The Department of Information Systems and Computing (DISC) is the institution that the research will be conducted in. The department is strongly research-led, with over £2.5 million of awards from a variety of funding bodies since the last RAE. DISC is involved in a broad range of information systems and computer science research activities, from the heavily technically based to sociologically oriented research. We currently have 34 lecturing staff, of whom 8 have a primary research interest in the areas of human computer interaction or computer-supported co-operative work. These staff members will provide a strong supporting resource for this project and several have expressed an interest in future research projects that may arise out of this work. The department also has a great deal of experience in research student supervision, graduating 33 since the last RAE, and with 58 current PhD students.
The investigators share expertise in two key research areas for
this project: user studies and interface design, and distributed
and networked systems.
The principal investigator, Dr Mark Perry has research
interests in interaction design, workplace studies, and the use
of mobile technologies. This submission follows recent research
work into the use of mobile telecommunications and documents by
mobile professionals undertaken with Hewlett-Packard and The Appliance
Studio (O Hara, et al., forthcoming; Perry and Brown, forthcoming;
Perry, et al. unpublished). He holds a £10,000 research
grant (BRIEF award) to develop technology for distributed knowledge
management. This involves basic research into what is commonly
referred to as an organisational memory, or organisational knowledge
and how it can be integrated into a more theoretically sound framework.
From a practical, software development perspective, it will use
this theoretical understanding to motivate the development of
design prototypes.
Mark Perry has been a lecturer at the Department of Information
Systems and Computing since 1998, leading a module in interactive
systems and supervising three PhD students. His research interests
lie in the areas of human-computer interaction (HCI) and computer-supported
co-operative work (CSCW). He is group leader of the Centre for
Research into the Information Environment, a multidisciplinary
research centre at Brunel University investigating -information
in the context of people, organisations and technology. Mark has
also been involved in a number of research projects, the most
recent of which was a research fellow (1997-98) on the EU funded
CICC project (ACTS AC 017). During this time he also held a position
at Stanford University as a visiting scholar. The focus of the
CICC project was to improve collaboration in the construction
industry through the context-appropriate use of communications
technology. The benefits of this work lay in providing more effective
intra- and inter-organisational collaboration and in supporting
improved user interaction with the software that was developed
in concert with the industrial partners. This was conducted at
the same time as his PhD, which built on the theoretical aspect
of collaboration and communication by engineering designers. The
contribution of the PhD was in developing a deeper understanding
of the nature of design in terms of problem solving through the
use of artefacts, and the social, environmental and organisational
resources and constraints. The thesis also provided a strong contribution
to the development of a theoretical basis to distributed cognition
where it operates in open organisational settings, where additional
resources can be co-opted into problem solving activity.
The project co-investigator, Dr Simon Taylor (Senior Lecturer),
joined the Department of Information Systems and Computing at
Brunel University in 1995, researching and publishing on technical
aspects of distributed systems. During this time, he has developed
a Masters Degree in Distributed Information Systems, an undergraduate
module in Networked Organisations and Distributed Systems, postgraduate
modules in Distributed Systems and Distributed and Mobile Computing,
and a course guide for the University of London External Programme.
He has supervised the development of the Java-based GRIDS distributed
simulation environment (Generic Runtime Infrastructure for Distributed
Simulation) and the DIFA agent environment (Distributed Infrastructure
for Agents). He has successfully graduated one PhD student and
is currently supervising four PhD students in distributed and
mobile systems. He is also the W3C Representative for the University
and has the responsibility for disseminating developments in web
standards across the University.
The investigators have published extensively in the research areas
noted above and seek an avenue for bringing their research interests
more closely together in this project, linking the workplace studies
to the development of distributed and mobile communications technologies.
2000
Brown, B. and Perry, M. (forthcoming) Why don t telephones
have off-switches? Understanding the use of everyday technologies.
Accepted for publication in Interacting with Computers.
O Hara, K., Perry, M., Sellen, A. & Brown, B.A.T. (forthcoming)
Exploring the relationship between mobile phone and document use
during business travel. To be presented at Wireless World:
social, cultural and interactional issues in mobile communication
and computing (workshop).
Pouloudi, N., Perry, M. and Saini, R. (forthcoming) Organisational
appropriation of technology: a case study. Accepted for publication
inCognition Technology and Work.
Rajani, R. and Perry, M. (forthcoming) The reality of medical
work - the case for a new perspective on telemedicine. Accepted
for publication in Virtual Reality.
