Agenda

22 September, 2013

9.00-9:10 Arrival

9:10-9:30 Introduction (Stuart & Joel)

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Accepted paper talks should include 5 mins questions during or after

9.30-9.50 

Supporting Collaborative Use of a Mobile Museum Guide for Small Groups of Visitors

Joel Lanir, Alan Wecker and Tsvi Kuflik

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9.50-10.10

Experiences from a Real-Time Mobile Collaborative Writing System in an Art Gallery

Matthias Korn, Anna Maria Polli and Clemens Nylandsted Klokmose

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10.10-10.30

Watching the Watchers: Visibility and Mobility in Visitor Experiences

Patrick Brundell, Stefan Rennick-Egglestone and Paul Tennent

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10:30-11:00 Break

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11.00-11.20

Bursting the Mobile Bubble

Sus Lundgren and Olof Torgersson

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11.20-11.40

Ambient Awareness of Classroom Activities

Tarmo Toikkanen and Anna Keune

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11.40-12.00

The Ethical Implications of the Technological Surveillance of Art

Norman Su

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12:00-12:30

The Practical Organisation of Mobile Group Interaction

Peter Tolmie

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12:30-14:00 Lunch

14:00-14:30 Questions/topics/key themes and issues for discussion.

14:30-15:30 Discussion

1. Interaction techniques and technologies that support group interactions, e.g., on ‘sensing’ of social context in the literature, e.g., proximity, collocation, conversation, bodily orientation, gaze etc.
2. Methods: evaluation and studies of group interaction settings.
3. Requirements/implications for design or implications for what?
4. Concepts/design principles: E.g., group-sensitive, group-aware, group- adaptive design What do we mean by ‘mobile’/mobility?

15:30-16:00 Break

16:00-17:30 Discussion continued

• Wrap up feedback and next steps (journal special issue or collective journal paper)

17:30 Close

Invited Talk: Peter Tolmie

We’re pleased to announce that Peter has accepted our invitation to give a talk at the workshop. See below for title and abstract, as well as his bio.

The Practical Organisation of Mobile Group Interaction

Abstract. For over forty years now there have been ethnomethodological studies of interaction being conducted in various kinds of work and leisure environments for the purposes of informing systems design. Many of the most notable earlier examples of these studies were conducted in the field of computer-supported cooperative work. A number of the early studies in this canon – principally work practice studies of air traffic control and bank work at Lancaster University – began to identify some gross organisational problems in the practice of group work that were fruitful as a frame for studies geared into design. These included matters such as ‘plans and procedures’, ‘distributed coordination’, and ‘awareness’ and built upon Garfinkel’s original discussions of the rational or reason-able characteristics of social organisation such as ‘accountability’, ‘a shared taken for granted world’ (which was borrowed in turn from phenomenology) and the inevitably situated and practical character of human action. It is worth revisiting these matters as organisational problems to be addressed in ordinary everyday practical action when engaged in mobile group interaction. what is the impact upon their character when interactions across groups can be more widely distributed and conducted when on the move as a consequence of using mobile technologies? During this talk I will revisit these key organisational concerns and discuss them by drawing upon a variety of examples from my own studies, conducted since I was first employed as an ethnographer at Lancaster in the late nineties. In particular I shall be exploring facets of how interaction across groups can be both facilitated and breached through the use of mobile technologies, leading to a range of issues such as the blurring of cohorts and the consequences of new modalities of awareness and availability of other people’s actions.

Bio. Dr Peter Tolmie is a Senior Research Fellow in the Mixed Reality Laboratory at the University of Nottingham. He was originally a member of the Centre for CSCW at Lancaster University, doing studies of middle management in retail finance. In 2000 he was recruited by Xerox Research Centre Europe and worked at XRCE’s Cambridge laboratory until its closure in 2002. During this time he conducted numerous studies of small businesses and home environments.  In 2002 he moved to XRCE’s sister laboratory at Grenoble in France and became Area Manager of XRCE’s Work Practice Technology group at the beginning of 2005. Here his work focused on a range of topics including consultancy practice and remote service assistance.  Since starting work with the MRL in May 2006 his studies have covered a range of different topics: the use of home networks and evolving infrastructures; pervasive gaming; a longitudinal study of inhabitants occupying an energy efficient home; the social context of musical performance and its consumption; the work of personal assistants; family rural activities; museum visiting practices; and the general conduct of domestic life. He has also worked on several projects as an independent consultant, most notably a wide-ranging study of TV and film production in collaboration with the London-based company Cleverplugs, looking to inform the development of new kinds of workflow technology across the film and television industries; a study of the work of bid managers to inform new ways of supporting distributed knowledge-intensive work; and examining the communication and decision-making practices amongst health professionals treating patients with breast cancer.

He has been published widely in both journals and conferences in the domains of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, Ubiquitous Computing and Human-Computer Interaction, is the author of a book on intimacy in domestic environments, the joint author of a book on ethnographic work in design, and the joint editor of two recently published volumes of articles relating to ethnomethodological studies of work and of play. He is also an active reviewer for a number of the major computing conferences and journals and regularly serves as an associate and sub-committee chair.

Deadline extended

We’re extending our deadline until July 7. Looking forward to your submissions!

