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.

Over the last 10 years, Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) has identified a base set of findings. These findings are taken almost as assumptions within the field. In summary, they argue that human activity is highly flexible, nuanced, and contextualized and that computational entities such as information transfer, roles, and policies need to be similarly flexible, nuanced, and contextualized. However, current systems cannot fully support the social world uncovered by these findings. This paper argues that there is an inherent gap between the social requirements of CSCW and its technical mechanisms. The social-technical gap is the divide between what we know we must support socially and what we can support technically. Exploring, understanding, and hopefully ameliorating this social-technical gap is the central challenge for CSCW as a field and one of the central problems for HCI. Indeed, merely attesting the continued centrality of this gap could be one of the important intellectual contributions of CSCW. This paper also argues that the challenge of the social-technical gap creates an opportunity to refocus CSCW as a Simonian science of the artificial. To be published in Human-Computer Interaction Preprint- Ackerman- Challenge of CSCW 1 1.

Based on a field study of cooperative design in a distributed company, this paper identifies and defines the embodied actions of the designers that enabled a cooperative design process. These actions are considered as classes of cognitive practices that are simultaneously available to the actor and others in a shared physical workspace. The public availability of these actions to the perceptions of the participants in a cooperative process enables their communicative functions A taxonomy of embodied actions is developed as a bridging structure between the field study of cooperative work and the design of technology that might support that work over distance Boundaries are drawn by mapping pracuces; "objects " do not pre-exist as such. Objects are boundary projects. But boundaries shift from within; boundaries are very tricky. What boundaries provisionally contain remains generative, productive of meanings and bodies. Siung (sighting) boundaries is a risky pracuce Donna Haraway, Situated Knowledges, 1991, p. 200.

This chapter discusses a core phenomenon for a theory of CSCL: building collaborative knowing. Rather than reviewing, one after another, various theories that are currently influential in the field of CSCL (and that are described in other chapters), a view of collaboration is outlined here that

This paper is a development and clarification of certain ideas put forth in Allwood & Haglund 1991 and its aim is to explore some ways in which deontic notions like obligation and option can be used to analyze some of the dependencies and regularities which exist in dialogue. 2 . Obligations and options of a dialogue contribution

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To decide how to respond to an utterance, a speaker must interpret what others have said and why they have said it. Speakers rely on their expectations to decide whether they have understood each other. Misunderstandings occur when speakers differ in their beliefs about what has been said or why. If a listener hears something that seems inconsistent, he may reinterpret an earlier utterance and respond to it anew. Otherwise, he assumes that the conversation is proceeding smoothly. Recognizing an inconsistency as a misunderstanding and generating a new reply together accomplish what is known as a fourth-position repair. To model the repair of misunderstandings, this thesis combines both intentional and social accounts of discourse, unifying theories of speech act production, interpretation, and repair. In intentional accounts, speakers use their beliefs, goals, and expectations to decide what to say; when they interpret an utterance, speakers identify goals that might account for it. In...

ry design interventions into technology projects in the clinic of radiology. The adopted theoretical attitude of interweaving construction and reconstruction necessitates questioning and reconfiguring some of the taken-for-granted assumptions of disciplinary dichotomies and conventional frames of reference both with regard to ethnographic traditions focused on current practices as well as technology-centered and future-oriented system design. Radiology, with its ongoing and complex transition from film-based to digitally mediated work, has provided the concrete setting for thinking about the relations between researcher, designer and work practice practitioner in an attempt to find ways in which to sensitise system design towards everyday work practice. Establishing the relevance between ethnographic findings of work and design specifications requires a reformulation of work practice that appreciates the everyday fluency of work practice and recognises the endogenous change for the ne

cognition in computer-assisted

This paper argues that in addition to the familiar approach using formal contexts, there is now a need in artificial intelligence to study contexts as social constructs. As a successful example of the latter approach, I draw attention to `interpretation' (in the sense of literary theory), viz. the reconstruction of intended meaning of a literary text that takes into account the context in which the author assumed the reader would place the text. An important contribution here comes from Wendell Harris, enumerating the seven crucial dimensions of context: knowledge of reality, knowledge of language, and the authorial, generic, collective, specific, and textual dimensions. Finally, two recent approaches to interpretation, due to Jon Barwise and Jerry Hobbs, are analyzed as useful attempts which also come to grips with the notion of context. It must be noted that there has been a considerable body of contributions connecting linguistic structure with social context. For example, anthropo...