Richard Bentley

Ethnographically-informed systems design for air traffic control

This paper relates experiences of a project where an ethnographic study of air traffic controllers is being used to inform the design of the controllers’ interface to the flight data base. We outline the current UK air traffic control system, discuss the ethnographic work we have undertaken studying air traffic control as a cooperative activity, describe some of the difficulties in collaboration between software developers and sociologists and show how the ethnographic studies have influenced the systems design process. Our conclusions are that ethnographic studies are helpful in informing the systems design process and may produce insights which contradict conventional thinking in systems design.

Basic support for cooperative work on the World Wide Web

The emergence and widespread adoption of the World Wide Web offers a great deal of potential in supporting cross-platform cooperative work within widely dispersed working groups. The Basic Support for Cooperative Work (BSCW) project at GMD is attempting to realize this potential through development of web-based tools which provide cross-platform collaboration services to groups using existing web technologies. This paper describes one of these tools, theBSCW Shared Workspace system?a centralized cooperative application integrated with an unmodified web server and accessible from standard web browsers. The BSCW system supports cooperation through “shared workspaces”; small repositories in which users can upload documents, hold threaded discussions and obtain information on the previous activities of other users to coordinate their own work. The current version of the system is described in detail, including design choices resulting from use of the web as a cooperation platform and feedback from users following the release of a previous version of BSCW to the public domain.

The World Wide Web as Enabling Technology for CSCW: The Case of BSCW

Despite the growth of interest in the field of CSCW,and the increasingly large number of systems whichhave been developed, it is still the case that fewsystems have been adopted for widespread use. This isparticularly true for widely-dispersed, cross-organisational working groups where problems ofheterogeneity in computing hardware and softwareenvironments inhibit the deployment of CSCWtechnologies. With a lightweight and extensibleclient-server architecture, client implementations forall popular computing platforms, and an existing userbase numbered in millions, the World Wide Web offersgreat potential in solving some of these problems toprovide an ‘enabling technology’ for CSCWapplications. We illustrate this potential using ourwork with the BSCW shared workspace system – anextension to the Web architecture which provides basicfacilities for collaborative information sharing fromunmodified Web browsers. We conclude that despitelimitations in the range of applications which can bedirectly supported, building on the strengths of theWeb can give significant benefits in easing thedevelopment and deployment of CSCW applications.

Integrating ethnography into the requirements engineering process

Experiences from an interdisciplinary project involving software engineers and sociologists are reported. The project is concerned with discovering the requirements of a user interface to a flight database which is used to provide real-time information to air-traffic controllers. The sociologists are conducting an ethnographic analysis of the activity of air-traffic control, and this is being used for the development of a prototype system. An overview of the project is given, the contribution of sociologists to requirements engineering is discussed, and tool support which will allow ethnographic observations to be integrated into the requirements engineering process is suggested.<<ETX>>

Situated evaluation for cooperative systems

This paper discusses an evaluation of the MEAD prototype, a multi-user interface generator tool particularly for use in the context of Air Traffic Control (ATC). The procedures we adopted took the form of opportunistic and informal evaluation sessions with small user groups, including Air Traffic Controllers (ATCOs). We argue that informal procedures are a powerful and cost effective method for dealing with specific evaluation issues in the context of CSCW but that wider issues are more problematic. Most notably, identifying the “validity” or otherwise of CSCW systems requires that the context of use be taken seriously, necessitating a fundamental re-appraisal of the concept of evaluation.

An architecture for tailoring cooperative multi-user displays

A range of architectures have emerged which support realtime cooperative user interfaces. These architectures have tended to centralise the management of the interface and thus provide only limited support for user-centred development and interface tailoring. This paper considers the problems associated with the development of tailorable cooperative interfaces and proposes an architecture which allows such interfaces to be developed using an incremental, user-centred approach. The architecture presented in this paper has emerged within the context of a project investigating cooperative interface development for UK air traffic control. We conclude that the architecture is equally applicable to other Command and Control domains, where a shared information space forms the focus for the work taking place.

