SOCIAL IMPLICATIONS AND DESIGN ISSUES IN CSCW AND HCI

I203 Social and Organizational Issues of Information

Assignment #3Reading Response PapersFinal Paper

Administrative Fun

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Assignment #3

Shorter than Assn #1, tied more directly to final paper.

The purpose of the assignment is to work from our own class reading examples to identify and frame problems and arguments.

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A Few Social Challenges for Design in Human-Computer Interaction

“Huggable HAL 9000” from Laura MacCary

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Part of this is a sub-area in HCI: Do we treat computers as social entities?

Nass and colleagues research: Politeness, Flattery, Gender stereotyping in computers and interfaces.

Kiesler and Sproull: Cooperation and Trust with computers and interfaces.

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Computers as Social (Nass)

People appear to obey politeness norms with computers

People appear to prefer responses from computers that match their own personality type Includes quality of interaction and competence

People like to be flattered by computer responses

People appear to apply gender stereotypes to computers

People appear to orient their reactions to the computer, not the programmer(s).

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Computers as not social (Kiesler and Sproull)

We love dogs and people, but people seem to cooperate more with people-like computer partners than dog-like partners.

Our reactions may be a learned response

We have to look at the situation and our expectations to understand our seemingly “social” responses.

If we want such research to inform design, then we have to actually specify what aspect of the computer we are examining (all software? Specific interface characteristics?)

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Challenges for design in CSCW

What is CSCW and why is it important? Study of the various ways that individuals work in

groups and the technologies (hardware and software).

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Select Findings in CSCW (Ackerman)

Exceptions tend to be the norm in work processes

People prefer to know who else is present in a shared space, and how they are performing

Visibility of communication and information exchange can enable learning, but also works against efficiency under some circumstances.

Norms emerge for CSCW systems, and these norms tend to be constantly re-negotiated.

Critical Mass problems

Importance of Incentives (tied to many other issues above)

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The “Social-Technical Gap”

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Much ado about nothing?

The ‘gap’ is just a mistake caused by early miscommunications, or just habit of software designers/researchers.

We just have not found the proper solution with existing technologies; eventually we will so the gap is a moot point.

Instead of complaining about it, we should just change our behavior (i.e. adapt) to work with the technology the way it is supposed to be used.

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CSCW as a ‘Science of the Artificial’

“CSCW is at once an engineering discipline attempting to construct suitable systems for groups, organizations, and other collectivities, and ad the same time, CSCW is a social science attempting to understand the basis for that construction in the social world”

Ackerman (2000: 13)

No Silver Bullet?