographic findings, discuss their relevance to design and provide an introduction to the analytic sensibilities of such studies. We discuss how we developed patterns of interaction from a corpus of ethnographic studies, illustrate a selection of these patterns and suggest how the patterns collection can be used by requirements engineers as a means of highlighting potential social issues that are or relevance to the system requirements and as a means of generating requirements that support social interaction. 1.

In this article a social constructionist approach to information technology (IT) literacy is introduced. This approach contributes to the literature on IT literacy by introducing the concept of IT self as a description of the momentary, context-dependent, and multilayered nature of interpretations of IT competencies. In the research literature, IT literacy is often defined as sets of basic skills to be learned, and competencies to be demonstrated. In line with this approach, research on IT competencies conventionally develops models for explaining user acceptance, and for measuring computer-related attitudes and skills. The assumption is that computerrelated attitudes and self-efficacy impact IT adoption and success in computer use. Computer self-efficacy measures are, however, often based on self-assessments that measure interpretations of skills rather than performance in practice. An analysis of empirical interview data in which academic researchers discuss their relationships with computers and IT competence shows how a self-assessment such as “computer anxiety ” presented in one discussion context can in another discussion context be consigned to the past in favor of a different and more positive version. Here it is argued that descriptions of IT competencies and computer-related attitudes are dialogic social constructs and closely tied with more general implicit understandings of the nature of technical artifacts and technical knowledge. These implicit theories and assumptions are rarely taken under scrutiny in discussions of IT literacy yet they have profound implications for the aims and methods in teaching computer skills.

Motivation – Awareness is an integral part of remote collaborative work and has been an important theme within the CSCW research. Our project aims at understanding and mediating non-verbal cues between remote participants involved in a design project. Research approach – Within the AMIDA 1 project we focus on distributed ‘cooperative design ’ teams. We especially focus on the 'material ' signals – signals in which people communicate through material artefacts, locations and their embodied actions. We apply an ethnographic approach to understand the role of physical artefacts in co-located naturalistic design setting. Based on the results we will generate important implications to support remote design work. We plan to

s, is valuale for learning whether a technology meets requirements for a predetermined level of usaility. Evaluators collect data on prolems that arise from assigned tasks. What such testing does not provide is knowledge of how mo ile technologies are actually used in different settings outside the laoratory. One fails to discover the pro lems 9bE9;zPBb B9b yroupSosp RPb 8b Other methods include heuristic , where, e.g. software developers, will evaluate a technology, looking for certain aspects that, ased on their experience, will likely result in usaility prolems. Again, while enefiting from the experience of experts who have previously encountered prolems with technology, P;Pzb 8P;b pSosp RPb 8b Interviews and questionnaires can otain the users impressions. However, they are not suitale as sole evaluation techniques, e.g. they are suject to the memory iases of the suject, especially since the interview (;BB9b bE(Lz6;b sp RPb 8b Another method is to automat

This paper will examine the role of the social in design practice. In aid of understanding and enacting that role, it will examine the kinds of sociology that could be involved in design practice and education. Topics considered include the fundamentally social and cultural nature of design, and the of design to the sociologies of work, science and technology, organisations, education, and culture. INTRODUCTION AND DISCLAIMERS THE ORIGINS of this paper may be found for the most part within my years of teaching design students as a sociologist within design programs, initially architecture and later industrial design.