Perry, M., O Hara, K., Sellen, A. Harper, R. & Brown, B.A.T.
(unpublished) Dealing with mobility: understanding access anytime,
anywhere. To be submitted to journal - TOCHI.
Perry, M. and Macredie, R. Distributed cognition: investigating
collaboration in open organisational systems. Submitted to Journal
- Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction.
1999
Perry, M. Fruchter, R. and Rosenberg, D. (1999) Co-ordinating
distributed knowledge: an investigation into the use of an organisational
memory. Cognition Technology and Work, 1, p. 142-152.
Perry, M. (1999) The application of individually and socially
distributed cognition in workplace studies: Two peas in a pod?
In Proceedings of the European Conference on Cognitive
Science, 27-30 October, Sienna, Italy, Ed. Bagnara, S. p.
89-92.
Taylor S.J.E., Sudra, R. and Saville, J. (1999) Developing interest
management techniques in distributed interactive simulation using
java. In Proceedings of the 1999 Winter Simulation Conference.
Ed. Farrington, P.A., Nembhard, H.B., Sturrock, D.T., and Evans,
G.W. Association for Computing Machinery Press, New York, Ny.
pp. 518-523.
1998
Perry, M. & Sanderson, D. (1998) Co-ordinating joint design
work: the role of communication and artefacts. Design Studies,
19, 3, p. 273-288.
Perry, M. (1998) Process, representation and taskworld: distributed
cognition and the organisation of information. Exploring the
Contexts of Information Behaviour (Proceedings of ISIC 98
- Information Seeking in Context: an International Conference
on Information Needs, Seeking and Use in Different Contexts),
Eds. Wilson and Allen. London: Taylor Graham. p. 552-567.
Perry, M. J. (1998) Distributed cognition and computer supported
collaborative design: the organisation of work in construction
engineering. PhD Thesis, Brunel University.
Saville J. and Taylor S.J.E. (1998). Developing Interest Management
Techniques in Distributed Interactive Simulation Using Java. In
Proceedings of the 12th European Simulation Multiconference
1998, ed. Zobel R. and Moeller D. Society for Computer Simulation
International, Delft. pp. 272-278.
1997
Perry, M.J. (1997) A personal examination of the issues faced
in conducting workplace studies. Presented at the ECSCW 97
Workshop on -Workplace Studies: Theoretical and Practical Issues.
Rosenberg, D. & Perry, M. (1997) Editorial on ECSCW Workshop
submissions. Presented at the ECSCW 97 Workshop on -Workplace
Studies: Theoretical and Practical Issues.
Macredie R.M., Taylor S.J.E., Yu X. and Keeble R. (1997). Virtual
Reality and Simulation: An Overview. Informatica, 21(4),
pp. 611-620.
Saville J. and Taylor S.J.E. (1997). Interest Management: Dynamic
Group Multicasting Using Mobile Java Policies. In 1997 Fall
Simulation Interoperability Workshop, Volume 1. Simulation
Interoperability Standards Organisation, Institute for Simulation
and Training. Florida. pp. 125-134.
Deshpande Y.L., Jenkins R. and Taylor S.J.E. (1996). Use of Simulation
to Test Client-Server Models. In Proceedings of the 1996 Winter
Simulation Conference. ed. Charnes J.M., Morrice D.M., Brunner
D.T. and Swain J.J. Association for Computing Machinery, New York.
pp. 1210-1217.
1995
Frohlich, D. & Perry, M.J. (1995) The paperful office paradox.
Hewlett Packard Technical Report (HPL-94-20).
Perry, M.J. & Thomas, P.J. (1995) Externalising the internal:
collaborative design through dynamic problem visualisation. Adjunct
proceedings of BCS HCI 95 Conference: People and Computers, August
29 - September 1st, Huddersfield, UK. Eds. Allen, Wilkinson
& Wright, p. 149-154.
1.1 Rationale
Despite the increasing uptake of mobile information and communications
(MIC) technology, developments and research into the area have
been largely technologically driven. Human factors research has
largely focused on the design of small screens and interface navigation
with the devices. Little research has been conducted on the use
of devices in collaboration and other work activities, and on
how their design should draw from such findings.
This project will investigate user requirements, the design and
the deployment of MIC devices from a user-centred perspective.
