Collaboration has long been of considerable interest in the CHI community. This paper proposes and explores the concept of network communities as a crucial part of this discussion. Network communities are a form of technologymediated environment that foster a sense of community among users. We consider several familiar systems and describe the shared characteristics these systems have developed to deal with critical concerns of collaboration. Based on our own experience as designers and users of a variety of network communities, we extend this initial design space along three dimensions: the articulation of a persistent sense of location. the boundary tensions between real and virtual worlds, and the emergence and evolution of community.

We seek to take some initial steps towards a theory of information that is adequate for understanding and designing systems that process information, i.e., information systems in a broad sense. Formal representations of information are needed in designing, using and maintaining such systems, especially when they are computer based. However, it is also necessary to take account of social context, including how information is produced and used, not merely how it is represented; that is, we need a social theory of information. Ideas from ethnomethodology and semiotics, as well as logic and the sociology of science, are used to explore the nature of information.

Procedural representation..................................................................................................... 16

We identify certain formal algebraic models affording understanding (including positional number systems, conservation laws in physics, and spatial coordinate systems) that have empowered humans when we have augmented ourselves using them. We survey how, by explicit mathematical constructions, that such algebraic models can be algorithmically derived for all finite-state systems and give examples illustrating this including coordinates for the rigid symmetries of a regular polygon, and recovery of the decimal expansion and coordinates arising from conserved quantities in physics. By accepting Haraway's `ironic myth' of the ourselves as cyborgs, one opens the door to empowerment of humans responsible and in control of their hybrid natures as beings augmented by both cognitive and physical tools. Indeed we argue that biological systems share with the subjects of all sciences of the `artificial' (in the sense of Herbert Simon) an essential quality of contingent, conscious or unconscious d...

This paper examines the importance of acknowledging gender and gender related categories for interactive design, especially for design engineering processes of Embodied Conversational Agents. It offers a complex understanding of the term gender- including the intersectional character of gender, second thoughts on gender as a binary system and the performativity of gender. These different aspects are discussed against the background of the construction of technological artifacts. Identity issues are addressed as well as processes of abstraction. The paper closes with a few thoughts on degendering strategies.

Questions of human values often arise in HCI research and practice. Such questions can be difficult to address well, and a principled approach can clarify issues of both theory and practice. One such approach is Value Sensitive Design (VSD), an established theory and method for addressing issues of values in a systematic and principled fashion in the design of information technology. In this essay, we suggest however that the theory and at times the presentation of VSD overclaims in a number of key respects, with the result of inhibiting its more widespread adoption and appropriation. We address these issues by suggesting four topics for next steps in the evolution of VSD: (1) tempering VSD’s position on universal values; (2) contextualizing existing and future lists of values that are presented as heuristics for consideration; (3) strengthening the voice of the participants in publications describing VSD investigations; and (4) making clearer the voice of the researchers. We propose new or altered approaches for VSD that address these issues of theory, voice, and reportage. Author Keywords Value Sensitive Design; participatory design; design; collaborative ethnography; qualitative research; universal values; culturally-specific values; feminism; voice ACM Classification Keywords K.4.1 [Computers and society]: Public policy issues-

How might we reread James for a digital age? Should we use him to resist the impacts of new media and technologies? Or can we exploit these technologies to better popularise and understand James’s writing? Almost all of James’s fictions are now available online as e-texts. If you’re interested in James and communications technology, read “In the Cage, ” the tale of telegraphy he dictated in 1898, and some of the recent papers on it. What more could you want? As the contents of Richard Hathaway’s The Henry James Scholar’s Guide to Websites indicates, James studies has responded to the digitisation of Western culture. These responses are unlikely to be the final word, however. This paper lays out a possible agenda of issues for James studies in thinking about how further to respond to the ongoing social, cultural, and academic implications of new media. It explores the possible application of three central concepts that have established themselves during the last ten years of cyberculture studies (the cyborg, hypertext, and virtuality) though these concepts may well be superseded in future. At the time of writing, some of the most effective work pushing forward the theorising of new media is being undertaken by Lev Manovich, particularly in

from thinking machines to the global village

The concept of limited access highways in the city could be considered as the epitome of modernity; reflecting the ever increasing speed of everyday life and the distancing of individuals from communities (cf. Simmel, Tönnies). Separation from contact with the landscape and its effect on space-time relationships creates a new spatiality (see Augé, 1995). While laying concrete across the countryside over such huge areas is dramatic enough, the building of highways through and over whole neighbourhoods in the city has to be one of the most significant actions ever taken in altering the urban landscape. The elevated highway project opens up the possibility of a completely new perception of the city, from above and at speed. The Westway, opened in 1970, is a two and a half-mile long elevated highway linking the centre of London with the west of England route to Oxford. I will discuss the space of the Westway in three particular ways; firstly as a modernist marker, symbolic of prevailing national urban aspirations, secondly as autonomous, machinic entity and thirdly as cinematic experience. My intention is to demonstrate that the visualities developed in “reading ” the Westway as text cannot adequately describe the meaning of the spaces and that the material surface and form, with its “invisible ” means of production and the sensually visual qualities of the cinematic experience of moving through the city are equally important in contributing to our understanding of urban spaces of mobility. “I gazed down at this immense motion sculpture, whose deck seemed almost higher than the balcony rail

The Internet is shaped through metaphors into spaces that have their counterparts in the “real ” world such as the global city, superhighway or library. Although the generation of online space can be produced by lived embodied practices as users download or upload videos, read and write texts and create and view images, the production of space in this context is primarily phenomenological, produced through the imagination of its users. This paper argues that the Internet resembles the “real ” world yet in miniature. A key facet of miniaturization applied to the creation of virtual space is that enclosed within the tiny is the immense. Consequently, by virtue of the imagination of its users, the boundary between large and small dissolves: contained within the miniature controlled world of a computer screen is a vast sphere of seemingly endless possibility. This research builds upon a central concern in cyberculture studies of whether the Internet is a locus of control or freedom, while incorporating an array of fields and disciplines beyond media studies namely philosophy, literary theory, cultural theory and linguistics.