A contemporary approach to describing and theorizing about joint human endeavor is to posit “knowledge in common ” as a basis for awareness and coordination. Recent analysis has identified weaknesses in this approach even as it is typically employed in relatively simple task contexts. We suggest that in realistically complex circumstances, people share activities and not merely concepts. We describe a framework for understanding joint endeavor in terms of four facets of activity awareness: common ground, communities of practice, social capital, and human development. We illustrate the sort of analysis we favor with a scenario from emergency management, and consider implications and future directions for system design and empirical methods. 1.

The earlier chapters of this book present a conceptual understanding of awareness [28, 54]. A historical account [70] as well as descriptions of various implementations (see Section III of this book) illustrate how various systems have attempted to foster greater awareness. A common challenge faced by all awareness systems is

As human-computer interaction increasingly focuses on mediated interactions among groups of individuals, there is a need to develop techniques for measurement and analysis of groups that have been scoped at the level of the group. Bandura’s construct of perceived self-efficacy has been used to understand individual behavior as a function of domain-specific beliefs about personal capacities. The construct of collective efficacy extends self-efficacy to organizations and groups, referring to beliefs about collective capacities in specific domains. We describe the development and refinement of a collective efficacy scale, the factor analysis of the construct, and its external validation in path models of community-oriented attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. ACM Classification: H.5.3 Group and Organizational

Theoretical and technological progress has revived the interest in the design of services for the support of co-located human-human communication and collaboration, witnessing the start of several large-scale projects over the last few years. Most of these projects focus on meetings and/or lecture situations. However, usercentred design and evaluation frameworks for co-located communication and collaboration are a major concern. In this paper, we summarise the prevalent approaches towards usercentred design and evaluation, and we develop two different services. In one service, participants in a small-group meeting receive real-time feedback about observable properties of the meeting that are directly related to the social dynamics, such as individual amount of speaking time or eye-gaze patterns. In the other service, teachers in a classroom receive real-time feedback about the activities and attention level of participants in the lecture. We also propose ways to address the different dimensions that are relevant to the design and evaluation of these services (the individual, the social and the organisational dimension), bringing together methods from different disciplines. Categories and Subject Descriptors: H.5.3 [Information interfaces]: Group and organization interfaces – Collaborative computing- Computer-supported

www.isr.uci.edu

Abstract. We followed an international research network that holds regular meetings in technology-enhanced working environments. The team is geographically distributed and uses a set of technical artefacts to support their collaborative work, including a videoconferencing system and a media space. We

The research programme which underlies this paper focuses on understanding the process of addressing “creative ” or illstructured problems – an economically significant process and one which pervades the professional lives of teams of professionals such as software engineers, managers and strategic planners. This class of problem is poorly understood and, consequently, there is little effective support (leverage without constraint on flexibility/creativity) currently available. In this paper, we present a preliminary study of creative teams in action – a study in which we have access to both data describing the dynamics of “evolution ” of the focal artefact and data describing the process undertaken by the team. 1.

e.s.guy @ bton.ac.uk Recent CSCW research has focused on methods for evaluating usability, rather than the more problematic evaluation of systems in use. A possible approach to the integration of use, design and evaluation is through the representation of evaluation findings as design-oriented models. A method is described for modeling computer-supported cooperative work and its context: a design patterns language, based on the principles of activity theory. The language is the outcome of an evaluation of the evolving use of tools to support collaborative information sharing, carried out at a global NGO.

Abstract—We take a new, scenario based look at evaluation in information visualization. Our seven scenarios, evaluating visual data analysis and reasoning, evaluating user performance, evaluating user experience, evaluating environments and work practices, evaluating communication through visualization, automated evaluation of visualizations, and evaluating collaborative data analysis were derived through an extensive literature review of over 800 visualization publications. These scenarios are described through their goals, the types of questions they embody and illustrated through example studies. Through this broad survey and the distillation of these scenarios we make two contributions. One, we encapsulate the current practices in the information visualization research community and, two, we provide a different approach to reaching decisions about what might be the most effective evaluation of a given information visualization. For example, if the research goals or evaluative questions are known they can be used to map to specific scenarios, where practical existing examples can be considered for effective evaluation approaches. Index Terms—Information visualization, evaluation 1

Abstract not found