It will investigate how information is used in organisations,
where people are no longer fixed to permanent or semi-permanent
locations. Recent changes in both work and communications technologies
have led to a shift in working patterns, so that across a range
of organisations, a model of work where the employee has a desk
and a rich, fixed set of informational and technological resources
is no longer appropriate. However, with a few honourable exceptions
(e.g. at the Viktoria Institute in Sweden), few studies exist
that tell us much about how mobile workers operate, the sort of
work they perform and the problems that they encounter. If we
are to develop appropriate technologies to support mobile work,
we need to understand the tasks that users are engaged in, the
access to information that they have, and how they collaborate
with their colleagues (who may be mobile or static).
The research will examine how people use technological and non-technological
tools when away from their home office bases and where they are
not co-located with colleagues. It will draw implications from
this to support the next generation of mobile technologies that
offer complex data services as well as voice connectivity.
Preliminary studies will investigate the underlying patterns of
mobile activity using a fieldwork-based approach. These findings
will then be transformed into implications for design to augment
the kind of working practices observed in distributed and mobile
environments. These implications will then be transformed into
prototype technologies that will be iteratively evaluated to see
how they support or change patterns of mobile work, and to see
how acceptable the designs are to their mobile users. The evaluative
studies will therefore be used both to motivate future designs
and to offer an insight into the potential effects that this technology
might have on work itself. This evaluation is intended to include
work that is currently conducted from a static location, because
MIC technologies allow a greater degree of flexibility in where
work can take place, and may transform the work into something
very different from that currently being conducted.
1.2 Aims and Objectives
The aim of the research is to better understand the collaborative
and informational requirements of mobile workers and to understand
how mobile technology can be effectively designed to support their
needs.
The objective of the work is to develop technologies that will
support mobile work and which are appropriate for the requirements
of its users. It will achieve this by developing research methods
and analytical tools to investigate mobile work, and through conducting
a field study of mobile workers and their use of mobile technology.
Broken down into its component parts, the objectives of the research
are therefore to:
These objectives are linked to the individual work packages in Appendix I.
1.3 Relevance, Innovation and Timeliness
The rapid proliferation of mobile technologies and decreasing
cost of mobile telecommunications service provision has revolutionised
the take-up of mobile communications technology. We have recently
seen the beginning of a convergence of mobile communications and
data technologies alongside a variety of newly designed standards,
protocols and technologies that allow the more flexible interconnection
of handheld information appliances. As evidenced by proposed standards
and technology developments, there is now an increasing interest
by the telecommunications industry into supporting mobile data
connectivity in addition to voice-based communications. This goes
far beyond supporting simple voice and modem based communications.
Whilst data transfers are currently possible, these proposed technologies
will support increased levels of flexibility, speed and processing
power for data communications. Little is known about how these
will change work patterns or will be integrated together into
task-centred suites of technology (either designed, or ad hoc).
The innovative aspect of the proposed research therefore lies
in its investigation and application of these emerging technologies
and standards, and in its consideration of matching mobile technology
to user activities.
The research will be of benefit to a number of communities. It
will benefit the research community in the domains of human-computer
interaction and computer-supported co-operative work by extending
their understanding of the use and development of MIC technologies.
It will also be of benefit to developers, in providing them with
an understanding of who their users are, their informational requirements,
and potential directions for the development of next generation
devices. In the longer term, the research will be of benefit to
mobile workers in providing appropriate support for their work,
and to the employers of mobile workers who will be able to make
more effective use of their workers time when they are working
away from a central location.
Human computer interaction (HCI) and computer-supported co-operative work (CSCW) have long examined how to support interaction with devices and communication with other people through the use of appropriate technologies. A large body of research now exists in journals and conference proceedings that systems designers can make use of when designing technology. However, this research has been done in very specific environments and where users have a particular set of resources with which to work. Because of the physical constraints of mobile systems (e.g. weight, screen size, battery consumption, connectivity failures) and the nature of mobile work (distributed and highly dynamic), interaction designers need to review their development techniques and methodologies for this new generation of computing devices.
Recent research into the design of mobile technology has extensively
examined low level performance criteria, such as text-entry speed
and error rates (e.g. Goldstein et al., 1998; Pascoe et
al., 1998; Dunlop and Crossan, 1999; MacKenzie and Zhang,
1999). However, we need to go deeper than this to understand how
to investigate the overall performance of mobile technology
to support the work itself, rather than conducting simple measures
of performance on tightly constrained interaction tasks. This
requires us, as researchers and designers, to draw from a deeper
understanding of use than through the simple performance-based
criteria used until now.
