Bellotti, V.; Edwards, W. K. Intelligibility and accountability: human considerations in context aware systems. Human Computer Interaction. 2001. 16 (2-4): 193-212.

In this essay Bellotti and Edwards argue that there are human aspects of context that cannot be sensed or even inferred by technological means, so context-aware systems cannot be designed simply to act on our behalf. It is the human and social aspects of context that seem to raise the most vexing questions. Because people, unlike systems and devices, make unpredictable judgments about context. In other words they improvise (Sccuhman, 1987)

Although these are the very aspects of context that are difficult or impossible to codify or represent in a structured way, they are, in fact, crucial to making a context-aware system a benefit rather than a hindrance or—even worse—an annoyance.

This entails making certain contextual details and system inferences visible to users in a principled manner and providing effective means of controlling possible system actions.

Context-aware systems mediate between people, and must be accountable and so must their users:

Users need to be able to understand how a system is interpreting the state of the world. Context-aware systems must be intelligible as to their states, “beliefs,” and “initiatives” if users are to be able to govern their behavior successfully (Dourish, Accounting for System Behaviour: Representation, Reflection and Resourceful Action, 1997). […] context-aware systems must also provide mechanisms that enforce accountability of users to each other.

Bettotti and Edward propose two crucial features to support the user in making his own inferences

Intelligibility: Context-aware systems that seek to act upon what they infer about the context must be able to represent to their user what they know, how they know it, and what they are doing about it.

Accountability: Context-aware systems must enforce user accountability when, based on their inferences about the social context, they seek to mediate user actions that impact others.

However there are drawbacks in differing power to the user:

• If systems don’t do anything, there will be too many matters that users must deal with themselves, somewhat undermining the point of context-aware systems.
• Even if the system is enabled to take action, it will constantly be annoying the user with warnings or queries if it can’t go ahead and do things on its own.

Therefor the authors present different design strategies (probably based on a probabilistic approach to detect the system’s state of correctness) for control and minimize the human effort:

• If there is only slight doubt about what the desired outcome might be, the user must be offered an effective means to correct the system action.
• If there is significant doubt about the desired outcome, the user must be able to confirm the action the system intends to take.
• If there is no real basis for inferring the desired outcome, the user must be offered available choices for system action.

Relation to my thesis: Another essay on the balance between visibility and control and empowering users of context-aware systems to reason for themselves about the nature of their systems and environment and to decide how best to proceed. This vision is supported by two key features of context-aware infrastructure: intelligibility and accountability. The authors talk about strategies to minimize the human effort. It would be interesting to analyze in what conditions there is a positive and negative impacts on the human and on a group effort.

Dourish, P. and Bellotti, V. (1992). Awareness and Coordination in Shared Workspaces. Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work CSCW’92 (Toronto, Ontario), 107-114. New York: ACM.

Awareness is an understanding of the activities of others, which provides a context for your own activity. This context is used to ensure that individual contributions are relevant to the group’s activity as a whole, and to evaluate individual actions with respect to group goals and progress.

Awareness information can be explicitly generated, directed and separate from the shared work object or passively collected and distributed, and presented in the same shared work space as the object of collaboration.

Dourish and Bellotti suggest that awareness information provided and exploited passively through the shared workspace, allows users to move smoothly between close and loose collaboration.

Most awareness systems embody an assumption that a simple awareness of other’s activity needs to be augmented with other explicit, or restrictive mechanisms for ensuring an easy collaboration. However there are 3 potential problems:

• The price of heightened awareness for the group is clearly restriction in the potential activities of individuals
• Individuals will receive what the initiator of the information deems to be appropriate. However appropriateness can only be determined in the context of the other individuals’ activities
• Delivery is controlled more by the sender than by the recipient

Relation to my thesis: I am interested in explicitly generated and passively collected information about uncertainty and uncertainty-awareness in collaborative environments in general.

Mark S. Ackerman. “The Intellectual Challenge of CSCW: The Gap Between Social Requirements and Technical Feasibility.” John Carroll (ed.), HCI in the New Millennium, Addison-Wesley, 2001.

