CSCW

We propose an approach to creating shared mixed realities based on the construction of transparent boundaries between real and virtual spaces. First, we introduce a taxonomy that classifies current approaches to shared spaces according to the three dimensions of transportation, artificiality, and spatiality. Second, we discuss our experience of staging a poetry performance simultaneously within real and virtual theaters. This demonstrates the complexities involved in establishing social interaction between real and virtual spaces and motivates the development of a systematic approach to mixing realities. Third, we introduce and demonstrate the technique of mixed-reality boundaries as a way of joining real and virtual spaces together in order to address some of these problems.

Supporting context-based collaboration among online users is an important issue to computer-mediated collaboration to fulfill specified tasks. However, several problems make it difficult to be aware of the context. The context of the user task can be (i) dynamic (i.e., changing over time), and (ii) mixed with multiple sub-contexts together. We propose a novel ontology-based platform to overcome these problems.

A área de Design de Interação recorrentemente é abordada por práticas de projeto que tornam invisíveis as contribuições de diversos atores envolvidos no processos de design. Em projetos de interação de plataformas digitais, estas práticas tsão frequentes, refletindo ideologias de projetos que estão ligadas a sistemas econômicos e a relações de poder, que invisibilizam a materialidade de relações de trabalho, assim como dos projetos feitos pelos assim chamados de “usuários”. Este trabalho de conclusão de curso busca reconhecer e caracterizar a dimensão projetual invisível, construída ao longo do tempo, presente em plataformas digitais. Este estudo se desenvolve majoritariamente a partir das concepções de Infraestrutura da Informação e de ação infraestruturante, sendo complementadas com os conceitos de ação metaestruturante, metadesign e meta-organizações. O trabalho empírico consiste na combinação de diferentes abordagens etnográficas, a fim de re-construir a narrativa escondida em registros encontrados em uma plataforma livre para trabalhos cooperativos. No decorrer dos capítulos, são exploradas as relações ecológicas tecidas por diferentes atores ao se organizarem em grupo, assim como da interferência dessa meta-organização no projeto de interação da plataforma estudada. Também é analisado o papel da ideologia projetual no desenvolvimento de plataformas digitais e de como estas proporcionam autonomia projetual para diferentes Coletivos Autogestionários na produção de suas Identidades Visuais. Como resultado, identificamos uma relação projetual que se difere da literatura convencional de design de interação, a que denominamos de Infradesign.

This paper explores current research around IT-related organizational change in the public sector, and in particular the emergence of “virtual organizations”(VOs) in government. We argue that despite their centrality to broader digital government visions, the tensions and challenges attending VO development remain a theoretical and empirical weak point in digital government scholarship to date. This paper draws on findings from the fields of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), Science and Technology Studies (STS), and Organization Science to illuminate three central problems confronting the growth of public sector VOs: problems of distance, alignment, and resistance. Theoretically and empirically informed approaches to these problems promise to improve both understanding and practice of IT-related organizational change in government.

We present a mobile phone based cricket game for
improving the spoken English pronunciation of school
children designed and tested within a specific socio-cultural
context in rural India, the Mewat district of Haryana State.
The development of the game concept was informed by a
field study, which identified the cultural restrictions
respected by the community as well community interests
and motivations. The game was accessible using a low-end
mobile phone and evaluated with a group of 63 students
from classes 4 and 5 of a rural school. The results suggest
that the cricket game can be effectively used to engage
students and to improve their spoken English skills in the
given setting. Further, the game serves as an informative
example of how factors impacting the acceptability and
appropriation of a technology in a particular setting can be
taken into account from the very beginning of the design
process.

This paper presents the design and architecture of a collaborative learning model based on the Web as an experience that it is being done at the University of Oviedo, giving support to the students of a logic course, in the collaborative achievement of exercises by means of e-meetings and in the training of the achievement of exams by means of a virtual reality game. This model is developed like a component of the project IDEFIX and it uses Web services.

