Please note that these are not the finalised versions of my papers - please see the published versions for full details.
Social Coordination around a Situated Display Appliance
(was: Interactive web signage and the ordering of social action: exploring a room calendaring display)
O'Hara, K. and Perry, M. and Lewis, S.
ABSTRACT: Advances in display technology are creating more opportunities
for situating displays in our environment. While these displays
share some common design principles with display-based interaction
at the desktop PC, situated displays also have unique characteristics
and values that raise particular design considerations and challenges.
In order to further understand situated display design we present
a field study of RoomWizard, an interactive room reservation display
appliance designed to be mounted outside meeting rooms. The findings
illustrate important ways that individual and social behaviours
were oriented around the persistent situated displays. These observed
behaviours are discussed in relation to particular design characteristics
of RoomWizard. We conclude by highlighting more general themes
supporting the design of other situated display technologies.
User centred opportunities for supporting consumer behaviour through handheld and ubiquitous computing
O'Hara, K. and Perry, M.
ABSTRACT: As we move around our environment and interact with
the physical world, we are surrounded by information exhorting
and stimulating us to buy things. For most of us, not all of these
impulses are followed: products may be too expensive, too hard
to understand, similar to a product we already own, or other reasons.
New technological infrastructures are being researched and developed
that allow users to access contextually relevant information to
support more informed purchasing decisions and access to mobile
e-commerce services for in-the-moment acting upon those impulses.
However, this work has emphasised the functional and transactional
aspects of shopping and consumer behaviour, but largely ignores
the experiential nature of much everyday shopping behaviour. We
present a study of shopping and consumer behaviour that examines
the reasons why purchasing impulses are deferred in mobile situations
as a means of understanding this better. Results are used to inform
thinking and motivate several possible design solutions for new
mobile consumer services and technologies.
Of Maps and Guidebooks: designing geographical technologies
Brown, B. and Perry, M.
ABSTRACT: Researchers and designers are increasingly making use of geographic location in designing context-aware computer systems. However, there has been little conceptual work on how geography interacts with technology. In this paper, we use the concepts of "place and space" to explore how technologies are used geographically and how they impact on and are used in the physical environment. Fieldwork with tourists using maps and guide books shows how technology brings together space and place in activity. This discussion is used to look at how technologies might better span place and space.
Dealing with Mobility: Understanding access anytime, anywhere
Mark Perry, Kenton O'hara, Abigail Sellen, Barry Brown And Richard
Harper
ABSTRACT: The rapid and accelerating move towards the adoption and use of mobile technologies has increasingly provided people and organisations with the ability to work away from the office and on the move. The new ways of working afforded by these technologies are often characterised in terms of access to information and people 'anytime, anywhere'. This paper presents a study of mobile workers that highlights different facets of access to remote people and information, and different facets of anytime, anywhere. Four key factors in mobile work are identified from the study: the role of planning, working in 'dead time', accessing remote technological and informational resources, and monitoring the activities of remote colleagues. By reflecting on these issues, we can better understand the role of technology and artefact use in mobile work and identify the opportunities for the development of appropriate technological solutions to support mobile workers.
Shopping Anytime Anywhere
Kenton O'Hara, and Mark Perry
ABSTRACT: When people walk around in the world, many impulses to make a transaction are generated by objects in the environment. For many reasons these transaction impulses are deferred. A study of consumer behaviour is presented focussing on why these transaction impulses are deferred. By looking at the reasons for deferral the aim is to inform the design of new user-centred mobile e-commerce devices and services that can overcome these deferral reasons.
Exploring the relationship between mobile phone and document use during business travel
Kenton O'Hara, Mark Perry, Abigail Sellen and Barry A. T. Brown
ABSTRACT: Many IT companies recognise the importance of wireless communication in the development of new technologies. In order to better inform this development, this paper describes a study of mobile professionals focussing on their communication and document activities. The findings indicate the particular importance of verbal communication for these people and hence the value of the mobile phone. The study also brings to the fore the relationship between their use of the phone and their document activities. The findings have allowed us to develop a taxonomy of this relationship that provides a useful resource for thinking about design implications and new technology supporting mobile work.
The Millennium Home: domestic technology to support independent-living older people
Dowdall, A. and Perry, M.
