Are you there? : Presence in collaborative distance work

doi linkki ei toimi 31.1.2022, ilmoitettu lehteen/USAlready before the pandemic, digitally mediated collaborative work and communication were perceived as challenging. We investigate the attitudes towards emerging technologies and for transforming practises in workplaces. The focus lies on understanding the readiness for appropriating emotional tracking on presence and support for collaboration. The research-based design framework allowed to combine the various perspectives of the transdisciplinary team. Methods included participatory design, design thinking, contextual inquiry and prototype testing for enhancing presence while working with shared objects in video conferencing to explore the appropriation of tools. The findings revealed four indications: 1) awareness of interlocutors’ presence during synchronous communication is crucial. 2) Emotion and behaviour tracking raises concerns about privacy and personal control over what is displayed to others, and technology could be simpler non-distracting the work at hand. 3) The prototype was found to enhance the feeling of presence without disturbing work at hand, and 4) appropriation requires a step-by-step approach.Peer reviewe

Human-Computer Integration (Dagstuhl Seminar 18322)

The rise of technology that supports a partnership between user and computer highlights an opportunity for a new era of "human-computer integration", contrasting the previously dominant paradigm of computers functioning as tools. However, most work around these technologies only focused on the instrumental perspective to achieve extrinsic performance objectives. However, phenomenology emphasizes that it is also important to support the experiential perspective, which indicates that technology should also help people pay attention to their lived experiences and personal growth in order to deepen their understanding of their own bodies. This seminar focuses on embodied integration, where a computer tightly integrates with the person\u27s body. Although an increasing number of systems are emerging, a thorough understanding of how to design such systems is notably absent. The reason for this is the limited knowledge about how such embodied partnerships unfold, and what underlying theory could guide such developments. This seminar brought together leading experts from industry and academia, including those who are central to the development of products and ideas such as wearables, on-body robotics, and exertion systems. The goal was to address key questions around the design of embodied integration and to jump-start collaborations to pioneer new approaches for a human-computer integrated future