In terms of activity, mobile work has been described as heterogeneous
(Kristofferson and Ljungberg, 1999) in that its context is constantly
changing as people interact and reorient themselves to their environments.
Little existing research and few of the MIC systems developed
have directly applied themselves to such work settings. This is
perhaps strange when workplace studies have shown that workers
spend a large proportion of their time working away from desks
and offices (e.g. Whittacker et al., 1994; Bellotti and
Bly, 1996).
Users of mobile devices are confronted with a situation in which
technologies and services are being designed without a detailed
understanding of what contexts these systems are being used in
and what their users informational requirements are. This is similar
to the situation that desktop computer systems were in 20 years
ago, yet it appears that little is being done to address the situation.
Neglecting this in the design and implementation of MIC technology
can lead to an increased workload or even a contrary requirement
for non-mobility. For example, Luff and Heath (1998) showed how
a mobile data recorder used for record keeping did not support
the kinds of collaboration that was possible using paper records.
As a consequence, workers chose to record their data twice - once
onto paper and again into the mobile computer system at a later
time when they were back at their office desk. Had the designers
of the device understood or accounted for the collaborative nature
of the work, they could have presented a design more appropriate
to the requirements of these workers.
Research findings from a previous study (Perry et al., unpublished)
have demonstrated strategies through which mobile workers make
use of the resources that they have available to them. To effectively
make use of the time that they have when travelling, mobile workers
can co-opt the resources that they find available to them, but
they can also plan ahead to take things with them that they may
require. This preplanning for contingency is often an essential
feature of the work. Mobile workers also needed to keep up with
their ongoing background work activities, rather than only working
when they had a complete office infrastructure. The flexibility
of the mobile telephone allowed them to distribute their workload
and to work in otherwise dead time . The other resources
that allowed them to do this were pen and paper - a technology
with a low interactional overhead that could be used in a wide
variety of environments. The mobile telephone also allowed its
users to operate other technologies by proxy. When they
were in resource-poor surroundings, the mobile workers used the
mobile telephone to access external devices (e.g. fax machines,
email) and documents. They could also use the mobile telephone
when they were away from their home base to monitor activity
back in their main office, something that they tended to do
in dead time. Technologies could be built to support these strategies
more effectively, linking the different technologies and integrating
them more closely with their work practices.
All of the factors noted above had a technological component that
the mobile workers made use of. However, the infrastructures and
compatibility issues thrown up in their use of the technology
often frustrated users. These are clearly areas that we could
provide support for in this project. There also appear to be a
variety of ways in which people integrate their use of telecommunications
and documents (O Hara, Perry, et al, forthcoming). The
data suggest that there are regularities in the use of the combined
document and telephone, particularly their use in negotiation
and discussion (documents triggering phone calls, and document
discussion during a phone call), in providing an audit trail
(phone confirmation of document receipt, and conversely, the
document as a record of a phone call), and in elaboration (calls
that elaborate on a document, and documents to elaborate on a
phone call). Documents generated from phone calls could be taken
as notes (semi-synchronously), or as a larger, more formal follow-up
document (asynchronously). Here, flexible access to documents
and their integration into voice-based communication would be
of enormous benefit to mobile workers, and again, technologies
developed in this project may provide solutions to support these
activities.
The mobile communications technologies designed will need to support
a range of different types of activity, between the mobile user
and their offices, between several mobile users, and between the
range of devices that the mobile user carries with them. When
deconstructed, the notion of mobility or mobile work - perhaps
unsurprisingly c is a diverse one (see also Dahlbom and Ljungberg,
forthcoming). Whilst mobility can be related to occupation, it
can differ within an individual s working day. Mobility can be
described as being of many kinds - working at multiple (but stationary)
locations, walking around a central location (see Bellotti and
Bly, 1996), travelling between locations, and working in hotel
rooms, on moving vehicles, or in remote meeting rooms. Mobile
workers have described their activities involving some or all
of these types of work (Perry et al, unpublished), each
having their own particularities, constraints and access to resources.
These are important features of mobile work that should influence
the design process: they provide a wide set of different requirements,
and the technology development aspects of the project will need
to understand and take account of them.
