Frederic Roulland

Supporting Communities of Practice with Large Screen Displays

In the foreseeable future large screen displays will be affordable and consequently widely available in work organisations. Several projects have started to investigate what kinds of information are most usefully presented by large screen displays and in which ways. This research is part of a larger effort concerning Ambient Displays, but here we focus on the visual presentation of information in work settings. Starting from communication needs in work organisations, we identify Communities of Practice as a relevant organisational group to address, and present a system for supporting them. On the basis of our experience and experience found in the literature we analyse design choices that can alleviate the cost of using these systems. Furthermore, context-sensitiveness may provide additional ways of improving the cost/benefit ratio.

From ethnographic study to mixed reality: a remote collaborative troubleshooting system

In this paper we describe how we moved from ethnographic study to design and testing of a Mixed Reality (MR) system, supporting collaborative troubleshooting of office copiers and printers. A key CSCW topic is how remotely situated people can collaborate around physical objects which are not mutually shared, without introducing new interactional problems. Our approach, grounded in an ethnographic study of a troubleshooting call centre, was to create a MR system centred on a shared 3D problem representation, rather than to use video or Augmented Reality (AR)-based systems. The key drivers for this choice were that given the devices are sensor equipped and networked, such a representation can create reciprocal viewpoints onto the current state of this particular machine without requiring additional hardware. Testing showed that troubleshooters and customers could mutually orient around the problem representation and found it a useful troubleshooting resource.

Designing Technology as an Embedded Resource for Troubleshooting

In this paper we describe a number of technologies which we designed to provide support for customers troubleshooting problems with their office devices. The technologies aim to support both self-conducted and expert-supported troubleshooting and to provide a seamless route from one type of support to another. The designs are grounded in the findings of an ethnographic study of a troubleshooting call centre for office devices. We examine the properties of different assemblies of people, resources, technologies and spaces to inspire design for the different troubleshooting situations. Through our fieldwork and our technology envisionments we uncovered a number of dislocations between various aspects of the troubleshooting assemblies: (1) a physical dislocation between the site of the problem and the site of problem resolution; (2) a conceptual dislocation between the users’ knowledge and the troubleshooting resources and (3) a logical dislocation between the support resources and the status of the ailing device itself. The technologies that we propose attempt to address these dislocations by embedding the troubleshooting resources in the device itself, thus harmonizing the various elements and capturing, where possible, the haecceities—the ‘just thisness’—of each particular troubleshooting situation.

Colour management is a socio-technical problem

This paper describes how achieving consistent colour reproduction across different devices is a complicated matter. Although there is a technological infrastructure for managing colour across devices this is very rarely used as intended. This infrastructure has been created by modelling the problem of colour management as a wholly technical one. In this paper we illustrate the importance of understanding the management of colour as a socio-technical problem, by describing the findings of a multi-sited ethnography of designers and print shops. Our analysis of the ethnography reveals that designers build up practical, tangible, visual understandings of colour and that these do not fit with the current solution, which requires users to deal with colour in an abstract manner. This paper builds on previous research in CSCW which has considered the importance of socio-technical systems, bringing the work into a previously unexplored domain. It shows how an understanding of the social can also be central when designing technical infrastructures.

Query reformulation and refinement using NLP-based sentence clustering

We have developed an interactive query refinement tool that helps users search a knowledge base for solutions to problems with electronic equipment. The system is targeted towards non-technical users, who are often unable to formulate precise problem descriptions on their own. Two distinct but interrelated functionalities support the refinement of a vague, non-technical initial query into a more precise problem description: a synonymy mechanism that allows the system to match non-technical words in the query with corresponding technical terms in the knowledge base, and a novel refinement mechanism that helps the user build up successively longer and more precise problem descriptions starting from the seed of the initial query. A natural language parser is used both in the application of context-sensitive synonymy rules and the construction of the refinement tree.

‘Colour, It’s Just a Constant Problem’: An Examination of Practice, Infrastructure and Workflow in Colour Printing

Two interrelated topics that have been of enduring interest to researchers in studying cooperative work practices and the design and use of technologies to support those practices are workflow and, to a slightly lesser extent, infrastructure. Workflow systems are a classic form of technology employed to coordinate cooperative work along a process of production where different workers (potentially in different companies and locations) complete different tasks along a ‘line’ of production. The workflow and the technologies that embody or enforce it are designed to maintain adherence to procedure and coordination across time and place. The central issues surrounding the treatment of workflow in Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and related disciplines have been the problem of getting workflow systems to mesh with the particularities of local flows of work among people. Since Suchman (1983, 1987), at least, there has been a presiding concern with the ways in which workflow models fail to take into account the local, embodied, non-prescriptive and emergent manner (responding to dynamic local circumstances) in which people organise their work. Workflow systems have been criticised for being designed from ‘elsewhere’ – with an inadequate, overly idealistic or abstracted understanding of the work they are meant to assist. People end up having to organise or translate (potentially after-the-fact) their work, so it fits with the workflow system or workaround or ignore the technology completely (see Bowers et al. 1995) for an example from the print industry).

Query Suggestion for On-Device Troubleshooting

This paper describes a novel query suggestion tool we have designed and implemented to help users of office printing devices better formulate their queries, while searching a troubleshooting knowledge base provided as a service on the device itself. The paper traces the main motivations of the design of the query suggestion tool and outlines its technical details with an emphasis on its combination of features in relation to prior work.

Mixed reality for supporting office devices troubleshooting

In this paper we describe the Mixed Reality system that we are developing to facilitate a real-world application, that of collaborative remote troubleshooting of broken office devices. The architecture of the system is centered on a 3D virtual representation of the device augmented with status data of the actual device coming from its internal sensors. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how this approach supports the interactions required by the remote collaborative troubleshooting activity whilst taking into account technical constraints that come from a real world application. We believe it constitutes an interesting opportunity for using Mixed Reality in this domain.

Mobile 3D Representations for Device Troubleshooting

We are interested in supporting users in a real world application, that of troubleshooting malfunctioning office devices, such as printers or copiers. Basing upon findings from case studies of troubleshooting activities that we conducted, we are constructing a Mixed Reality troubleshooting system. The system allows end-users to try to solve the problem they are experiencing with the device by themselves, with online support available on the device, or by collaborating with a remote troubleshooter. The architecture of the system is centered on a 3D representation of the device augmented with status data of the actual device coming from its internal sensors. The 3D representation is provided to the end-users on the device screen and to the remote troubleshooters on their desktops and it offers a number of means to interact with it providing help for troubleshooting the device. The main purpose of this paper is to illustrate a new interaction mode with the virtual representation for the end-users that we are designing for our system and that is based on the use of a detachable device screen.Copyright

Creation and Maintenance of Query Expansion Rules

In an information retrieval system, a thesaurus can be used for query expansion, i.e. adding words to queries in order to improve recall. We propose a semi-automatic and interactive approach for the creation and maintenance of domain-specific thesauri for query expansion. Domain-specific thesauri are especially required in highly technical domains where the use of general thesauri for query expansion introduces more noise than useful results. Our semi-automatic approach to thesaurus creation constitutes a good compromise between fully manual approaches, which produce high-quality thesauri but at a prohibitively high cost, and fully automatic approaches, which are cheap but produce thesauri of limited quality. This article describes our approach and the architecture of the system implementing it, named Cannelle. It exploits user query logs and natural language processing to identify valuable synonymy candidates, and allows editors to interactively explore and validate these candidates in the context of a domain-specific searchable knowledge base. We evaluated the system in the domain of online troubleshooting, where the proposed method yielded an improvement in the quality of the search results obtained.