Basic issues in social awareness

1
Basic issues in social awareness

• Anders Mørch
• TOOL 5100, theme 10

2
Outline

• Social awareness
• Related work
• Design for social awareness
• Learning support with social awareness

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Social awareness

• An overview of article by Bødker Christiansen
  (2006)
• Social awareness is the kind of awareness of
  other people that grows from overhearing and
  overseeing
• We gather continuously information about our
  colleagues and act accordingly (Tollmar et al,
  1996)
• Extended to virtual world and design How this
  kind of awareness apply when people are distanced
  from each other (no longer co present)

4
Related work

• Makes a distinction between focal awareness and
  peripheral/subsidiary awareness, a distinction
  originally proposed by Polanyi (1966)
• Dourish and Bly (1992) on real time, distributed
  awareness, and (indirectly) Gutwin, Stark
  Greenberg (1995) on workspace awareness

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Related work contd

• Theory of social psychology and communication
• Strauss on breadcrumb, traces and cues as
  indicators of activities of others in shared
  space
• Clark (1996) on common ground as linguistic
  precondition for mutual understanding
• Rommetveit on intersubjectivity (not referenced)
• Robinson on common artifacts, their common use
  and peoples adaptation of them to personal needs

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Critique

• This paper is a critique of current work on
  computational awareness because it tries to
• Make something subtle explicit
• Giving increased attention to secondary
  (previously tacit) concerns has the side effect
  of missing important concerns
• The authors do not go beyond being there to
  identify ways to use ICT beyond modeling existing
  (F2F) social interaction

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Research study

• RQ What does it mean to be present and how to
  leave traces of one presence in the virtual
  world?
• Personal panels helped people to leave traces of
  current and pending activities
• Leave trace of past activities as reminders to
  themselves or others
• Display personal content like family photos

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Design for social awareness

• Challenges for design
• How to put computational awareness in the
  background as subtle (non distracting), but still
  informative cues
• Ignore irrelevant information about peoples
  movement and plans
• Sensitivity to personal information, as material
  to be seen but not touched
• Ability to leave traces in virtual rooms

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Learning support with social awareness

• Questions for discussion in class