Pervasive CSCW for smart spaces communities

Future pervasive environments will take into consideration not only individual users' interest, but also social relationships. In today's scenarios, the trend is to make use of collective intelligence, where the interpretation of context information can be harnessed as input for pervasive systems. Therefore, social CSCW applications represent new challenges and possibilities in terms of use of group context information for adaptability and personalization in pervasive computing. The objective of this paper is to present two enterprise scenarios that support collaboration and adaption capabilities through pervasive communities combined with social computing. Collaborative applications integrated with pervasive communities can increase the activity's quality of the end user in a wide variety of tasks

A context-aware framework for collaborative activities in pervasive communities

Pervasive environments involve the interaction of users with the objects that surround them and also other participants. In this way, pervasive communities can lead the user to participate beyond traditional pervasive spaces, enabling the cooperation among groups taking into account not only individual interests, but also the collective and social context. In this study, the authors explore the potential of using context-aware information in CSCW application in order to support collaboration in pervasive environments. In particular this paper describes the approach used in the design and development of a context-aware framework utilizing users' context information interpretation for behaviour adaptation of collaborative applications in pervasive communities

A context-aware framework for CSCW applications in enterprise environments

Future pervasive environments will take into consideration physical and digital social relationships. Nowadays it is important to use collective intelligence, where the interpretation of context information can be harnessed as input for context-aware applications, especially for group collaboration. For collaborative applications this represents opportunities, but also new challenges in terms of using collective information for adaptability and personalization in pervasive environments. This paper presents the challenges in design and development of a context-aware framework CSCW supporting pro-behaviour capabilities in pervasive communities

Social awareness in pervasive communities for collaborative work

Future pervasive environments will take into consideration physical and digital social relations. Nowadays it is important use to collective intelligence, where the interpretation of context information can be harnessed as input for context-aware applications, especially for group collaboration. The use of collective intelligence represents new possibilities but also new challenges in terms of collective information for adaptability and personalization in intelligent environments. This paper presents a collaborative context-aware framework focusing on social matching capabilities for session formation in collaborative activities

Amplifying Quiet Voices: Challenges and Opportunities for Participatory Design at an Urban Scale

Many Smart City projects are beginning to consider the role of citizens. However, current methods for engaging urban populations in participatory design activities are somewhat limited. In this paper, we describe an approach taken to empower socially disadvantaged citizens, using a variety of both social and technological tools, in a smart city project. Through analysing the nature of citizens’ concerns and proposed solutions, we explore the benefits of our approach, arguing that engaging citizens can uncover hyper-local concerns that provide a foundation for finding solutions to address citizen concerns. By reflecting on our approach, we identify four key challenges to utilising participatory design at an urban scale; balancing scale with the personal, who has control of the process, who is participating and integrating citizen-led work with local authorities. By addressing these challenges, we will be able to truly engage citizens as collaborators in co-designing their city

A Review of Research on Participation in Democratic Decision-Making Presented at SIGCHI Conferences : Toward an Improved Trading Zone Between Political Science and HCI

We present a review of 80 papers representing efforts to support participation in democratic decision-making mostly related to local or national governments. The papers were published in leading human–computer interaction (SIGCHI conferences) venues. Most of this literature represents attempts to support assembly- oriented participation, wherein decisions are made through discussion, although referendum-type participation, involving decision-making based on voting, has gained attention too. Primarily, those papers addressing agenda-setting have examined organization-led forms, in which the agenda is controlled by those issuing the call for participation. Accordingly, the authors call for more research into support for representative models and participant-driven agenda-setting. Furthermore, the literature review pinpoints areas wherein further interdisciplinary engagement may be expected to improve research quality: in political science, HCI-informed methods and new ways of using physical input in participation merit more research, while, from the HCI side, cultivating closer relationships with political science concepts such as democratic innovations and calculus of voting could encourage reconsideration of the research foci. These observations speak to the benefits of a new research agenda for human–computer interaction research, involving different forms of participation, most importantly to address lack of engagement under the representative model of participation. Furthermore, in light of these findings, the paper discusses what type of interdisciplinary research is viable in the HCI field today and how political science and HCI scholars could usefully collaborate.Peer reviewe

“No powers, man!”: A student perspective on designing university smart building interactions

Smart buildings offer an opportunity for better performance and enhanced experience by contextualising services and interactions to the needs and practices of occupants. Yet, this vision is limited by established approaches to building management, delivered top-down through professional facilities management teams, opening up an interaction-gap between occupants and the spaces they inhabit. To address the challenge of how smart buildings might be more inclusively managed, we present the results of a qualitative study with student occupants of a smart building, with design workshops including building walks and speculative futuring. We develop new understandings of how student occupants conceptualise and evaluate spaces as they experience them, and of how building management practices might evolve with new sociotechnical systems that better leverage occupant agency. Our findings point to important directions for HCI research in this nascent area, including the need for HBI (Human-Building Interaction) design to challenge entrenched roles in building management

CUI@CSCW: Inclusive and Collaborative Child-facing Voice Technologies

Conversational User Interfaces (CUIs), from online chatbots to smart speakers, are increasingly being used to support children and family activities. This virtual workshop seeks to bring together researchers from academia and practitioners from industry who are interested in the design, development, application, and study of CUIs with a focus on children and family based interactions. We aim to examine the challenges involved in designing and developing CUIs that are capable of supporting everyday activities of children and families. Furthermore, we will also discuss the insights CSCW research can provide into understanding how CUIs can participate in collaborative activities of children and families. By bringing together existing researchers and new ideas in this space, we intend to map new areas of work including addressing the technical, social, and ethical challenges that lay ahead. Additionally, this workshop seeks to foster a strong community and enable potential future collaborations on this important topic

Design Ltd.: Renovated Myths for the Development of Socially Embedded Technologies

This paper argues that traditional and mainstream mythologies, which have been continually told within the Information Technology domain among designers and advocators of conceptual modelling since the 1960s in different fields of computing sciences, could now be renovated or substituted in the mould of more recent discourses about performativity, complexity and end-user creativity that have been constructed across different fields in the meanwhile. In the paper, it is submitted that these discourses could motivate IT professionals in undertaking alternative approaches toward the co-construction of socio-technical systems, i.e., social settings where humans cooperate to reach common goals by means of mediating computational tools. The authors advocate further discussion about and consolidation of some concepts in design research, design practice and more generally Information Technology (IT) development, like those of: task-artifact entanglement, universatility (sic) of End-User Development (EUD) environments, bricolant/bricoleur end-user, logic of bricolage, maieuta-designers (sic), and laissez-faire method to socio-technical construction. Points backing these and similar concepts are made to promote further discussion on the need to rethink the main assumptions underlying IT design and development some fifty years later the coming of age of software and modern IT in the organizational domain.Comment: This is the peer-unreviewed of a manuscript that is to appear in D. Randall, K. Schmidt, & V. Wulf (Eds.), Designing Socially Embedded Technologies: A European Challenge (2013, forthcoming) with the title "Building Socially Embedded Technologies: Implications on Design" within an EUSSET editorial initiative (www.eusset.eu/