Designing with ethnography: making work visible

Abstract The paper reviews some aspects of a research project in which ethnographic studies of air traffic controllers at work were used to inform the design of an electronic flight strip. In particular, it emphasises the important role of ethnography in gaining an insight into the fine grained and often ‘invisible’ aspects of work which are essential to its accomplishment and which must be taken account of in the design process. The paper also reviews some of the practical lessons of interdisciplinary working and the role, along with some limitations, that ethnographic studies can play in the system design process.

Architectural support for cooperative multiuser interfaces

Computer support for cooperative work requires the construction of applications that support interaction by multiple users. The highly dynamic and flexible nature of cooperative work makes the need for rapid user-interface prototyping a central concern. We have designed and developed a software architecture that provides mechanisms to support rapid multiuser-interface construction and distributed user-interface management. Rapid prototyping requires mechanisms that make the information determining interface configuration visible, accessible, and tailorable. We developed the architecture as part of a project investigating support for the cooperative work of air traffic controllers. Extensive use of prolonged ethnographic investigation helped to uncover the nature of cooperation in air traffic control. The aim of the architecture is to support an environment in which a multidisciplinary team can experiment with a wide range of alternate user-interface designs for air traffic controllers. Thus, we use examples from this domain to illustrate the architecture.<<ETX>>

Distributed authoring on the Web with the BSCW shared workspace system

m We consider requirements for distributed authoring on the Web, based on experience with the BSCW Shared Workspace system. The BSCW system is an extension of a standard Web server, which provides a range of basic services for collaboration, including features for uploading documents of any type, remote editing, version management, group administration, access control and more, accessible from different platforms using unmodified Web browsers. We discuss the need for standards for Web-based distributed authoring and reveal our own application-level solutions as implemented in the BSCW system. he Web was originally intended to support a richer, more active form of information sharing than is currently the case. Early implementations at CERN allowed browsing of pages, as is common today, but also supported annotation and the addition of links between arbitrary pages, not just those on local servers, which the user could access and edit [Berners-Lee 1992]. Some of these concepts were carried through to early drafts of the standards for Web protocols, which describe features such as remote publishing of hypertext pages and check in/out support for locking documents, to ensure consistency in a multiauthor environment. To date, these aspects have largely been sidelined, while development of Web browsers, servers, and protocols has focused on the more “passive” aspects of information browsing. The emergence of tools like Netscape Composer (Gold) and America Online AOLpress suggest a return to the Web as the basis for more active information sharing. Such tools support WYSIWYG editing of Web pages and publishing to remote Web servers: a first step towards true distributed, cross-platform, collaborative authoring and annotation. These developments in turn raise questions about the support required for version management, consistency control, and the like, and how (and to what extent) this support should be provided through extension of the standard Web protocols. These questions are the focus of the work of the recently established IETF Working Group on Distributed Authoring and Versioning. To provide input to these discussions, we describe our work with the BSCW Shared Workspace system [Bentley et al. 1997a; 1997b]. Conceived as a means to support dispersed work groups, BSCW provides features for sharing documents of any type by upload to a BSCW server. Simple locking and versioning services are also provided, and a basic event service informs users of the current state of the authoring process. BSCW integrates tools like Distributed Authoring on the Web with the BSCW Shared Workspace System

Designing a system for cooperative work on the World-Wide Web: experiences with the BSCW system

The Basic Support for Cooperative Work (BSCW) project at GMD is developing tools that provide support for cross-platform information sharing for groups of users over the World Wide Web. The basis for these tools is the BSCW shared workspace system, a centralised shared information system integrated with an unmodified Web server and accessible from standard Web browsers. We discuss the experiences with the public release of version 1 of the system and the subsequent re-design for the current version (version 2), following feedback from the users. We describe particular problems, and demonstrate our solutions, arising from the choice of the Web as a platform for collaboration tools, and extend this to suggest that some of our experiences may be more generally applicable to the design of effective collaboration-support systems.