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.

We are indebted to Terry Winograd for suggesting the acronym "Oval " after hearing about the four components of our system and to John McDermott for suggesting the term "radically tailorable " as a description of the Oval system. The Oval system has benefited from the suggestions and work of numerous people over many years, including most recently: Mark

The concept of awareness has received increasing attention over the past several CSCW conferences. Although many awareness interfaces have been designed and studied, most have been limited deployments of research prototypes. In this paper we describe Sideshow, a peripheral awareness interface that was rapidly adopted by thousands of people in our company. Sideshow provides regularly updated peripheral awareness of a broad range of information from virtually any accessible web site or database. We discuss Sideshow's design and the experience of refining and redesigning the interface based on feedback from a rapidly expanding user community.

In this paper, we look at how people working in a governmental labor inspection agency tailor their shared PC environment. Starting with standard off-the-shelf software, the tailors adapt that software to the particular workplace in which they are embedded, at the same time that they modify and extend the practices of that workplace. Over time, their adaptations and the tailoring processes themselves become structured and systematized within the organization. This tendency toward systematization is in part a response to the requirement that the results of tailoring be sharable across groups of users. Our study focuses on several dimensions of the work of tailoring: construction, organizational change, learning, and politics. We draw two kinds of lessons for system development: how better to support the work of tailors, and how system developers can learn from and cooperate with tailors. KEYWORDS: Tailoring, customization, emergent use of standard technology, development and use of sha...

Recent years have seen a shift in perception of the nature of HCI and interactive systems. As interface work has increasingly become a focus of attention for the social sciences, we have expanded our appreciation of the importance of issues such as work practice, adaptation, and evolution in interactive systems. The reorientation in our view of interactive systems has been accompanied by a call for a new model of design centered around user needs and participation. This article argues that a new process of design is not enough and that the new view necessitates a similar reorientation in the structure of the systems we build. It outlines some requirements for systems that support a deeper conception of interaction and argues that the traditional system design techniques are not suited to creating such systems. Finally, using examples from ongoing work in the design of an open toolkit for collaborative applications, it illustrates how the principles of computational reflection and metaobject protocols can lead us toward a new model based on open abstraction that holds great promise in addressing these issues.

While groupware is readily available, people on wide area networks—such as the Internet—have considerable trouble contacting each other and setting up groupware connections. To pinpoint why this occurs, this paper identifies human factors critical to getting a group communicating through groupware. It addresses how people find suitable partners, and how people choose appropriate communication mediums. These factors are discussed in detail, and form a design foundation for systems that promote social presence and that integrate communication. Existing systems are critically reviewed and shown to be inadequate for general use over a wide area net, for they either do not meet some basic design criteria, or they require a very high technological entry level that is beyond the reach of most computer users. As an alternative, the paper presents the design considerations behind TELEFREEK, a flexible, extensible, and customizable platform for collaboration. Drawing on resources freely available to the Internet community, TELEFREEK assists people making contact with others, and integrates access to common communication facilities. KEYWORDS contact facilitation, casual interaction, coordination, computer supported cooperative work, groupware.

Although visual programming techniques have been used to lower the threshold of programming for end users, they are not sufficient for creating end user programming environments that are both easy to use and powerful. To achieve this, an environment must support the definition of programs that are not just static representations of behavior, but are instead dynamic collections of program objects which can be applied in a number of contexts rather than just a program editor. We describe an approach to end user programming called tactile programming which extends visual techniques with a unified program manipulation paradigm that makes programs easy to comprehend, compose and, most importantly, share over the World Wide Web. Tactile programming’s inherent ability to support the social context in which programming takes place along with its ability to ease program comprehension and composition is what differentiates this approach from others. In the context of the Agentsheets programming substrate, we have created an instance of a tactile programming environment called Visual AgenTalk which is used to create interactive simulations.

Distributed organizations, with distributed cooperative work, are a fact of life. How can new technologies help? Distributed video is an appealing choice, carrying more contextual information than voice alone and, arguably, better at conveying subtle cues, such as the emotional states. Although new commercial systems are being introduced, they focus primarily on providing new technology. Most are based on relatively simple extensions of two existing models of communication: formal meetings become videoconferences and telephones become videophones. However, research in computer-supported cooperative work has tried to emphasize the user, with models based on Shared Workspaces (to support shared work on a common task), Coordinated Communication (to support structured communication to serve a specified purpose), and Informal Interaction (to support informal, unplanned and unstructured interactions). Although mediaspaces can incorporate all three, they emphasize informal communication, providing people working together at a distance with interactions that they take for granted when they are co-located. This chapter describes some of the pioneering work in media spaces, with more detailed descriptions of our own work at Rank Xerox EuroPARC (RAVE for our own use in the laboratory and WAVE, to support engineers working collaboratively between facilities in England and the Netherlands), concluding with a discussion of the technical, user interface and social issues involved in designing media spaces.

One fundamental challenge for the design of the interactive systems of the future is to invent and design environments and cultures in which humans can express themselves and engage in personally meaningful activities. Unfortunately, a large number of new media are designed from a perspective of viewing and treating humans primarily as consumers. The possibility for humans to be and act as designers (in cases in which they desire to do so) should be accessible not only to a small group of “high-tech scribes, ” but rather to all interested individuals and groups. Meta-design characterizes activities, processes, and objectives to create new media and environments that allow users to act as designers and be creative. In this paper we discuss problems addressed by our research on meta-design, provide a conceptual framework for metadesign, and illustrate our developments in the context of a particular system, the Envisionment and Discovery Collaboratory.

In the past, most collaboration support systems have focused on either automating fixed work processes or simply supporting communication in ad-hoc processes. This results in systems that are usually inflexible and difficult to change or that provide no specific support to help users decide what to do next. This paper describes a new kind of tool that bridges the gap between these two approaches by flexibly supporting processes at many points along the spectrum: from highly specified to highly unspecified. The development of this approach was strongly based on social science theory about collaborative work. Keywords Process Specificity, Process Support System, MixedInitiative Systems, Dynamic/Improvisational Change.