Leon Watts

Measures of Process

It has been said that all work is cooperative, and so any work supported by a computer is computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW). To some, such a position would seem to give a book on evaluation for CSCW a very wide brief: we would like to widen it still further. Our primary concern is how one can evaluate the wide range of electronic facilities now being provided to help people communicate and cooperate. These facilities range from email and on-line electronic conferencing to video links used as an adjunct to shared tools. Their purpose is to mediate conversations between people about work, and their use has been dubbed “mediated” communication in order to differentiate it from the more common face-to-face communication.

Peripheral participation in video-mediated communication

The importance of overhearing, and other ways of monitoring communicative behaviour not explicitly directed at oneself, has been illustrated in numerous ethnographic studies of computer-supported cooperative work. This paper is concerned with a particular form of monitoring. A “peripheral participant” is defined as someone who has a legitimate interest in monitoring a joint task (being carried out by some “primary participants”) but who is not actively involved in carrying out the task themselves. The concept is illustrated through field studies of telemedical consultation and related to other analyses of overhearing. Two experiments are reported where participatory status was manipulated using a role-play task. Ratings of interpersonal awareness, measures of gaze direction and recall of the conversation all indicate that the task successfully operationalized the distinction between primary and peripheral participation. In addition, the experiment manipulated the visibility of the peripheral participant to a remote primary participant. This was shown to have an effect on the remote primary participants interpersonal awareness of the peripheral participant. Potential mechanisms for this effect are considered. It is concluded that peripheral participation is a potentially important form of involvement that needs to be considered when designing and configuring equipment for video-mediated cooperative work.

A dimension space for the design of interactive systems within their physical environments

This paper introduces a Dimension Space describing the entities making up richly interactive systems. The Dimension Space is intended to help designers understand both the physical and virtual entities from which their systems are built, and the tradeoffs involved in both the design of the entities themselves and of the combination of these entities in a physical space. Entities are described from the point of view of a person carrying out a task at a particular time, in terms of their attention received, role, manifestation, input and output capacity and informational density. The Dimension Space is applied to two new systems developed at Grenoble, exposing design tradeoffs and design rules for richly interactive systems.

YourGloves, hothands and hotmits: devices to hold hands at a distance

There is a growing body of work in HCI on the design of communication technologies to help support lovers in long distance relationships. We build upon this work by presenting an exploratory study of hand-holding prototypes. Our work distinguishes itself by basing distance communication metaphors on elements of familiar, simple co-located behaviours. We argue that the combined evocative power of unique co-created physical representations of the absent other can be used by separated lovers to generate powerful and positive experiences, in turn sustaining romantic connections at a distance.

Free-hand sketch grouping for video retrieval

We present an algorithm for extracting object descriptions from free-hand sketches of remembered scenes, drawn as video retrieval queries. Our sketches depict scene content, as well as indicators of motion. We report an exploratory study investigating how people sketch to depict recalled events. We incorporate several observations from this study into the design of a novel sketch parsing algorithm. We draw upon a temporal HMM classifier to recognise common pictograms, and graph-cut to identify more general objects.

Telemedicine. What happens in remote consultation.

The results of a field study of three sites that used video to link primary care medical centers to hospitals are reported. The analysis was concerned with identifying the people involved, the tasks carried out in collaboration at each end of the link, and how the different communications facilities helped or hindered. The results are summarized as six task characteristics and their design implications for this model of telemedical consultation are discussed.

Towards Artificial Emotions to Assist Social Coordination in HRI

Coordination of human–robot joint activity must depend on the ability of human and artificial agencies to interpret and interleave their actions. In this paper we consider the potential of artificial emotions to serve as task-relevant coordination devices in human–robot teams. We present two studies aiming to understand whether a non-humanoid robot can express artificial emotions in a manner that is meaningful to a human observer, the first based on static images and the second on the dynamic production of embodied robot expressions. We present a mixed-methods approach to the problem, combining statistical treatment of ratings data and thematic analysis of qualitative data. Our results demonstrate that even very simple movements of a non-humanoid robot can convey emotional meaning, and that when people attribute emotional states to a robot, they typically apply an event-based frame to make sense of the robotic expressions they have seen. Artificial emotions with high arousal level and negative valence are relatively easy for people to recognise compared to expressions with positive valence. We discuss the potential for using motion in different parts of a non-humanoid robot body to support the attribution of emotion in HRI, towards ethically responsible design of artificial emotions that could contribute to the efficacy of joint human–robot activities.

A design model of emotional body expressions in non-humanoid robots

Robotic emotional expressions could benefit social communication between humans and robots, if the cues such expressions contain were to be intelligible to human observers. In this paper, we present a design framework for modelling emotionally expressive robotic movements. The framework combines approach-avoidance with Shape and Effort dimensions, derived from Laban, and makes use of anatomical body planes that are general to both humanoid and non-humanoid body forms. An experimental validation study is reported with 34 participants rating an implementation of five expressive behaviours on a non-humanoid robotic platform. The results demonstrate that such expressions can encode basic emotional information, in that the parameters of the proposed design model can convey the meaning of emotional dimensions of valence, arousal and dominance. The framework thus creates a basis for implementing a set of emotional expressions that are appropriately adapted to contexts of human-robot joint activity.

Choosing friends carefully: allies for critical computing

In this paper, we argue firstly that researchers in critical computing should address the specific information and communication technology (ICT) needs and activities of those agencies concerned with emancipatory issues. Secondly, we argue that a critical perspective, explicitly foregrounding empowerment and emancipatory concerns, forms a basis for emphasising the practice of individuals, groups and organisations, rather than purely focusing on organisational form in social action.We discuss this context of social action, identifying some relevant ICT-related challenges. We identify three themes that highlight factors that differentiate ICT support for social action groups from the setting of conventional business and service organisations: Free / Libre Open-Source Software, techniques and technologies for engagement through storytelling, and learning and evaluation in social action.

It's neat to feel the heat: how can we hold hands at a distance?

There is a growing body of work in HCI on the design of communication technologies to help support long distance relationships. We build upon this work by presenting three different prototypes based on hand holding. This distinguishes itself by basing distance communication metaphors on elements of co-located hand-holding actions. We then present an evaluation of the prototypes based on a three-phase interview process with 12 participants. We conclude by discussing the combined evocative power of unique physical metaphors and memories in fostering romantic connections at a distance.