ABSTRACT: The number of older people in the population is increasing, and the problem of supporting a good quality of life for an ageing population is greatest in developed countries such as the USA, Japan and Britain because of the demographic structures of these countries. In Britain, improvements in quality of life and lower birth rates have resulted in those over 65 years of age representing 16% of the population, with this figure expected to rise to 19% in the first quarter of the 21st century. Many of these older adults, for reasons of personal choice and economics, will continue to live independently with a large number of them living alone. However, the elderly are far more prone to accidents in the home and often lie injured and undiscovered should one happen. It is in the interest of society in general that some way be found to detect early manifestations of problems they may have and provide some kind of a response to resolve the problem or summon external aid as quickly as possible. This also needs to be done in a way that the resident is comfortable using, is useful to them, and is usable. This paper provides details on the work to date of the Millennium Home project, which uses a combination of unobtrusive sensors, linked to a computer to monitor the well being of the elderly resident. Should a situation arise where the resident’s wellbeing may be threatened, the system will communicate with them in an attempt to resolve the situation or contact an outside party for assistance.
Designing for "Blue-Collar" Work
Mobility, Collaboration and Information Use
Jacqueline Brodie and Mark Perry
ABSTRACT: The uptake of mobile phones in the UK has increased exponentially in the past two years, indicating that a wider range of users are now utilising mobile technologies in different contexts than ever before. Still little is known about how mobile technologies are used amongst different populations in specific contexts and this research addresses the context of work use by blue-collar workers with an aim to augmenting this with new mobile technologies better suited to their informational and communicative needs.
Contextualising Virtuality: Polychronicity and Multipresence
Heejin Lee and Mark Perry
ABSTRACT: Virtuality implies fundamental transformations of temporal and spatial aspects of interaction and work. In this paper, we suggest that we can better conceptualise the notion of virtuality through examining it in terms of polychronicity and multipresence. These allow us to examine the underlying nature of what it means to be virtual, in a variety of contexts. One of these contexts - mobility - is examined in detail using fieldwork to illustrate this. Our data showed how the use of technology (in particular, the mobile telephone) supported the virtuality of mobile individuals by augmenting their abilities 1) to manage the polychronicity of their ongoing work and 2) to maintain an appropriate level of multipresence across different physical locations.
The reality of medical work - The case for a new perspective on telemedicine
Rakhi Rajani and Mark Perry
ABSTRACT: This paper considers the nature of medical work and how new telemedicine technologies can be developed to support that work. Telemedicine developers attempt to increase communication and collaboration between medical practitioners and between patients and medics, with the goal being to make medical care and information more easily accessible. However, the focus of telemedicine systems appears to have so far been technology centred, and the work they are trying to support is often ignored. We argue that to develop appropriate telemedicine technologies, it is important to understand the nature of medical work, and to examine the manner in which medical practice actually occurs. Only then will we be in a position to design appropriate telemedicine technologies to support these activities. Unless designers have an insight into the work itself, new technologies will continue to fail to support what telemedicine effectively aims to promote - collaboration and access to distributed knowledge.
Why don't telephones have off switches? Understanding the use of everyday technologies
Barry Brown and Mark Perry
ABSTRACT: Unlike other technologies, the telephone is unusual in that it cannot be 'turned off'. Almost uniquely, its design does not incorporate an off switch, or when it does, it tends to be located in an inaccessible position (such as on the underside of the phone). Rather than arguing that this is a special feature of telephones, this paper argues that this is an example of designers seeing rules as generators of action, rather than resources for action. That is, a rule of phone behaviour is "when a phone rings, answer it". However, rules do not simply generate action. We can choose when not to follow it. Support for this case has been neglected by designers, forcing individuals to appropriate other technologies to support not answering the phone. These rules of use are implicit in how we conceptualise the use of technology, and in turn, how we perform design. We suggest that designers can be aided by understanding better the nature of rule following, allowing them to design technology that supports 'deviant', yet equally valid modes of use.
