Emotional Biosensing: Exploring Critical Alternatives

Emotional biosensing is rising in daily life: Data and categories claim to know how people feel and suggest what they should do about it, while CSCW explores new biosensing possibilities. Prevalent approaches to emotional biosensing are too limited, focusing on the individual, optimization, and normative categorization. Conceptual shifts can help explore alternatives: toward materiality, from representation toward performativity, inter-action to intra-action, shifting biopolitics, and shifting affect/desire. We contribute (1) synthesizing wide-ranging conceptual lenses, providing analysis connecting them to emotional biosensing design, (2) analyzing selected design exemplars to apply these lenses to design research, and (3) offering our own recommendations for designers and design researchers. In particular we suggest humility in knowledge claims with emotional biosensing, prioritizing care and affirmation over self- improvement, and exploring alternative desires. We call for critically questioning and generatively re- imagining the role of data in configuring sensing, feeling, ‘the good life,’ and everyday experience

Distributed-Pair Programming can work well and is not just Distributed Pair-Programming

Background: Distributed Pair Programming can be performed via screensharing or via a distributed IDE. The latter offers the freedom of concurrent editing (which may be helpful or damaging) and has even more awareness deficits than screen sharing. Objective: Characterize how competent distributed pair programmers may handle this additional freedom and these additional awareness deficits and characterize the impacts on the pair programming process. Method: A revelatory case study, based on direct observation of a single, highly competent distributed pair of industrial software developers during a 3-day collaboration. We use recordings of these sessions and conceptualize the phenomena seen. Results: 1. Skilled pairs may bridge the awareness deficits without visible obstruction of the overall process. 2. Skilled pairs may use the additional editing freedom in a useful limited fashion, resulting in potentially better fluency of the process than local pair programming. Conclusion: When applied skillfully in an appropriate context, distributed-pair programming can (not will!) work at least as well as local pair programming

Infrastructural Speculations: Tactics for Designing and Interrogating Lifeworlds

This paper introduces “infrastructural speculations,” an orientation toward speculative design that considers the complex and long-lived relationships of technologies with broader systems, beyond moments of immediate invention and design. As modes of speculation are increasingly used to interrogate questions of broad societal concern, it is pertinent to develop an orientation that foregrounds the “lifeworld” of artifacts—the social, perceptual, and political environment in which they exist. While speculative designs often imply a lifeworld, infrastructural speculations place lifeworlds at the center of design concern, calling attention to the cultural, regulatory, environmental, and repair conditions that enable and surround particular future visions. By articulating connections and affinities between speculative design and infrastructure studies research, we contribute a set of design tactics for producing infrastructural speculations. These tactics help design researchers interrogate the complex and ongoing entanglements among technologies, institutions, practices, and systems of power when gauging the stakes of alternate lifeworlds

An investigation into computer support for cooperative work in software engineering groups

The research of this thesis relates to Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) in the context of software engineering, and in particular software engineering education. Whilst research into group working has tended to be directed towards CSCW, very little research has been undertaken on group working within software engineering. Linked with CSCW is groupware, which is the class of tools that supports and augments groupwork. This thesis represents an attempt to contribute to the understanding of the groupware needs of software engineers, and to identify and trial groupware that supports software engineering activities. An infrastructure has been developed providing virtual environments, for use by both collocated and geographically distributed software engineering students, to support their groupwork. This infrastructure comprises of synchronous and asynchronous groupware, in the form of desktop video conferencing, and a shared information workspace. This shared workspace has been tailored from the groupware tool, Basic Support for Cooperative Work (BSCW).Within this thesis, hypotheses have been formulated as to the student use of these virtual environments. These hypotheses concentrate on the areas of: organisation and coordination of tasks, the level of cooperation that occurs within the phases of the software lifecycle, the usage of the functions within a shared workspace, and what importance is placed on the role of synchronous communication within software engineering student groupwork. Through a series of case studies it was possible to determine the outcome of these hypotheses using various data collection methods. These methods include questionnaires, focus group meetings, observations, and automatic monitoring of workspace activities. The outcomes of this thesis are that the hypotheses regarding organisation and coordination, and, the role of synchronous communication within software engineering, have been proved. Whilst the determination of the level of cooperation during the phases of the software lifecycle has not been proved, the use of functions within the shared workspace has been partly proved