The Theoretical component of the project will
examine and critically evaluate existing literature on collaborative
and mobile work, and on handheld and MIC technologies (detailed
in appendix I, WP2). We will need to review material on workplace
studies, the technical literature on MIC devices and development
resources, and in the design methodologies (prototyping methods
and development techniques) for mobile devices. This component
will contribute to the:
The Empirical component of the study (depicted in appendix I, WP2) will draw from a range of existing techniques in the social sciences and human-computer interaction to investigate the use of mobile voice and data connectivity in real world settings. It will use this to paint a rich picture of how distributed information management takes place in practice, investigating the nature of mobile work and its integrated into organisational work systems.
The field studies will trace the activities of the selected mobile
workers and the tasks they undertake in their everyday work using
an ethnographically informed fieldwork approach (Agar, 1980; Hughes,
et al. 1992,94). This will be complemented through the
use of diary studies (e.g. Adler, et al. 1998; Brown, et
al. 2000) and contextual interviews (Holtzblatt and Jones,
1995) in which the participants will be interviewed at their (static)
workplace and questioned about artefacts that they have used,
generated or collected. A feature of mobile work that it can also
involve a component of desk-based work and we do not wish to ignore
this. Following analysis, prototype systems will be developed
that build on this understanding of mobile and distributed work.
Development - rather than taking a technology-centred
perspective, we will work from a user-centred perspective (detailed
in WP3). This is in direct contrast to the current approaches
to designing mobile information devices, which follow a different
model of work - attempting to reproduce tools from a desktop environment
on a small hand-held device with limited communications bandwidth.
If we understand the nature and context of mobile work better,
devices that are matched to the work, and not existing (and perhaps
inappropriate) design paradigms, could be developed. To achieve
this, the integration of mobile devices to one another and to
other networked information sources would be of paramount importance.
In order to develop these devices, we will prototype and evaluate
a variety of mobile applications and hybrid devices to augment
the mobile activities uncovered in the data-gathering phase. These
communications devices will build on recent and emerging developments
in distributed systems, such as the use of Sun Microsystems Java
and Jini, Hewlett-Packard s JetSend, and XML (eXtensible Markup
Language), and in mobile computing, such as WAP (wireless application
protocol) and Bluetooth, time-difference-of-arrival location processing
(TLP) or tracking GPS (allowing location pinpointing to around
125metres), 3G (high bandwidth data channel), and General Packet
Radio Services (GPRS).
The development effort will be pushed in two complimentary directions.
We will develop software to support the kind of activities that
we uncover in the field studies. We will also develop hardware,
in the form of hybrid devices - linked information and communications
appliances - through which the user will be able to operate the
devices in novel ways. An example (although not one we
propose developing without supporting field data) of such a hybrid
device might be to use a handheld computer fitted with a modem
linked to a mobile telephone and a digital camera. The handheld
computer could be used to send an email enclosing a digital image
from the camera over the mobile telephone, whilst also keeping
a record of the communication that could be accessed later. In
this case, software and hardware are tightly integrated and cannot
sensibly be seen as independent from one another. We expect the
development effort will focus on integrating technologies that
allow users to manage (create, destroy, retrieve and communicate)
distributed information from mobile settings, and in providing
context-relevant information appropriate to their needs.
There are very few published studies of, or standard approaches
to, the development of handheld MIC devices. In addition to the
user studies and development itself, we will document and critically
review the prototyping and development approach used with the
objective of providing a resource for future developers. Whilst
not a core aspect of the research, this could provide an important
resource for future MIC developments.
Evaluation will play a key part in the design process
and because of the iterative prototyping techniques used, it will
be tightly coupled to development. Throughout the prototype development
phase, evaluation work will be performed to examine how technology-enabled
mobile workers integrate the technology into their work practices,
and where the technology is not appropriate. This in turn will
provide an understanding of mobile work in terms of the appropriateness
of informational representations and technology to the user's
mobile activities.
To summarise, the project will not be an isolated and independent
research effort, and is clearly linked to other research in a
number of fields: the application of field studies to systems
design and evaluation (e.g. Hughes et al., 1992, 1994;
Anderson, 1994); studies of CSCW in mobile work and technology
use (e.g. Bellotti and Bly, 1996; Bergquist et al. 1999),
and systems development and prototyping techniques (e.g. Gould
and Lewis, 1985; Newman and Lamming, 1995; Kiljander, 1999).