Co-ordinating Distributed Knowledge: a Study into the Use of an Organisational Memory
M. J. Perry, R. Fruchter and D. Rosenberg
ABSTRACT: This paper presents an ethnographically informed investigation into the use of an organisational memory, focusing in particular on how information was used in the performance of work. We argue that understanding how people make use of distributed knowledge is crucial to the design of an organisational memory. However, we take the perspective that an 'organisational memory' is not technology dependant, but is an emergent property of group interaction. In this sense, the technology does not form the organisational memory, but provides a novel means of augmenting the coordination of collaborative action. The study examines the generation, development and maintenance of knowledge repositories and archives. The knowledge and information captured in the organisational memory enabled the team members to establish a common understanding of the design and to gain an appreciation of the issues and concerns of the other disciplines. The study demonstrates why technology should not be thought of in isolation from its contexts of use, but also how designers can make use of the creative flexibility that people employ in their everyday activities. The findings of the study are therefore of direct relevance to both the design of knowledge archives and to the management of this information within organisations.
See also this (similar paper):
Spaces, Traces and Networked Design
Mark Perry, Fruchter Renate and Gabriella Spinelli
ABSTRACT: A field study was conducted on a team of collaborating designers who used a variety of internet-based media to co-ordinate their activities. The paper focuses on their work practices, specifically those of their conversational resources in organising collaboration and structuring their workspaces for future reuse. The team was interdisciplinary and both locally (office spaces spread over a single site) and temporally (across different time zones) distributed. As well as face-to-face meetings, their resources included a shared web-space, web-development software, telephones, videoconferencing, email, Hypermail, and CAD software. Our findings demonstrate that it was not enough that the team maintained a persistent record of their communication. It was also critical that this record was archived and accessible in an appropriate media for rapid and effortless re-use, and that it be dynamically re-configurable to adapt to the team members' changing communication and informational requirements over the project lifecycle. From the findings we develop implications for the design of persistent network-based solutions for this information referral and review.
The application of individually and socially distributed cognition in workplace studies: two peas in a pod?
Mark Perry
ABSTRACT: This paper compares and contrasts two forms of distributed cognition - one looking at how an individual interacts with one or more artefacts, the other looking at how groups of people interact with or without artefacts. Whilst the two approaches have many similarities, they can be seen to have significant practical and theoretical differences and merit very different approaches, particularly in their application.
Co-ordinating Joint Design Work: The Role of Communication and Artefacts
Mark Perry and Duncan Sanderson
ABSRACT: An increasing number of technology developers are orienting their efforts towards supporting the group work of designers and engineers, yet there are relatively few indepth workplace studies of this type of work. To help fill this gap, two case studies of design work in engineering companies are presented and compared. The findings suggest that design and engineering is constructed through the interactions of multiple actors, and that artefacts and representations of the design process have a key function in the organisation of this work. We note how current design and communication technologies fail to take these dimensions of work into account, and provide suggestions about areas where further reflection is needed.
Process, representation and taskworld: Distributed cognition and the organisation of information
Mark Perry
ABSTRACT: Distributed cognition provides a means of describing the co-ordination of collaborative activity. A single framework is applied to examine the interactions between people, the tools they use, and the environments that their activities are situated within. The resultant analyses show how the system resources are applied to result in problem solving activity. Examples from fieldwork are used to explore these issues. The paper critically evaluates DC, exploring the problems and the benefits that such an approach brings to understanding the organisation of information in its contexts.
Forms, Boards and Bleepers - media and mobility in accident and emergency
Rakhi Rajani and Mark Perry
ABSTRACT: We examine the collaborative nature of medical artefacts within the medical environment. Taking the domain of the Accident and Emergency Department (A&E, known in the US as the Emergency room, or ER), we consider the use and role of representational media (such as the whiteboard and paper documents) in the work routines and interaction of doctors, nurses and other medical personnel.
Externalising the internal: collaborative design through dynamic problem visualisation
Mark Perry and Peter Thomas
ABSTRACT: In collaborative system design, problems can arise through the differing aims, plans and goals that participants hold. Simulation models can be used as visual representations acting as dynamic 'blackboard' models of design problems. These representations permit problem understanding through the externalisation of individual stakeholder mental models, making them available to all involved. Informed negotiation can then ensue of the design ideas and iterative redesign can proceed until a final decision can be agreed upon. Understanding the role that representations play in sharing designers' mental models suggests several changes to the design of the simulation modelling environment.