305 research outputs found

    Supporting collaboration with non-literate forest communities in the congo-basin

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    Providing indigenous communities with ICT tools and methods for collecting and sharing their Traditional Ecological Knowledge is increasingly recognised as an avenue for improvements in environmental governance and socialenvironmental justice. In this paper we show how we carried out a usability engineering effort in the “wild” context of the Congolese rainforest – designing, evaluating and iteratively improving novel collaborative data collection interfaces for non-literate forest communities that can subsequently be used to facilitate communication and information sharing with logging companies. Working in this context necessitates adopting a thoroughly flexible approach to the design, development, introduction and evaluation of technology and the modes of interaction it offers. We show that we have improved participant accuracy from about 75% towards 95% and provide a set of guidelines for designing and evaluating ICT solutions in “extreme circumstances” – which hold lessons for CSCW, HCI and ICT4D practitioners dealing with similar challenges

    Ambiguity for Social Self-tracking Practices: Exploring an emerging design space

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    Ambiguity is gaining attention in self-tracking research as a means to go beyond the mere quantification of body signals. Recent research has suggested that ambiguity can be used even to enable social connection mediated by personal data. To explore this design space more widely, we organized two design workshops with a total of 67 participants. In this paper, we present three design concepts, as outcomes of the workshops, which use ambiguity to enable social self-tracking practices. We then discuss how these concepts demonstrate the potential of ambiguity to encourage collective sense-making, directly impact the user’s social relationships, and offer multifaceted perspectives on reality

    Some conversational challenges of talking with machines

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    A surge of interest in the capabilities of so-called 'conversational' technologies—both from research and industrial contexts—furnishes CSCW and HCI with opportunities to enrich and leverage its historic connection to conversation analysis (and relatedly, ethnomethodology) in novel ways. This paper explores a number of preliminary interactional troubles one might encounter when 'talking to' conversational agents, and in doing so sketches out possible routes forward in the empirical study of agents as collaborative technologies, as well as touching on further conceptual challenges that face research in this area

    Crowdsourcing Law and Policy: A Design-Thinking Approach to Crowd-Civic Systems

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    Crowdsourcing technologies, strategies and methods offer new opportunities for bridging existing gaps among law, policymaking, and the lived experience of citizens. In recent years, a number of initiatives across the world have applied crowdsourcing to contexts including constitutional reform, drafting federal bills, and generating local policies. However, crowd-civic systems also come with challenges and risks such as socio-technical barriers, marginalization of specific groups, silencing of interests, etc. Using a designthinking approach, this workshop will address both opportunities and challenges of crowd-civic systems to develop best practices for increasing public engagement with law and policy. The workshop organizers will suggest an initial framework explicitly intended to be criticized by participants and reconfigured through a series of iterative cooperative small-group activities focusing on “diagnosing” the failures of past crowd-civic system efforts and the successes of online action around social issues. While the ultimate objective of the workshop is to develop a best practices guide, we see iterations on the guide as a mechanism for fostering community and collaboration among policymakers, technologists, and researchers around crowd-civic systems for law and policy

    Platforms, scales and networks: meshing a local sustainable sharing economy

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    The “sharing economy” has promised more sustainable use of the world’s finite resources, exploiting latency and promoting renting rather than ownership through digital networks. But do the digital brokers that use networks at global scale offer the same care for the planet as more traditional forms of sharing? We contrast the sustainability of managing idle capacity with the merits of collective local agency bred by caring-based sharing in a locality. Drawing on two studies of neighbourhood sharing in London and analysis of the meshing of local sharing initiatives, we ask how ‘relational assets’ form and build up over time in a neighbourhood, and how a platform of platforms might act as local socio-technical infrastructure to sustain alternative economies and different models of trust to those found in the scaling sharing economy. We close by proposing digital networks of support for local solidarity and resourcefulness, showing how CSCW knowledge on coordination and collaboration has a role in achieving these ends

    Bots as Virtual Confederates: Design and Ethics

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    The use of bots as virtual confederates in online field experiments holds extreme promise as a new methodological tool in computational social science. However, this potential tool comes with inherent ethical challenges. Informed consent can be difficult to obtain in many cases, and the use of confederates necessarily implies the use of deception. In this work we outline a design space for bots as virtual confederates, and we propose a set of guidelines for meeting the status quo for ethical experimentation. We draw upon examples from prior work in the CSCW community and the broader social science literature for illustration. While a handful of prior researchers have used bots in online experimentation, our work is meant to inspire future work in this area and raise awareness of the associated ethical issues.Comment: Forthcoming in CSCW 201

    Working Together in a PhamilySpace: Facilitating Collaboration on Healthy Behaviors Over Distance

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    Studies have shown that interpersonal relationships such as families and friends are an important source of support and encouragement to those who seek to engage in healthier habits. However, challenges related to geographic distance may hinder those relationships from fully collaborating and engaging in healthy living together. To explore this domain, we developed and deployed a lightweight photo-based application called PhamilySpace with a week-long intervention. Our goal is to examine family members\u27 and friends\u27 engagement and awareness on healthy behaviors while living apart. Our analysis of the semi-structured interviews, pre/post-intervention instruments, and application logs suggests three main benefits of interventions for health promotion in this context: (1) increased awareness on acts of health; (2) reciprocal sharing of health information supports social accountability over distance; and (3) positive dialogue around health enhances support on healthy living. By providing insights into distributed family/friends interactions and experiences with the application, we identify benefits, challenges, and opportunities for future design interventions that promote healthy behaviors

    Demanding by Design: Supporting Effortful Communication Practices in Close Personal Relationships

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    The investment of effort into personal communication can be highly meaningful to people, and has particular significance for the mediation of close relationships. This paper presents qualities of effort investment that are seen to be valuable. Furthermore, we consider how these qualities might sensitise designers of communication technologies to the meaningfulness of effort. We report a qualitative study focusing on individual descriptions of meaningful effort invested into everyday correspondence. We encapsulate our findings in the form of five qualities that characterise valued effort: discretionary investment, personal craft, focused time, responsiveness to the recipient, and challenge to a sender’s capacities. Drawing on ideas generated in brainstorming sessions, we present two illustrative concepts for new communication technologies, highlighting how our findings can guide the creation of designed artefacts
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