Academic research community. The work would support the academic research community generally by extending understanding of use and development of mobile communications technologies. More specifically, the work would support the human computer interaction research community in providing a better understanding about the use of MIC devices and interface designs that facilitate their effective use. It would provide the computer-supported co-operative work research community with information about the performance of mobile and distributed work and how mobile devices support communication and co-ordination. The distributed and networking research communities would also benefit from a study looking at the integration of a variety of standards, protocols and technologies, and through case studies of distributed and networked devices in real world settings.
Developers of mobile computing and mobile telephony. These
include software developers, such as Symbian Ltd.; mobile computer
manufacturers, such as Psion; mobile telephone companies, such
as Nokia; mobile network providers, such as Vodaphone; and information
appliance manufacturers, such as Hewlett-Packard. These organisations
would learn about the use of mobile technologies in real world
settings, and provoking them to think about novel design solutions
to support their users activities.
Potential users by industrial sector. Providing mobile
workers with appropriate support for their work in remote settings
and expanding the range of application areas that mobile technology
can be effectively used in. Industrial domains that this would
have the potential to offer most support to include a variety
of engineering domains (for example civil engineering), in which
people are highly mobile and use a rich set of media and communications
tools to communicate. Medical work is another area that could
greatly benefit from this research c doctors, nurses and other
health professionals are highly mobile; they work and collaborate
from multiple locations. Medical workers are notable because they
are infrequent users of personal communications and information
technology. Other groups that could benefit from technologies
and understanding developed include sales personnel who need to
work and collaborate whilst travelling with their base office
and other mobile co-workers, and the self-employed, who may operate
from home but need to work at multiple locations.
Employers of mobile workers. Financial benefits accruing
from developments in MIC technology as they are able to plan and
manage their workforce effectively, even when not co-located with
them.
PhD student. Training in research and development techniques.
Project investigators. Mark Perry and Simon Taylor - developing
as researchers.
The industrial collaborator, Symbian Ltd. is an offshoot of the mobile computer manufacturers Psion; they develop the EPOC operating system software. They are currently developing EPOC for integration as a standard operating system into a variety of mobile, data-enabled smartphones and communicators . Symbian Ltd. is a joint venture between Psion, Nokia, Ericsson, Motorola and Matsushita that aims to promote standards for Wireless Information Devices . It believes that research into user needs and innovative designs for mobile communications devices will be valuable for mobile workers and for the wireless industry. The involvement of Symbian is a very positive step by the mobile communications and computing industry into examining how recent technological developments will be used by mobile workers. Symbian believes that this research can be of benefit to the wireless information device community and market. Their interest in the project is to learn about the use of their prototype and future commercial releases of the EPOC based mobile communications devices, and to see what is possible as different technologies are linked together and used in novel ways to support work practices.
The market for products supporting the mobile worker is potentially
enormous. We will be working closely with Symbian to explore the
possibilities of integrating these technologies with their future
product range. However, this research is not intended primarily
to support one organisation, and (subject to agreed limits of
disclosure) we will be making the published findings widely available.
This fits in with the remit of Symbian, which is an organisation
that is jointly owned by a number of large organisations, and
which is involved in setting industry standards. It is therefore
in their interest to make much of this information publicly available
and widely publicised. Ownership of intellectual property and
its exploitation will therefore be managed according to the EPSRC
and university guidelines. The university will retain ownership
of software developed at Brunel University. The collaborators
have agreed to draw up a legal agreement between Brunel and Symbian
Ltd. regarding project exploitation; Brunel will offer Symbian
first right of refusal to commercially exploit the research.
6.1 Research and dissemination
We have broken the project into four workplans to simplify the
project management aspect of the work proposed. This is shown
in the attached workplan and Gantt chart in the Appendices. In
terms of project management responsibilities, the work breaks
cleanly into three parts: PhD supervision (first supervisor is
Mark Perry, second supervisor is Simon Taylor), field study and
design (Mark Perry, with secondary help from Symbian Ltd.), and
technical support (Simon Taylor and Symbian Ltd.). We have identified
three key milestones (i.e. specific, important and identifiable
outputs) that will be used to assess the project s progress:
In addition to the project deliverables, findings from the research will be submitted to journals and conferences, publicising the results. The sum requested in the proposal includes registration fees and travel for this, which will also be useful to us in discovering other national or international research groups and projects that we could collaborate with in the future. We also recognise that the MIC industry is a fast moving one, and in order to make an impact we will ensure that the findings from the study are publicly available as soon as possible. To this end we will develop and maintain a web presence detailing our work done so far. We will also make efforts to present the findings at organisations involved in the development of MIC technologies; Symbian s partner organisations and contacts will prove to be useful in this respect. A breakdown of dissemination activities is described in Appendix I.
