Tim Mansfield

Locales framework: exploring foundations for collaboration support

We believe that virtual simulation of physical environments is an insufficient basis for building collaborative support systems. In response, we present a locales framework which frames collaboration as the interaction of individuals within social worlds regardless of whether that interaction is physical or virtual. The overview describes the five aspects of the framework: locale foundations, where locales are the basic structures providing the affordances for the work of social worlds; mutuality in interaction, including presence and awareness issues; individual views of multiple locales of interest, defined by the individuals participation in multiple social worlds; interaction trajectories, capturing the temporal dimensions of interaction; and civic structures, which embed locales and the collaborative work of groups in the larger public sphere.

Designing an immersive environment for public use

Bystander is a multi-user, immersive, interactive environment intended for public display in a museum or art gallery. It is designed to make available heritage collections in novel and culturally responsible ways. We use its development as a case study to examine the role played in that process by a range of tools and techniques from participatory design traditions. We describe how different tools were used within the design process, specifically: the ways in which the potential audience members were both included and represented; the prototypes that have been constructed as a way of envisioning how the final work might be experienced; and how these tools have been brought together in ongoing designing and evaluation. We close the paper with some reflections on the extension of participatory commitments into still-emerging areas of technology design that prioritise the design of spaces for human experience and reflective interaction.

Applying the Locales Framework to understanding and designing

The paper presents another iteration in the ongoing CSCW dialogue between the understanding of work and the design of systems to support work. We overview the Locales Framework (and its five aspects of locale foundations, individual views, civic structures, interaction trajectory, and mutuality) as a shared abstraction for both understanding and designing. We describe the use of the framework in a telehealth case study and discuss the implications of the framework for the design of generic toolkit environments, as interpreted in the prototype system called Orbit. We conclude with a critique of the framework and suggestions for further iterations in the dialogue.

Announcing activity: design and evaluation of an intentionally enriched awareness service

ABSTRACT We introduce and explore the notion of “intentionally enriched awareness.” Intentional enrichment refers to the process of actively engaging users in the awareness process by enabling them to express intentions. We explore this concept designing and evaluating the AnyBiff system, which allows users to freely create, share, and use a variety of biff applications. Biffs are simple representation of predefined activities. Users can select biffs to indicate that they are engaged in an activity. AnyBiff was deployed in two different organizations as part of a user-centered design process. We report on the results of the trial, which allowed us to gain insights into the potential of the AnyBiff prototype and the underlying biff concept to implement intentionally enriched awareness. Our findings show that intentional disclosure mechanisms in the form of biffs were successfully used in both fields of application. Users actively engaged in the design of a large variety of biffs and explored many different uses of the concept. The study revealed a whole host of issues with regard to intentionally enriched awareness, which give valuable insight into the conception and design of future applications in this area.

Multidisciplinary medical team meetings: a field study of collaboration in health care

We present an observational study that was conducted to guide the design of an enhanced collaboration platform to support distributed multidisciplinary team meetings between two hospitals. Our goal was to find out how the breast cancer multidisciplinary team collaborates in their face-to-face meetings and in their discussions using an existing video-conferencing system and to identify obstacles and issues to their primary tasks. We identified a set of concerns around the way visibility and audibility affect the social cohesion of the group and impede communication and situation awareness between the distributed team. We also identified a parallel set of concerns around the difficulty of preparing and interacting around the medical images used in the meetings. These issues exposed a complex matrix of technical, social, procedural and organisational factors that affect the collaboration. We suggest potential directions for technical interventions in this setting.

Understanding awareness in mixed presence collaboration

Mixed presence collaboration combines distributed and collocated collaboration -- there are multiple distributed sites, each with a collocated group. While collocated collaboration and purely distributed collaboration are each the subject of rich bodies of research, the combination is less well explored. In this paper we present our initial concepts of awareness support in mixed presence collaboration. We present this as a first version model of awareness. The selected literature we have used to inform the model is drawn from collocated research and distributed research as well as the small body of work addressing mixed presence collaboration directly. In this paper we present a discussion of this relevant literature and use it to explain our model. We also offer a sample of applying the model through the use of a scenario.

MUDdling through [collaborative systems]

The wOrlds project is concerned with developing next generation collaboration frameworks. We strongly believe that real progress in enhancing the usability of collaborative systems hinges on improving our understanding of work, and applying the resulting insights to development of collaborative work support frameworks. We are investigating the thesis that appropriate bases for such an approach can be drawn from existing results in sociology, specifically the work of sociologist Anselm Strauss, and his notion of social worlds (A. Strauss, 1993). We motivate and overview wOrlds, the collaborative environment we have built in order to explore our ideas and insights. We then critique wOrlds (and by implication, the class of systems known as MUDs of which it is a member), and point to future directions for investigation.

Design and Evaluation of Intentionally Enriched Awareness

In this chapter we introduce and explore the notion of “intentionally enriched awareness”. Intentional enrichment refers to the process of actively engaging users in the awareness process by enabling them to express intentions. We initially look at the phenomenon if sharing intentional information in related collaborative systems. We then explore the concept of intentional enrichment through designing and evaluating the AnyBiff system which allows users to freely create, share and use a variety of biff applications. Biffs are simple representation of pre-defined activities. Users can select biffs to indicate that they are engaged in an activity. We summarise the results of a trial which allowed us to gain insights into the potential of the AnyBiff prototype and the underlying biff concept to implement intentionally enriched awareness. Our findings show that intentional disclosure mechanisms in the form of biffs were successfully used in a variety of contexts. Users actively engaged in the design of a large variety of biffs and explored many different uses of the concept. The study revealed a whole host of issues with regard to intentionally enriched awareness which give valuable insight into the conception and design of future applications in this area.

Sharing Social Recommendations: Towards a Social Portal

The Information Ecology project at DSTC is constructing a Social Portal. This article explains what we mean by a Social Portal, what user needs we believe we are serving by building one, what research goals we think we are serving and how we intend to go about it.