Tommaso Colombino

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.

A Reformulation of the Semantic Gap Problem in Content-Based Image Retrieval Scenarios

This paper considers the notion of the “semantic gap” problem – i.e. how to enable a machine to recognize the semantic properties of an image – as it is commonly formulated in the domain of content-based image retrieval. Drawing on ethnographic studies of design professionals who routinely engage in image search tasks we seek to demonstrate the means by which aesthetic and affective concepts become associated with images and elements of images within a cooperative design process of selection, discussion and refinement and how these often do not correspond to the unused semantic tags provided in image libraries. We discuss how we believe the problem of the semantic gap is misconstrued and discuss some of the technology implications of this.

Colour management is a socio-technical problem

This paper describes how achieving consistent colour reproduction across different devices is a complicated matter. Although there is a technological infrastructure for managing colour across devices this is very rarely used as intended. This infrastructure has been created by modelling the problem of colour management as a wholly technical one. In this paper we illustrate the importance of understanding the management of colour as a socio-technical problem, by describing the findings of a multi-sited ethnography of designers and print shops. Our analysis of the ethnography reveals that designers build up practical, tangible, visual understandings of colour and that these do not fit with the current solution, which requires users to deal with colour in an abstract manner. This paper builds on previous research in CSCW which has considered the importance of socio-technical systems, bringing the work into a previously unexplored domain. It shows how an understanding of the social can also be central when designing technical infrastructures.

Asymmetrical collaboration in print shop-customer relationships

The service provider-customer relationship, although not perhaps considered a typical collaborative relationship, is clearly collaborative work. However, such work is constrained by the very (service) nature of the relationship. Customer-service provider interaction can be characterised as interaction at the boundaries of organisations, each of which is likely to have their own workflows and orientations. Many service organisations attempt to facilitate this interaction by configuring their customers, using standardised forms or applications. In this way they bring the customers workflow into line with their own. In this paper we describe field work examining one particular service relationship; that between print shops and their customers. A notable feature of print shop-customer relationships is that customers prepare the material that the print shop then prints. This makes the standardization of workflows difficult, particularly within the service relationship. Technologies exist which aim to automate and standardize the workflow from customers to print shops. However, they have, up to now, largely failed to live up to their promise, leaving print shops to adopt ad hoc solutions. This paper describes the hidden work that the print shops do to make the service relationship work.

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.

‘Colour, It’s Just a Constant Problem’: An Examination of Practice, Infrastructure and Workflow in Colour Printing

Two interrelated topics that have been of enduring interest to researchers in studying cooperative work practices and the design and use of technologies to support those practices are workflow and, to a slightly lesser extent, infrastructure. Workflow systems are a classic form of technology employed to coordinate cooperative work along a process of production where different workers (potentially in different companies and locations) complete different tasks along a ‘line’ of production. The workflow and the technologies that embody or enforce it are designed to maintain adherence to procedure and coordination across time and place. The central issues surrounding the treatment of workflow in Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and related disciplines have been the problem of getting workflow systems to mesh with the particularities of local flows of work among people. Since Suchman (1983, 1987), at least, there has been a presiding concern with the ways in which workflow models fail to take into account the local, embodied, non-prescriptive and emergent manner (responding to dynamic local circumstances) in which people organise their work. Workflow systems have been criticised for being designed from ‘elsewhere’ – with an inadequate, overly idealistic or abstracted understanding of the work they are meant to assist. People end up having to organise or translate (potentially after-the-fact) their work, so it fits with the workflow system or workaround or ignore the technology completely (see Bowers et al. 1995) for an example from the print industry).

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.

“The Device Is Not Well Designed for Me” on the Use of Activity Trackers in the Workplace?

The workplace, with its central place in peoples’ lives, can be considered as a key site for promoting better health practices. From this perspective, companies are considering providing employees with activity trackers and supportive services aiming at improving employee health. As an initial exploration of possibilities and challenges for activity trackers in the workplace we undertook the following study: a qualitative study of 13 users of activity trackers within our company. Our main findings are that the successful adoption of activity trackers within the workplace is not straightforward, unless for short term intervention, since all participants stopped wearing them within 3 months. In this case we also saw that the use of activity trackers generated various frustrations and raised a number of concerns around end-user configurability, usefulness and privacy and control of data. The findings can have broad implications in designing and developing adequate wellness solutions at the workplace.

Lessons Learnt Working with Performance Data in Call Centres

This paper details the treatment of performance data in outsourced call centre operations, as encountered by a team of researchers throughout the course of a project. This project aimed at improving support for performance and motivation management in an outsourced customer care contact centre for a large telecommunications company. In particular, we focus on how the practices of capturing, aggregating, and presenting data reflect the operation’s overall concern with “reporting upstream” and accountability. As well as, how the technological and organizational infrastructure of the call centre is shaped accordingly. We then discuss some emergent consequences of this organization of data management, which in particular take the form of some tensions between the emergent needs for data at certain levels of granularity and aggregation within the actual operations of the call centre, and its relative accuracy and availability.

Analysis of ‘Quantified-Self Technologies’: An Explanation of Failure

This paper presents the results of a long-term study of the use of fitness trackers, with particular focus on the factors that influence sustained use or abandonment. The analysis focuses on the consequences of adopting a reductionist quantification of general fitness, and how it fails to provide a coherent and understandable measure from the users’ point of view.