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.

The design of CSCW systems has often had its roots in ethnomethodological understandings of work and investigations of working settings. Increasingly, we are also seeing these ideas applied to critique and inform HCI design more generally. However, the attempt to design from the basis of ethnomethodology is fraught with methodological dangers. In particular, ethnomethodology’s overriding concern with the detail of practice poses some serious problems when attempts are made to design around such understandings. In this paper, we discuss the range and application of ethnomethodological investigations of technology in working settings, describe how ethnomethodologically-affiliated work has approached system design and discuss ways that ethnomethodology can move from design critique to design practice: the advent of technomethodology.

This essay considers the problem of defining the context that context aware systems should pay attention to from a human perspective. In particular, we argue that there are human aspects of context that cannot be sensed or even inferred by technological means, so context aware systems cannot be designed simply to act on our behalf. Rather they will have to be able to defer to users in an efficient and non-obtrusive fashion. Our point is particularly relevant for systems that are constructed such that applications are architecturally isolated from the sensing and inferencing that governs their behavior. We propose a design framework that is intended to guide thinking about accommodating human aspects of context. This framework presents four design principles that support intelligibility of system behavior and accountability of human users and a number of human-salient details of context that must be accounted for in context aware system design.

Over the past ten years, the use of sociological methods and sociological reasoning have become more prominent in the analysis and design of interactive systems. For a variety of reasons, one form of sociological enquiry, ethnomethodology, has become something of a favoured approach. Our goal in this paper is to investigate the consequences of approaching system design from the ethnomethodological perspective. In particular, we are concerned with how ethnomethodology can take a foundational place in the very notion of system design, rather than simply being employed as a resource in aspects of the process such as requirements elicitation and specification. We begin by outlining the basic elements of ethnomethodology, and discussing the place that it has come to occupy in CSCW and, increasingly, in HCI. We discuss current approaches to the use of ethnomethodology in systems design, and point to the contrast between the use of ethnomethodology for critique and for design. Currently, und...

The design of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) systems involves a variety of disciplinary approaches, drawing as much on sociological and psychological perspectives on group and individual activity as on technical approaches to designing distributed systems. Traditionally, these have been applied independently---the technical approaches focussing on design criteria and implementation strategies, the social approaches focussing on the analysis of working activity with or without technological support. However, the disciplines are more strongly related than this suggests. Technical strategies---such as the mechanisms for data replication, distribution and coordination---have a significant impact on the forms of interaction in which users can engage, and therefore on how their work proceeds. Consequently, the findings of sociological and psychological investigations of collaborative working have direct impact for how we go about designing collaborative systems. I...

Appropriation is the process by which people adopt and adapt technologies, fitting them into their working practices. It is similar to customisation, but concerns the adoption patterns of technology and the transformation of practice at a deeper level. Understanding appropriation is a key problem for developing interactive systems, since it critical to the success of technology deployment. It is also an important research issue, since appropriation lies at the intersection of workplace studies and design.

Modern applications such as Microsoft Word have many automatic features and hidden dependencies that are frequently helpful but can be mysterious to both novice and expert users. The “Crystal ” application framework provides an architecture and interaction techniques that allow programmers to create applications that let the user ask a wide variety of questions about why things did and did not happen, and how to use the related features of the application without using natural language. A user can point to an object or a blank space and get a popup list of questions about it, or the user can ask about recent actions from a temporal list. Parts of a text editor were implemented to show that these techniques are feasible, and a user test suggests that they are helpful and well-liked.

In order to develop intelligent systems that attain the trust of their users, it is important to understand how users perceive such systems and develop those perceptions over time. We present an investigation into how users come to understand an intelligent system as they use it in their daily work. During a six-week field study, we interviewed eight office workers regarding the operation of a system that predicted their managers ’ interruptibility, comparing their mental models to the actual system model. Our results show that by the end of the study, participants were able to discount some of their initial misconceptions about what information the system used for reasoning about interruptibility. However, the overarching structures of their mental models stayed relatively stable over the course of the study. Lastly, we found that participants were able to give lay descriptions attributing simple machine learning concepts to the system despite their lack of technical knowledge. Our findings suggest an appropriate level of feedback for user interfaces of intelligent systems, provide a baseline level of complexity for user understanding, and highlight the challenges of making users aware of sensed inputs for such systems. Author Keywords Intelligent systems, context-aware, mental models,

Tailorability is generally regarded as a key property of CSCW-systems, because cooperative activities provide for very dynamic and diversified requirements. Extensive tailorability has to be supported by the design of the system architecture. In this contribution we investigate the value of component architectures for this purpose and discuss several design options for the questions raised by this approach. We propose a model of a component architecture, which supports tailoring activities by changing parameter settings of single components, changing the composition of components, and changing the implementation of components. Hierarchical composition of components allows for tailoring operations on different levels of abstraction and complexity. We introduce the concepts of tailoring constraints, tailoring constructs, and tailoring rights, which allow a controlled evolution of the system. Finally, we show how our approach can be employed to design a tailorable application. 1. Introdu...

Collaboration management involves capturing the collaboration process, coordinating the activities of the participating applications and humans, and/or providing awareness, i.e., information that is highly relevant to a specific role and situation of a process participant. In this paper we propose an awareness provisioning solution that allows customization of the awareness delivered to each process participant. Unlike existing collaboration management technologies (such as workflow and groupware) that provide only a few built-in awareness choices, the proposed awareness solution allows the specification of what information is to be given to what users and at what time. To support this advanced level of awareness, we require the definition of awareness roles and the specification of corresponding awareness descriptions. Awareness roles can be dynamically created and associated with any process scope. Awareness descriptions define what information is to be given to users in an awareness...