Paul Luff

Applying the Technology of Conversation to the Technology for Conversation

Publisher Summary This chapter focuses on insights of conversation analysis (CA) that have been useful to designers of interactive technology. Insights into the organization and control of dialogue are provided by at least eight different disciplines. Complex interactions exist between the insights offered by each discipline, such that any individual piece of work is likely to combine insights from several sources. The function of repair in conversation appears to facilitate mutual understanding between participants. The turn-by-turn organization of conversation is such that participants must repeatedly exhibit their own understanding of prior utterances, especially when those utterances expect some direct response, as with adjacency pairs. The fact that repair itself is subject to the same kind of monitoring means that mutual misunderstanding can almost always be resolved to allow the conversation to proceed. Thus, dialogue between users and the advice system is characterized by alternating turns at talk which vary in size, content, and distribution over time. Turn constructional units (TCUs) are employed to segment what each party says, and turn allocation techniques are used to control turn transitions between segments. Continuous or discontinuous talk can result from this, depending on whether or not the pauses between TCUs are filled with talk by the other party. The overall length of the conversation is not specified in advance and repair mechanisms exist for dealing with various kinds of error.

On the Social Organisation of Organisations

This paper considers a range of theoretical approaches to the understanding of organisations and the implications these views have for the design of computer supported cooperative work systems. Organisations have often been seen as structures which can be divided into hierarchically ordered parts or as networks of informal relations. Organisational theorists have also considered organisations to resemble organisms with needs for survival in potentially hostile environments or as information processors, with decision-making as their most important characteristic. More recently, developments in the social sciences have suggested that radical reconceptualisations are necessary for the study of work settings. Consequently, these developments have attracted attention due to their potential to inform system design. This paper reviews some of these efforts and comments on some of the outstanding problems that have to be overcome if studies of everyday work settings are to inform the design of systems to support collaborative work.

Conversational resources for situated action

Suchman (1987) has recently drawn attention to the situated nature of human social action and its implications for the design of interactive computer systems. In particular, she has highlighted the shortcomings of globally managing human computer dialogues by matching user actions to some idealised plan for carrying out a task. In this paper we outline a scheme for the local management of dialogues based on the findings of conversation analysis. The scheme makes available a variety of communicative resources to both user and system, including the ability to give and take turns at talk, to initiate and carry out repair work, and to continue or change the topic of conversation. An implementation of the scheme in a welfare rights Advice System is described.

Interactional Resources for the Support of Collaborative Activities: Common Problems in the Design of Technologies to Support Groups and Communities

A typical challenge for designers of technologies to support groups and communities is how to support the early stages of interaction and collaboration. Whether the system is for individuals in an organisational setting or for more diverse and amorphous groups of people, a common problem is for the technology to facilitate individuals getting together to accomplish more focused collaborative activities. In this paper we will explore how in work settings, individuals use various resources including talk and visual conduct to move into participation with others around an artefact. Explicating these interactional resources offers some useful insights into the requirements of technologies to support emergent interactions. It also reveals that in everyday work settings participation and interaction can be amorphous and diverse.

Some lessons from an exercise in specification

Formulating precise descriptions of human-computer interactions is a prerequisite for the principled design, implementation, and evaluation of interactive systems. This article reports an exercise in interaction specification using Foley and Van Dams (1982) multilayered method of documenting the design of a user-computer interface. The specification was used to communicate the intended behaviour of a Forms Helper system from a design team to an implementation team. The ease with which the interaction could be represented at each of Foley and Van Dams four levels of abstraction is discussed, and recommendations are made for improving the method in places where its guidance was unclear or inadequate. The value of the method is examined prior to a discussion of the potential role of such specifications in the design and development cycle.

CHAPTER 13 – MIXED INITIATIVE INTERACTION

Publisher Summary This chapter explains the importance of attending to the dynamics of the interaction when designing knowledge-based systems. Small changes in these dynamics can greatly alter the way people use systems. The chapter describes a series of explorations in the design of new forms of interactional dynamics for knowledge-based systems. It discusses a number of discoveries in the design of what might be called mixed initiative interaction, in which the control of the dialogue is shared between the user and system. The chapter focuses on the evolution of interaction design ideas for the Forms Helper and the Advice System, and describes their consequences for usability.