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
Designing Mobile Face-to-Face Group Interactions 