In CSCW, there is an inherent gap that divides what we know we must support socially and what we can support technically. Exploring, understanding, and ameliorating this gap is the central challenge of CSCW as a field and one of the central problems for HCI.

CSCW assumptions and findings:

• Social activity is fluid and nuanced, and this makes systems technically difficult to construct properly and often awkward to use (Garfinkel 1967; Strauss 1993).
• Members of organizations sometimes have different (and multiple) goals, and conflict may be important as cooperation in obtaining issue resolutions (Kling 1991)
• Exceptions are normal in work progresses (Suchman, & Wynn, 1984)
• People prefer to know who else is present in a shared space, and they use this awareness to guide their work (Erickson, et al., 1999)
• Visibility of communication exchanges and of information enables learning and greater efficiencies (Hutchins, 1995)
• The norm for using a CSCW system are often actively negotiated among users (Strauss, 1991)
• There appears to be a critical mass problem for CSCW systems (Markus, 1990)
• People not only adapt to their systems, they adapt their systems to their needs (co-evolution) (Orlikowski, 1993; O’Day, Bobrow, Shirley, 1996)
• Incentives are critical

There are two major arguments against the importance of any social-technical gap:

1. Some new technology or software technique will shortly solve the gap (unlikely)
2. The gap is merely historical circumstance and we will adapt to the gap in some form (co-evolution: we adapt resources in the environment to our needs. Our culture will adapt itself or the limitations of the technology, so the technical limitations are not important). It goes against a central premise of HCI that we should not force users to adapt.

If the social-technical gap is real, important, and likely to remain, then we must

1. ameliorate the effects of the gap
2. further understand the gap

So far, CSCW has only been working on first-order approximation, that is tractable solutions that partially solve specific problems with known trade-offs. CSCW shares problems of generalizability from small groups to a general population (as do all social sciences), prediction of affordances (as does HCI), and the applicability of new technological possibilities (as does the rest of computer sciences)

Relation to my thesis: This paper provides on overview of CSCW and the high-level challenge for the framework of my thesis (I am less interested in the CSCW as a science section). My thesis has a natural emphasis on “what we can support technically”, how to deal with the limitations when they are hardly manageable due to the complexity of the real world, and how it impacts the social. Ways to find a balances between technically working and organizationally workable in ubicomp. My work is linked to Greenberg and Marwood, CSCW technical researchers who demonstrated the social-technical gap (Marwood, B., & Greenberg, S. (1994). Real Time Groupware as a Distributed System: Concurrency Control and Its Effect on the Interface. Proceedings of the Computer Supported Cooperative Work : 207-217.

If concurrency control is not established, people may invoke conflicting actions. As a result, the group may become confused because displays are inconsistent, and the groupware document corrupted due to events being handled out of order. (p. 207)

My claim is that a technical solution is unlikely and co-evolution does not solve everything especially with the constant evolution of technologies and our techno-push world. However, I am wondering on gow to go beyond first-order approximation and constributing “cool toys”.

Jessup, L. M. and Robey, D. 2002. The relevance of social issues in ubiquitous computing environments. Commun. ACM 45, 12 (Dec. 2002)

This papers illustrates how ubiquitous computing challenges individuals, teams and organizations to rethink their behaviors. Because of the new possibilities enabled by ubiquitous computing do not carry their own prescriptions, people must discover new behaviors on their own. The authors suggest the now obvious mix of old and new practices “virtual teams may need to employ older technologies, such as telephones, or even face-to-face meetings to complement their dependence on ubiquitous computing technologies”.

Relation to my thesis: The authors optimistically match new technologies with new opportunities for social actions, organizational forms and business models. All this is true, but they do not really take into account the way to carry pleasant user experience in the shift. Technologies are disruptive and people are most of the time left on their own. They build their own mental models and the goal for ubicomp practitioners is to avoid mismatches in ever growing complex environments. My research questions are related to one research issue the authors mention: How do work teams adopt and adapt ubiqutous compututing technologies?