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

ConvoCons: a tool for building affinity among distributed team members

In this paper we present the result of a user interface designed to increase social affinity between two remote collaborators working on design tasks. The results suggest that the tool is successful in creating an overall affinity that is 14.6% higher than the control group without adding a significant difference in task completion time. Affinity is measured with a framework with demonstrated inter-rater reliability using codes assigned to specific conversational patterns and video recorded interactions. This research approach provides a platform for future work codifying affinity and trust among larger numbers of remote collaborators

Information, Development and Social Change Programs in Information Schools

The objective of this report from School of Information masters students is to explore opportunity spaces for dynamic research networks and agendas focused on information, development, and social change. Research networks will include faculty, master's and doctoral students across information schools who will generate new paradigms for meeting social challenges through information science, new design methods for community inquiry, and evaluation methods to measure the effectiveness of these initiatives in affecting social change through mechanisms such as efficiency of resource utilization. Development in the context of this report refers to economic, social, and infrastructure capacity building initiatives in both emerging and developed economies.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/91307/1/2009-McLauglinPuckett-ISI_Report_Final.dochttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/91307/2/2009-McLauglinPuckett-ISI_Report_Final.pd

Self-Organizing Teams in Online Work Settings

As the volume and complexity of distributed online work increases, the collaboration among people who have never worked together in the past is becoming increasingly necessary. Recent research has proposed algorithms to maximize the performance of such teams by grouping workers according to a set of predefined decision criteria. This approach micro-manages workers, who have no say in the team formation process. Depriving users of control over who they will work with stifles creativity, causes psychological discomfort and results in less-than-optimal collaboration results. In this work, we propose an alternative model, called Self-Organizing Teams (SOTs), which relies on the crowd of online workers itself to organize into effective teams. Supported but not guided by an algorithm, SOTs are a new human-centered computational structure, which enables participants to control, correct and guide the output of their collaboration as a collective. Experimental results, comparing SOTs to two benchmarks that do not offer user agency over the collaboration, reveal that participants in the SOTs condition produce results of higher quality and report higher teamwork satisfaction. We also find that, similarly to machine learning-based self-organization, human SOTs exhibit emergent collective properties, including the presence of an objective function and the tendency to form more distinct clusters of compatible teammates

Designing Cooperative Gamification: Conceptualization and Prototypical Implementation

Organizations deploy gamification in CSCW systems to enhance motivation and behavioral outcomes of users. However, gamification approaches often cause competition between users, which might be inappropriate for working environments that seek cooperation. Drawing on the social interdependence theory, this paper provides a classification for gamification features and insights about the design of cooperative gamification. Using the example of an innovation community of a German engineering company, we present the design of a cooperative gamification approach and results from a first experimental evaluation. The findings indicate that the developed gamification approach has positive effects on perceived enjoyment and the intention towards knowledge sharing in the considered innovation community. Besides our conceptual contribution , our findings suggest that cooperative gamification may be beneficial for cooperative working environments and represents a promising field for future research