This paper describes a fundamental dual tradeoff that occurs in systems supporting awareness for distributed work groups, and presents several specific new techniques which illustrate good compromise points within this tradeoff space. This dual tradeoff is between privacy and awareness, and between awareness and disturbance. Simply stated, the more information about oneself that leaves your work area, the more potential for awareness of you exists for your colleagues. Unfortunately, this also represents the greatest potential for intrusion on your privacy. Similarly, the more information that is received about the activities of colleagues, the more potential awareness we have of them. However, at the same time, the more information we receive, the greater the chance that the information will become a disturbance to our normal work. This dual tradeoff seems to be a fundamental one. However, by carefully examining awareness problems in the light of this tradeoff it is possible to devise techniques which expose new points in the design space. These new points provide different types and quantities of information so that awareness can be achieved without invading the privacy of the sender, or creating a disturbance for the receiver. This paper presents four such techniques, each based on a careful selection of the information transmitted.

User-interruption in human-computer interaction (HCI) is an increasingly important problem. Many of the useful advances in intelligent and multitasking computer systems have the significant side effect of greatly increasing user-interruption. This previously innocuous HCI problem has become critical to the successful function of many kinds of modern computer systems. Unfortunately, no HCI design guidelines exist for solving this problem. In fact, theoretical tools do not yet exist for investigating the HCI problem of user-interruption in a comprehensive and generalizable way. This report asserts that a single unifying definition of user-interruption and the accompanying practical taxonomy would be useful theoretical tools for driving effective investigation of this crucial HCI problem. These theoretical tools are constructed here. A comprehensive analysis is conducted through the existing literature. Theoretical constructs from several relevant but diverse fields are identified and discussed. A unifying definition of user-interruption is synthesized. This new definition is supported with an array of postulates, assertions, and a taxonomy of human interruption to facilitate its practical application.

At first glance it seems absurd that busy people doing important jobs should want their computers to interrupt them. Interruptions are disruptive and people need to concentrate to make good decisions. However, successful job performance also frequently depends on people's abilities to (a) constantly monitor their dynamically changing information environments, (b) collaborate and communicate with other people in the system, and (c) supervise background autonomous services. These critical abilities can require people to simultaneously query a large set of information sources, continuously monitor for important events, and respond to and communicate with other human operators. Automated monitoring

Video media spaces are an excellent crucible for the study of privacy. Their design affords opportunities for misuse, prompts ethical questions, and engenders grave concerns from both users and nonusers. Despite considerable discussion of the privacy problems uncovered in prior work, questions remain as to how to design a privacy-preserving video media space and how to evaluate its effect on privacy. The problem is more deeply rooted than this, however. Privacy is an enormous concept from which a large vocabulary of terms emerges. Disambiguating the meanings of and relationships between these terms facilitates understanding of the link between privacy and design. In this article, we draw from resources in environmental psychology and computersupported cooperative work (CSCW) to build a broadly and deeply rooted vocabulary for privacy. We relate the vocabulary back to the real and hard problem of designing privacy-preserving video media spaces. In doing so, we facilitate analysis of the privacy-design relationship.

We developed four widely different interfaces for users of Somewire, a prototype audio-only media space. We informally studied users ’ experiences with the two screen-based interfaces. We prototyped a non-screen-based interface as an example of a novel tangible interface for a communication system. We explored the conflict between privacy and simplicity of representation, and identified two unresolved topics: the role of audio quality and the prospects for scsiling audio spaces beyond a single Workgroup. Finally, we formulated a set of design guidelines for control and representation in audio spaces, as follows: GUIs are not well-suited to audio spaces, users do not require control over localization or other audio attributes, and awareness of other users ’ presence is desirable. KEYWORDS Audio, speech interactions, mediated communication, computer-mediated communication, CMC, user interfaces, representations, media space, audio space, audio-only, tangible interactions, active objects, design guidelines.

Abstract. Collaboration has long been of considerable interest to both designers and researchers in the CHI and CSCW communities. This paper contributes to this discussion by proposing the concept of network communities as a new genre of collaboration for this discussion. Network communities are robust and persistent communities based on a sense of locality that spans both the virtual and physical worlds of their users. They are a technosocial construct that requires understanding of both the technology and the sociality embodying them. We consider several familiar systems as well as historical antecedents to describe the affordances these systems offer their community of users. Based on our own experience as designers, users and researchers of a variety of network communities, we extend this initial design space along three dimensions: the boundary negotiations between real and virtual worlds, support for social rhythms and the emergence and development of community. Finally we offer implications for designers, researchers and community members based on our findings.

The notion of awareness has received a lot of attention in the CSCW literature for quite some time now. Because it cannot be very precisely and uniquely defined, this notion covers a range of issues and is critical in very different situations. This is also true in the particular context of the WWW, where awareness has more than one facet. One objective for this paper is to give an overview of the field, by reviewing different awareness categories and by showing how they relate to Web-based systems. The discussion also gives an overview of the work done by the author in this area. Another goal for the paper is to introduce the papers presented at the CSCW'2000 Workshop on Awareness and the WWW with a short summary. Keywords Awareness, CSCW, WWW, implementation platform, activity space, group awareness, workspace awareness, contextual awareness, peripheral awareness INTRODUCTION There are different ways to look at the relation between CSCW and the WWW. First of all, one should of co...

Impromptu is a mobile audio device which uses wireless Internet Protocol (IP) to access novel computer-mediated voice communication channels. These channels show the richness of IP-based communication as compared to conventional mobile telephony, adding audio processing and storage in the network, and flexible, user-centered call control protocols. These channels may be synchronous, asynchronous, or eventtriggered, or even change modes as a function of other user activity. The demands of these modes plus the need to navigate with an entirely non-visual user interface are met with a number of audio-oriented user interaction techniques.

The concept of a weakly intrusive ambient soundscape (WISP) is presented as a means to provide a peripheral awareness of processes beyond a user's immediate attention. The WISP is a component in a larger environment for ubiquitous computing, centered around a conference room scenario. The experiences from a demonstration prototype indicate that the choice of sounds and the intensity of their presentation can greatly influence the way the WISP is perceived. The work relates in various ways to the sonification of data and audio-based techniques for maintaining peripheral awareness.

Within a group of peers, it is often useful or interesting to know whether someone in the group has gone to bed or whether they have awakened in the morning. This information, naturally integrated as a peripheral augmentation of an alarm clock, allows people to know whether it is appropriate to make a call or feel more connected with someone living remotely. In this paper, we present the design and evaluation of such an alarm clock, the BuddyClock, and describe how it enables users in a small social network to automatically share information about their sleeping behaviors with one another. Through 3-6 week deployment studies of this technology with five different social networks, we found that the alarm clock affected participant behaviors and allowed them to feel more connected to those with whom they shared their sleeping behaviors.