paper: your place or mine?

Finishing off my block of CSCW papers is Dourish, Belotti, et al's article on the long-term use and design of media spaces.

Your Place or Mine? Learning from Long-Term Use of Audio-Video Communication
Paul Dourish, Annette Adler, Victoria Belotti, and Austin Henderson
Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, 5(1), 33-62, 1996

This article reviews over 3 years of experience using an open audio-video link between the authors' offices to explore media spaces and remote interaction. The paper details the evolution of new behaviors in response to the communication medium, both at the individual and social levels. For example, the users learned to stare at the camera to initiate eye contact, but later learned to do without this but still establish attention. Also, colleagues would come to an office to speak to the remote participant.

I saw some important take home lessons here:

• People will adapt to their environments over time in multiple ways -- long-term usage data is invaluable in social technologies.
• Do not confuse social and physical mechanisms with the accomplishments they allow.
• Analysis should be mindful of the duality of technology and practice -- being mindful of this duality implies that design should not attempt to eliminate it, or to encode the social in the technical.

My full outlined summary follows...

• Introduction
  • Over 3 years use of a shared open audio-video link (media space) between users
  • Analyze from 3 non-traditional positions
    • Face-to-face communicative behavior in the real world not always an appropriate baseline for evaluation
    • Practices tailored to the nature of the medium arise over time as familiarity increases
    • Use, influence, and importance extend beyond the individuals who are directly engaged with it
  • Look at video as part of the real world, rather than comparison between video and the real world
• Perspectives on Mediated Interaction
  • Individual
    • Interaction between a single user and technology
    • Experiences
      • Equipment takes up desk space, placement is significant and constrained
      • Ability to appropriately place equipment key to ability to manage video interaction as part of everyday activity
      • Directions
        • Equipment becomes surrogate for video partner
        • Gestures (e.g. directions) misleading due to orientation mismatch
        • Participants learned to point "through" the connection correctly
      • Noises Off
        • Camera field of view - some parts of room in view, others aren't
        • Over time users develop understanding of field of view
        • Others come and greet remote user, but can't be seen
        • Remote user becomes accustomed to such disembodied voices
  • Interactional
    • Focus on individuals at the ends of a media connection, and their communication through it
    • Experiences
      • Open Audio
        • Enables lightweight initiation of conversation, short bursts of interaction
        • Act of turning audio on and off would be more intrusive than audio itself
        • Audio access lends peripheral awareness of each other's activities
      • Gaze Awareness
        • Over time, learned to stare at camera instead of monitor to create eye contact
        • With greater familiarity, abandoned this!
        • Lesson: don't confuse action with what it intends to accomplish
  • Communal
    • Connections reach beyond direct users drawing in others physically or socially proximate
    • Experiences
      • Communication
        • Colleagues would come to office to talk to remote participant
        • Users and colleagues think of users as "sharing an office"
      • Presence and Telepresence
        • Hear sounds of typing coming from office - confuse remote work with local work
        • Functional space is no longer isomorphic to physical space
      • Virtual Neighbourhood
        • Sounds reaching one end of a connection that do not originate in either office
        • Inverse notion - user wants camera to also face towards the door to get a sense of remote activity
      • Projecting Audio
        • Projects sound of mediated conversation into area beyond remote office
        • Possibly troublesome during private conversation
        • Effectively used to attract attention of remotely-observed passers-by
        • Speaking softly close to mic produces an intimate yet loud effect
  • Societal
    • Connections can affect the relationships between individuals and larger social groups
    • Experiences
      • Colleagues and Visitors
    • The presence of connections can reveal or highlight delineations between various groups
    • Not simply a comment on familiarity and expectations
    • Becomes more significant when observing how people's reactions and understanding serve to act as determinants of social grouping
    • Public Affirmations
      • Connection use can be seen as explicit demonstration of cultural norms or of status within wider groups
      • Video connection is not socially or politically inert - can have strong effects on perceived groupings, membership relations, or even perceptions of the existence of particular groups.
• Encompassing Issues
  • Ownership
    • Ownership of Technology
      • Shared communication link engenders shared ownership or responsibility for enabling technology
      • When no individuals see themselves as jointly owning a long-term connection, less use and responsibility
      • Technology itself plays a role
        • Can camera be moved around and adapted or fixed, immutable
    • Ownership of Space
      • Users thought of a single, shared office space - shared property of both occupants
      • Belotti reorganized office to better support mutual orientation
  • Evolution
    • Evolution of orientation towards the technology of the media space
    • Evolution of communicative practices in two-way communication
    • Evolution of understandings of the way in which media spaces disrupt the communal resource of "space"
    • Emergence of video-specific mechanisms of interaction
    • Development of new behaviours tailored to the nature of the medium
    • As familiarity increases, so does the range of acitvities that can be effectively performed with relative ease
    • Analysis should be mindful of the duality of technology and practice
      • Being mindful of this duality implies that design should not attempt to eliminate it, or to encode the social in the technical
    • Evolution is larger groups of understandings not about video communication but understandings including video communication
• Designing Media Spaces
  • Crucial implication is the most general: Over time, adaptations take place as partners in long-term communication in media space environments learn effective ways to use the system. The sorts of problems people typically encounter, especially with respect to ability to manage and regulate conversation, lessen with time as new sets of resources to regulate interaction are learned.
  • Do not confuse mechanisms of face-to-face interaction (e.g eye contact) for the accomplishments they support.
    • Otherwise we waste time unnecessarily in design, and fail to look beyond the inevitably flawed simulation of copresence.
  • Linking Spaces, Not Just People
    • Media spaces link spaces, not just people
    • Spaces are foci of communal activity, emphasizing linkage of spaces enhances ability to participate in a wider space
    • Design decisions evaluated purely against the criteria of face-to-face communication may no longer be appropriate
  • Audio
    • Supports lightweight interactions, peripheral monitoring of activity and remote space
    • Flattening of audio space
      • Impairs individuals ability to filter audio stream and listen selectively
    • Microphone headsets
      • Keeps communication private, removing ability of media space to reach out and draw in others
      • Distances wearer from local environment
    • Directional issues
      • Omnidirectional mics make it easier to maintain consistent audio environment, but lose directional information
  • Digital Transmission and Shared Media
    • Analog vs. Digital systems
    • Analog systems: individual actions not dependent, use affects levels of service offered to others
  • No Sense of Place
    • "Space is the opportunity, place is the understood reality"
    • Opportunity to flexibly organize activities and structures, giving the meanings for place to emerge from space, and the mutually recognizable orientation towars spaces which carries with it a sense of appropriate behaviour and expectations... a (shared) sense of place
    • Ability to appropriate, transform, and reuse space is rooted in the flexible switching which media spaces afford
    • Rigid and explicit geography is not a prereq for the mergence of a sense of place - it's community orientation that is critical
    • Use of geographical metaphor engenders the emergence of a shared understanding of the varied appropriate uses of spaces
    • Important that we allow for the way that place-orientations emerge out of the flexible, exploratory, and creative use of the space by its occupants
• Conclusions
  • Experiences lead to question basic assumptions:
    • The use of a real-world baseline
    • Person-to-person view of media spaces