More Than Screen Deep Toward Every-Citizen Interfaces to the Nation's Information Infrastructure (1997) / Chapter Skim
Currently Skimming:
5 Communication and Collaboration
5 Communication and Collaboration
Pages 154-179
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From page 154... ...
For an individual using a computer system, as Candace Sidner says in her paper in this volume, "interfaces are 'communication engines' to the functionality of software applications; interfaces are how we get our work done." Yet the word "interfaces" suggests a thin veneer (according to the 154
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From page 155... ...
and distance learning over the Web and in multiuser domains (MUDs; Bobrow, 1996) as well as the extensive use that the astronomy and high-energy physics communities make of the Web for large-scale scientific experiments involving widely dispersed people, instruments, and data provide examples of collaborations made possible by networked systems.
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From page 156... ...
as several examples in Loren Terveen's position paper (in this volume) illustrate.
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From page 157... ...
THE NATURE OF COLLABORATION: CRITICAL FEATURES AND CAPABILITIES Collaboration entails working together toward a common purpose, although the reasons for the collaboration and the ways in which it fits into some larger activity may vary among the participants (Bratman, 1992; Grosz and Kraus, 1996; Searle, 1990~. For instance, some authors of a multiauthored report may contribute because the report offers a vehicle for wide dissemination of their ideas, others because they believe the report may help meet a societal need of great concern to them.
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From page 158... ...
Likewise, there was debate about the level at which systems would need to negotiate. For instance, Candace Sidner argued that all collaboratorshuman and machine must be "aware of what the task is," with common knowledge about their shared undertaking.
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From page 159... ...
As Candace Sidner notes in her paper in this volume, no single interface metaphor is powerful enough for all work, yet a multiplicity of smaller applications, each with its own interface for performing one set of tasks, leaves people with lots of tasks to juggle and creates a need for an interface that communicates and collaborates in terms of the task rather than the application. It is also important not to confuse collaborative systems with help systems.
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From page 160... ...
An additional risk is that people may attribute greater capabilities to systems that appear to collaborate than those systems that actually have. As Olson observed at the workshop, "People really have a tendency to impute animisms to complicated technical devices, so in the situation of using it, it sure feels like a collaboration even if we, as disembodied researchers, can say it isn't." Lee Sproull noted at the workshop that the ongoing relationship built up in collaborations among people is an important nontask component of their activity.
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From page 161... ...
At the workshop, Austin Henderson observed that in "all of these situations we have to address the question of how it is that collaborating entities negotiate meaning."4 As explained by Terry Winograd in his paper in this volume, Whenever two people talk, they have only an approximate understanding of each other. When they speak the same language, share intellectual assumptions, and have common backgrounds and training, the alignment may be quite close.
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From page 162... ...
The example in Chapter 4 of telephone menu confusion problems is evidence of the gulf between person-person communication and person-computer communication. Even more telling is Andries van Dam's table-setting analogy.5 Bruce Tognazzini's equating of mouse clicks with grunts sheds light on the relative illiteracy of current interfaces, suggesting that direct manipulation interfaces hearken back to the days before language (other than grunting)
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From page 163... ...
"While an interface to a given application may have hundreds of so-called dialogue boxes, dialogue in the human sense does not take place." Sidner argues that the inadequacy of current interfaces from the perspective of systems that provide a capability for dialogue with users derives in part from their inadequate models of human communication. For instance, the dialogue is restricted to a single exchange in which the user must respond to a system query (e.g., S: "Replace?
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, they need to fulfill more than simply carrying communications between person and machine. In Austin Henderson's view, interfaces have a fourfold role: (1)
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Gary Olson notes in his paper (available on-line at http:// www2.nas.edu/CSTBWEB) , that the dominant user interface metaphors emerged from narrow segments of society: the command-based interfaces of early personal computing came from the world of science and engineering; the popular desktop metaphor emerged from the world of the office and white-collar workers; the hypertext metaphor used in World Wide Web browsers came from the world of experimental document structures; popular interfaces like MUDs (multiuser domains)
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I need expert assistance." He argues further that aiming to have systems that help people do things well is additional motivation for having collaborative systems. ECIs in Support of Person-Person Communication and Group Activities ECIs provide support for multiperson activities in two ways: (1)
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. we are studying are themselves embedded in interesting collaborative social situations that we need to take into account when we build these technologies." Loren Terveen noted in his paper in this volume that such patterns of behavior have seeds for new technology tools.
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As Lee Sproull explained at the workshop: "When people talk with one another, when people communicate with one another, they are not just exchanging information, they are not just acquiring it, they are not just disseminating it; they are also engaged in social action, social behavior....
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From page 169... ...
are more familiar with." Although a substantial body of work and techniques has been developed in the computer-supported collaborative work (CSCW) community,8 as Terry Winograd notes in his position paper in this volume, "The current state of the art can be described as having a large 'hole in the middle."' At the theoretical level, there are general abstract theories of how people work together and the role of communication in the process.
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From page 170... ...
At the workshop, Olson argued that it is critical to look beyond whitecollar work. "If you look at the proceedings of CSCW, almost all the studies of collaboration are about white-collar work, professional work of the kind that we all do, and we know almost nothing about what kind of collaborative activities occur in much broader social communities." Sproull's argument, cited in the previous section, that ECIs must take the social aspects of communication and collaboration into account is quite evident in this setting.
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From page 171... ...
"You need to be able to negotiate with the machine when it is doing what it is doing." This is one of the key areas in which ECI designers will have to find a middle ground between giving a system full responsibility and giving it none.
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Such trust requires in part being able to rely on others to carry out a job and their commitment to doing so in the current setting (Grosz and Kraus, 1996~. At the workshop, Olson argued that simplicity breeds trust and complexity breeds suspicion; this is evident by observation (e.g., people trust paper copies)
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As a result, ECI designers must take security concerns into account. Information security or trustworthiness can affect the kinds of information presumed necessary for a system to collaborate effectively, the way in which it is provided, the ways in which it is used, the granting of access to it, the capacity (and associated mechanisms)
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From page 174... ...
Speaking as a successful designer, at the workshop Bruce Tognazzini characterized an ideal as follows: As a designer, I feel when I am designing that I am collaborating with my eventual users. It is in the same way that I would collaborate over the telephone with somebody and communicate with them.
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Gary Olson observed that human-computer interface efforts typically focus on individuals in construing model users, whereas there are model social systems and model organizational systems that mostly are invisible to designers. CONCLUSIONS: RESEARCH ISSUES AND CHALLENGES · Theories of collaboration should be developed that support the development of systems that collaborate with people and systems that
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From page 176... ...
· The social effects of different interface choices should be investigated, particularly the ways in which different presentation and communication choices affect people's interactions with media. Research Issues for Person-Computer Collaboration · To develop the conceptual and computational tools to make it easy to bring collaboration into the mainstream of application requires a better understanding of the tradeoffs between explicit representations (which may engender more complex computations)
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From page 177... ...
· Ways should be provided to support community building and other social aspects of communication. Supporting communication means e-mail, chat, MUDs and MOOs, video links, and so forth for every person, not just for the computer literate (i.e., lots of kids and those of us who have used machines at work)
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Recent research (Ness and Reeves, 1996) has demonstrated that interactive media generate fundamental psychosocial cues regardless of whether the media are explicity designed.
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From page 179... ...
COMMUNICATION AND COLLABORATION 179 10. Here "responsibility" means "responsibility for doing a job" or "burden," and is not used in the sense of moral or legal responsibility between people and systems.
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