Nursing homes are complex healthcare settings that take care of older adults with sever cognitive and physical impairments. Given the conditions of the patients, nursing homes can be considered end-of-life contexts. There, the care work that aim to mitigate and treat the conditions of the patients it is the result of the collaboration between the care professionals and the relatives of the patients. Indeed, when the patients are very old adults in a end-of-life situation, the provision of care often involves a family caregiver as the main point of contact for the healthcare service. However, caring for institutionalized older adults is known to be a complex issue both for the families of the older adults and the care professionals. Over the last few years, there has been an increasing interest in this topic primarily due to a growing older population and, hence, a heightened need of research contributions in this area. Previous studies on caregiving for older adults living in nursing homes recognize the necessity to support professionals’ work practices to ameliorate their working conditions, and decrease the risk of burnout and job dissatisfaction, as well as to relieve the families of the patients from the burden of caring for their loved ones. Yet, the literature shows a lack of solutions in terms of technologies for this kind of environments.
In this thesis we report an extensive study and analysis we performed within a network of six and nursing homes located in the northern Italy.We investigated the practice of caregiving within the nursing homes. In particular, we focused on the work practices of care professionals, and on the relational issues between the care professionals and the families of the patients. We conducted, first, an exploratory study to comprehend the nature of our research context. Afterwards, we carried out a series of participatory design sessions and validation workshops to elicit the requirements for the development of a new technology platform to support the collaboration between care professionals and relatives of older patients.
The outcomes of this work shed new light on the opportunities of using ICT solutions to improve relations and information sharing among caregivers. Indeed, our findings state that the organizational and relational complexity of nursing homes emphasize how poor communication practices hinder the collaboration and the mutual understanding between the relatives of the patients and the care professional. As a result, we deliver a series of functional requirements for the development of a technology platform that aims to support relationships, communication, and coordination among care professionals, and between care professionals and families of the patients.

This book illuminates the role of crowdsourcing in policy-making By drawing on several cases around the world. From crowdsourced constitution reform in Iceland and participatory budgeting in Canada, to open innovation for services and crowdsourced federal strategy process in the United States, the book analyzes the impact of crowdsourcing on citizen agency in the public sphere. It also serves as a handbook with practical advice for successful crowdsourcing in a variety of public domains.

The author, Tanja Aitamurto, is a visiting researcher at the Liberation
Technology Program at Stanford University. She examines
how collective intelligence, whether harvested by crowdsourcing,
co-creation or open innovation, impacts processes in journalism,
public policy-making and design. This book is based on a report
she delivered to the Parliament of Finland about crowdsourcing
for democratic processes.

In this paper we discuss our experiences of conducting user evaluations of technological installations for the new Robert Burns Birthplace museum and the challenges associating with doing this. We believed it to be important to avoid a sterile lab situation, and to be able to observe the social dynamics that evolve around museum installations. As we were unable to conduct studies in the museum itself we devised ways of taking them out of the lab by basing them in a more museum-like or semi-realistic setting. We took efforts to recreate the installation setup when this was likely to influence interaction patterns and could reveal usability issues. Moreover, we invited young families and adult groups to take part in the evaluation sessions to investigate how they would interact with these as a group. We explain our motivations and the tradeoffs involved. We focus on discussing the effects that the semi-realistic setting may have had on the user feedback obtained, reflect on the differing user behaviours that might emerge in the genuine museum setting and make recommendations for future studies.

In this paper we outline a genealogy of Mixed Reality Lab (MXR) projects, their influencing factors both from the Asian region and also within the lab, the employment of Blue-Sky Innovation by the lab for ideation, collaboration and project generation, as well as discuss some major points of inspiration for MXR from various sources.

Our current understanding of human interaction with hybrid or augmented environments is very limited. Here we focus on ‘tangible interaction’, denoting systems that rely on embodied interaction, tangible manipulation, physical representation of data, and embeddedness in real space. This synthesis of prior ‘tangible’ definitions enables us to address a larger design space and to integrate approaches from different disciplines. We introduce a framework that focuses on the interweaving of the material/physical and the social, contributes to understanding the (social) user experience of tangible interaction, and provides concepts and perspectives for considering the social aspects of tangible interaction. This understanding lays the ground for evolving knowledge on collaboration-sensitive tangible interaction design. Lastly, we analyze three case studies, using the framework, thereby illustrating the concepts and demonstrating their utility as analytical tools.

In this paper, I discuss the affordances offered by media spaces for collaboration, contrasting their properties with those of the everyday medium and exploring the implications for perception and interaction. Collaboration is situated in a physical environment which supports or constrains the various forms social interactions might take. An analysis of the affordances of the environment – the properties that offer actions and interactions to those within it – thus complements analyses which emphasize social and cultural factors. Examining the "physics" of media space systems is helpful both in understanding how people use them to collaborate and in suggesting possibilities for design.