CMC for Special User

For people who are blind, deaf, limited mobility and so on.

CMC for Deaf individuals

• Supporting sign language (ASL) and English
• When they look at the screen, they couldn't look at doctor
• English is a second language for ASL speakers

Mobile ASL: A tool to support communication among ADL speakers. It can be used to exchange typed Enlgish text messages with non-ASL speaker

Peripheral Awareness: Useful sounds in the workplace as reported by hearing participants?

• Typing
• Co-worker talking

Awareness at home:

• Cars
• Music
• Phone
• TV
• Shower
• Chidren
• Doorbell, doorknock
• Alarm

Awareness for deaf people: we can translate sound to light, vibration, or signal on computer screen

Doctor-Patient Conversation (Piper & Hollan, CSCW 2008)

• Doctor can share X-ray pictures and other information on the table and they can type in notes on the screen. But the problem is patients cannot look at doctor and table at the same time.

CMC for Elders

Special design factors we need to keep in mind:

• Computer skills, typing skills
• Mobility
• Thinkability

ElderMail (Davidoff et al. CHI 2005)

Book as User Interface (BUI): use a familar form as tangible interface to computing

Wikipedia and collaborated writing.

Levels of Coordination and Conflict

1. Global level:

• Less direct work (article edits)
• More indirect work (article talk, user, procedure)
• More maintenance work (reverts, vandalism)

2. Article level:

• What does it mean to have conflict at tht article level?
• How would we measure this?

  Language signs of people arguing, disagreeing; Whether conflicts are good depends on the kinds of revisions: proof reading may be good, but if the revisions are reverted back to the original versions, it will be a conflict.

3. User Level

• What does it mean to have conflict between users?
• How can we identify conflict between user?

Many to many communication

Class practice:
Design a trust system for wikipedia

• Approval system

Shared Experiences

mGroup
Salovaara et al., CHI 2006

An application similar to twitter, but users can post pictures and videos as well.

It may only be used among close friends, because people may only want to share personal information with close friends.

Second Life

It can train people communication skills with foreign cultures in virtual world, so that people don't have to travel around the world.

Video Spaces

Visual Information in FtF:
Static visual cues

• Appearance, clothing, accessories
• Inferences about personality, itelligence, socio/cultural background etc.

Visibal behaviors

• Facial expressions (但是在CMC中，大家有时候根本就不看屏幕，不去注意对方的面部表情)
• Posture (姿势)
• Gaze (I see you), Mutual gaze (We are looking at each other and we know we are looking at each other), full gaze awareness (knowing where the other person is looking at, including mutual gaze)（大家喜欢知道对方在看哪儿）
• Gestures:

Environment

• Proxemics (people's orientation vis a vis one another)
• task objects, events

Gesture

Uses mostly hands, fingers, and arms

Manipulator: Contact with body or object (eg, scratching). Serve non-communicative functions

Beat: Sychronised with the emphasis of the speech

Deictic (直证的)：Arm/hand used to point at existing or imaginary object

Respresentational:

Emblem: Movement with precise cultural/social meaning

Audio-only media space

MY NOTES

Hindus et al. (1996)

Hindus, D., Ackerman, M. S., Mainwaring, S., & Starr, B. (1996). Thunderwire: a field study of an audio-only media space, Proceedings of the CSCW 1996 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, (pp. 238-247). NY: ACM Press.

Literature suggests that "audio, especially good-quality audio, would have a sufficient communicative capability for an interesting and useful shared media system" (p. 239).

Thunderwire (p. 240):

• It was a purely audio medium. Except for an “on” light, it had no other visual interface or cues.
• The audio was high quality, such that users could easily distinguish one another’s voices as well as overhear background sounds. The sound quality made it possible to hear everything one might hear sitting in a person’s office, including private vocalizations, phone calls, bodily noises, and background noise.
• All messages were public on Thunderwire.
• System use was fluid. People could connect or disconnect themselves from Thunderwire any time ‘they wished, simply by flipping a switch.
• The act of connecting or disconnecting was indicated only by a barely audible click. In fact, there was no way to know exactly who was listening without asking.

Access Thunderwire:

• Group within same company
• Group was already cohesive, young temporary staff
• Group seated within 100 feet of each other
  

Problems with Thunderwire:

• Knowing who is present
• low disturbance audio
  
• automatically turning off mic when phone calls come in
• private conversations
  

Add modalities (e.g. visual cues to presence)
Keep to audio-only interface

• development of norms
• eg. Annoucing oneself, signing off so people know who is present
• eg. signing off before taking personal calls
• audio cock-tail parties

Somewire
(Signer et al, CHI1999)

Somewire=audio system underlying THunderwire
Researched 4 Somewire interfaces

• Fader: audio controls
• Vizwire: social presentation
• Thunderwire:one/off+volume
• ToonTown: tangible interface

Aoki, P. M., Romaine, M., Szymanski, M. H., Thornton, J. D., Wilson, D., & Woodruff, A. (2003). The mad hatter's cocktail party: a social mobile audio space supporting multiple simultaneous conversations. Proceedings of CHI 2003 (pp. 425-432). NY: ACM Press.

Rodenstein & Donath (CHI 2000)

Rodenstein, R. & Donath, J. S. (2000). Talking in circles: Designing a spatially-grounded audioconferencing environment. Proceedings of CHI 2000 (pp. 81-88). NY: ACM Press.

Talking in Circles:
The best one!!!
Audio as a way to overcome limitations to text-based chat (typing ability)
But audio chat has two major shortcomings

Small Group Discussions
Do we want to provide cues to facilitate audio-only communication
Or , do we

How do we evaluate the effectiveness of this system?

Cambience 【Video ->audio】
(Diaz-Marino & Greenberg, CSCW 2006)

Simulate informal comm environment in IM

Informal Comm in CMC

1. Kraut, R. E., Fish, R.S., Root, R.W., & Chalfonte, B.L. (1990). Informal communication in organizations: Form, function, and technology. In S. Oskamp & S. Spacapan (Eds). Human reactions to technology: The Claremont
Symposium on applied social psychology (pp. 145-199). Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.

2. Isaacs, E., Walendowski, A., Whittaker, S., Schiano, D. J. & Kamm, C. (2002). The character, functions, and styles of instant messaging in the workplace. Proceedings CSCW 2002 (pp. 11-20). NY: ACM Press.

3. Zhao, D. & Rosson, M.B. (2009). How and why people Twitter: The role that micro-blogging plays in informal communication at work. Proceedings of GROUP 2009 (pp. 243-252). New York: ACM

How to facilitate Informal Comm in CMC?

Media tools:
1. PARC

2. CaveCat: show availability by door icon, which can be improved by adding a senser on the door.

3. VideoWindow (Bellcore)

4. Cruiser: late 80s

5. Autocruiser: system supplied availability

6. Montage: (~1993): Multimedia Glances for Distributed Groups
1) A small window
2) The window can fade in and fade out
3) One person can interrupt no matter the other person is busy or not
4) User can type in the status to add more features
5) User can leave notes on the other person's desktop
6) Users can share image and make marks on it