Stefania Castellani

The practical indispensability of articulation work to immediate and remote help-giving

This paper argues that the design of remote help-giving systems should be grounded in articulation work and the methodical ways in which help-givers and help-seekers coordinate their problem solving activities. We provide examples from ethnographic studies of both immediate and remote help-giving to explicate what we mean by articulation work and to tease out common and characteristic methods involved in help-seeking and the giving of expert advice. We then outline how emerging technologies might best be used to support articulation work in the design and development of systems for remote troubleshooting of devices with embedded computing capabilities.

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.

Using real-life troubleshooting interactions to inform self-assistance design

Technical troubleshooting is a domain that has changed enormously in recent years. Instead of relying on visits from service personnel end users facing technical problems with machinery, for example computers and printers, can now seek assistance from systems that guide them toward an autonomous solution of the problem. Systems that can be offered to them are wide in their range, but typically fall either in the category of Expert Systems or searchable databases that can be queried with keyword searches. Both approaches present advantages and disadvantages in terms of flexibility to address different levels of user expertise and ease of maintenance. However, few studies explicitly address the issue of how best to design for a balance between guidance and user freedom in such systems. In the work reported here an office equipment manufacturer’s call centre was studied in order to understand the mechanisms used when human agents guide users toward a resolution. The overall aim here is not to reproduce the agent behaviour in a system, but rather to identify which interactional building blocks such a system should have. These are assessed in relation to the existing online knowledge base resources offered by the same company in order to exemplify the kinds of issues designers need to attend to in this domain.

Event Extraction for Legal Case Building and Reasoning

We are interested in developing tools to support the activities of lawyers in corporate litigation. In current applications, information such as characters that have played a significant role in a case, events in which they have participated, people they have been in contact, etc., have to be manually identified. There is little in the way of support to help them identify the relevant information in the first place. In this paper, we describe an approach to semi-automatically extracting such information from the collection of documents the lawyers are searching. Our approach is based on Natural Language Processing techniques and it enables the use of entity related information corresponding to the relations among the key players of a case, extracted in the form of events.

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.

Agentville: Supporting Situational Awareness and Motivation in Call Centres

Call centres are high pressure work environments where agents work strictly according to shifts and time schedules. Typically, agents are grouped into teams with supervisors from whom they receive only periodic performance feedback. It is a challenge to maintain high motivation and performance amongst the agents in this environment. Agents may lack awareness of their individual status with respect to their objectives, and the performance of their team and the call center as a whole. In this chapter we describe the design of a system that we are building to provide the agents with real-time information on their work environment’s status and on potential improvements in performance, while hopefully also improving their work experience. The solution is based on the introduction in the call centre of some game mechanics whose selection and instantiation has been informed by case studies conducted by the authors.

XFolders: a flexible workflow system based on electronic circulation folders

We present a flexible lightweight document-centered workflow system, called XFolders, that breaks physical and organisational boundaries allowing users across distributed virtual organizations to flexibly collaborate and share documents. The paradigm underlying XFolders is the well known, and widely adopted, internal office circulation envelope. We show how XFolders combines the simplicity of this metaphor with the power and the benefits of todays networked computers, in terms of speed, distance bridging and support. In particular, we show how in XFolders documents can be migrated across organizations hidden by firewalls and how we deal with scalability and dynamicity issues.

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.

Understanding commuting to accompany work organisations' and employees' behaviour change

Commuting is a key domain for promoting sustainability but changing transportation habits to adopt more sustainable transportation modes is a hard challenge. Our approach is based on the idea of accompanying behaviour change by first understanding the context in which behaviours occur and then designing an appropriate intervention considering its practicability and acceptability. This paper illustrates key elements of reflection from a study on commuting that we have conducted in a workplace and that is informing our ongoing design of technology in support of behaviour change for the three stakeholders of commuting, commuters, work organisations and public administrators.