6.2 Resource deployment
From EPSRC grant. A PhD student (to be appointed)
will carry out the basic research and development efforts. Whilst
we envisage them have programming skills, we do not expect them
to be experienced in developing on a mobile platform. We will
therefore send them on a training course on developing mobile
technologies c this is a complex area in which even a graduate
in computer science is unlikely to be proficient. So that the
student will be able to visit external field sites and to shadow
participants, demonstrate and evaluate the mobile technology,
we have requested funds for travel and subsistence. We recognise
that these travel-related costs are relatively high, but it is
the nature of mobile work that we will have to study people who
are distant and travel frequently.
We require several handheld computers to develop the prototypes
on. These will be used to build the software on and to link together
as hardware hybrids . We require two of each device to demonstrate
that they are able to interact with one another - there is little
point in demonstrating a stand-alone communications device. We
also require a laptop computer for the same reasons (as a prototyping
platform), and because it has greater flexibility and connectivity
than the handheld devices (only one is required, because we can
use a desktop computer as a device to partner it). To support
pictorial communication, we will use a digital camera as an information
capture device that can be linked to the other devices as a hybrid.
For the communications aspect, two WAP enabled mobile telephones
are required to connect and network the other devices; we will
also require a service contract for them. As WAP devices, they
can also be used to access WAP enabled web documents. For a systems
development platform, we will need a powerful desktop workstation.
Where possible, we will make best use of open source (i.e. free)
software where possible (such as the WABA development platform
for the Palm( devices). We will however, need a powerful software
development environment (Code Warrior) for building more sophisticated
applications on.
From collaborating organisation. Symbian Ltd. have agreed
to a high level of supporting involvement in the project. This
includes access to prototypes and provision of early commercial
releases of EPOC mobile communications devices for development
work. They would also give training and support in the use of
development languages and techniques for mobile devices. However,
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| WP1: Theoretical investigation of mobile technology | |||||
| Duration | 10 months | Start date | Oct 2000 | End date | End July 2001 |
| Objectives |
|
||||
|
1.2 Study existing technologies and solutions to support mobile
work and collaboration. |
||||
| Deliverables | D.1. Work and collaboration
in mobile settings. D.2. Technologies to support mobile work and collaboration. D.3. Data collection: techniques and an analytic framework for identifying the technology requirements of mobile workers (Milestone 1). |
||||
| WP2: Empirical investigation of mobile work and implications for design | |||||
| Duration | 8 months | Start date | Aug 2001 | End date | End March 2002 |
| Objectives |
|
||||
|
2.2 Analysis of data on the activities and work practices carried by mobile workers. |
||||
| Deliverables | D.4. Work, collaboration
and artefact use in mobile settings: a field study. D.5. Requirements: Identification of the technology requirements for mobile workers (Milestone 2). |
||||
| WP3: Technology development and evaluation | |||||
| Duration | 24 months | Start date | April 2001 | End date | End March 2003 |
| Objectives |
|
||||
|
3.2 Take requirements generated from D.5. and build variety
of prototype software and hybrid mobile technologies to support
their activities. |
||||
| Deliverables | D.6. Prototype technologies
to support mobile work and collaboration (continuous process
of development and refinement). D.7. Evaluation report: prototype technologies in supporting effective mobile work and collaboration. |
||||
| WP4: Dissemination | |||||
| Duration | 36 months | Start date | Oct 2000 | End date | End Sept 2003 |
| Objectives |
|
||||
|
4.2 Develop publications through writing and submitting papers
to journals and conferences. |
||||
| Deliverables | D.8. Project web page
(to be updated continuously with new developments). D.9. Full draft of PhD dissertation. D.10. Final report: -Technology, mobile work and collaboration (Milestone 3). |
||||
| Workpackages, tasks and deliverables |
|
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| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | |
| WP1 Task 1.1 Task 1.2 Task 1.3 |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Deliverables | 1 | 2 | 3 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| WP2 Task 2.1 Task 2.2 |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Deliverables | 4 5 |
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| WP3 Task 3.1 Task 3.2 Task 3.3 |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Deliverables | 6 | 7 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| WP4 Task 4.1 Task 4.2 Task 4.3 |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Deliverables | 8 | 9 | 10 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||