Call for Participation

This workshop is concerned with understanding the nature of face-to-face group interactions in mobile, but collocated settings. It seeks to examine group-sensitive design examples, concepts and techniques, research methods and approaches to study group activities, and to learn how these social activities might be respected and supported by design. We aim to bring together researchers interested in the social organisation of face-to-face interaction, and designers of collaborative groupware and mobile, interactive experiences to explore opportunities and challenges for the design and study of experiences, apps and systems that support, augment or enable collocated activities.

Workshop aims and topics 

While considerable work has been conducted in CSCW to support different combinations of collocated and distributed groups across a range of settings and tasks, we are particularly interested in design that leverages existing social competencies as resources. Thus, how might the social organisation of groups of friends, families, co-workers, learners, players, and visitors of museums or cities be supported in ways that do not disrupt the dynamic face-to-face group interactions that occur in these settings? For example, how do we design an interactive audio guide that does not isolate the members of a group from one another, and a location-based tour guide that does not redundantly notify every member of the group that a sight is nearby?

The goal of this workshop is to identify the concepts, techniques, approaches and methods to study, respect and support the ways in which groups of people situate the interactive experience in their ongoing face-to-face interactions in mobile settings. Accordingly, the workshop is both concerned with possible interactive designs, but also investigating situations where design can draw upon everyday social competencies that group members bring to bear on face-to-face circumstances. While there has been significant amounts of collaborative systems developed to smooth over the dichotomies of collocated and distributed teams, we wish to focus specifically on the challenges raised by highly mobile but collocated situations where subtle but concerted organisation between group members is fundamental to experiencing the setting. For instance, we refer to visitor groups to cultural spaces such as museums and galleries, where issues of coordination and collaboration are central to the visiting experience.

We invite submissions of ideas and key discussion points for this workshop around the design and study of group experiences that include, but are not limited to:

• Discussions or reviews of methods and tools to study and evaluate socio-technical systems with a focus on collocated settings;
• Examples and ‘thick descriptions’ of interaction and conversation analysis and ethnographic reports of studies of group activities;
• Approaches and examples of how studies of collocated interaction inform group-sensitive design;
• Techniques of sensing social context, e.g., collocation, conversation, and bodily orientation;
• Concepts of group-awareness and group-adaptivity: how might a system be made group-aware and adaptive to the context of the group?
• Ideas of group-sensitive design: how might systems be designed to respect collocated groups and support or enable group activities?
• Reviews and applications of existing design concepts to facilitate group-sensitive design;
• Studies and examples of mobile, interactive experiences, apps or systems for collocated groups;
• Designs and deployments of groupware and CSCW systems, in particular for collocated settings;
• Explorations of interaction techniques aimed at supporting collocated interaction.

Important Dates 

June 28: Shared deadline for workshop position papers

July 31: Latest notification of acceptance for workshop participants

August 9: Early registration deadline

September 22: Workshop at ECSCW 2013 in Cyprus

Submissions 

We invite two kinds of submissions:

• Position papers (up to 6 pages) or
• Posters (PDF, A0) + Abstracts (up to 2 pages).

Submissions will be reviewed by at least 2 members of the Program Committee.

Please prepare your position paper or abstract according to the ECSCW format.

Submit your *anonymised* contribution as PDF to the workshop’s own easychair (MOGI 2013).

As a follow up to the workshop, we seek to edit a publication (e.g., a journal special issue) on designing and studying group interactions to provide a platform to publish the outcomes of this workshop in extended form.

Activities and goals

The main goal of the workshop is to create an interactive and lively platform for researchers and designers to share their experiences and develop new perspectives of how collocated group activities can best be studied and supported by design. To scaffold this goal, we suggest a mix of presentation and interactive group work in three phases.

Phase 1: Mutual grounding

The initial phase of the workshop will be aimed at developing common ground through presentation of position papers and an overview of key related work. Participants will have the opportunity to present their own position papers to the co-participants. The workshop organisers will present an overview of relevant methods, techniques, concepts, approaches and key works concerned with collocated group experiences and their support through (mainly mobile) technologies.

Phase 2: Charting the space

This phase is concerned with charting the design and study space for collocated group experiences. Through interactive group work we will first identify the emergent key themes and issues and then use these in order to categorise, compare and juxtapose the techniques, methods, approaches and concepts from the first phase.

Phase 3: Consolidation and synthesis

The final phase is aimed at synthesizing a repertoire of the key approaches, techniques, methods and concepts to address the key challenges in building and studying group experiences. The repertoire will provide workshop participants with a more complete and versatile tool set to design and study group experiences in a more encompassing way.

Organisers

Joel Fischer, The Mixed Reality Lab, University of Nottingham

Stuart Reeves, The Mixed Reality Lab, University of Nottingham

Steve Benford, The Mixed Reality Lab, University of Nottingham

Chris Greenhalgh, The Mixed Reality Lab, University of Nottingham

Program Committee 

Barry Brown, Mobile Life

Pat Brundell, University of Nottingham

Alan Chamberlain, University of Nottingham

Abigail Durrant, Newcastle University

Lesley Fosh, University of Nottingham

Giulio Jacucci, Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT

Matt Jones, Swansea University

Boriana Koleva, University of Nottingham

Siân Lindley, Microsoft Research

Andrés Lucero, Nokia

James Norris, University of Nottingham

Stef Rennick-Egglestone, University of Nottingham

Simon Robinson, Swansea University

Duncan Rowland, University of Lincoln

Vicky Shipp, Horizon Digital Economy Research

Peter Tolmie, University of Nottingham