Contextual Method for the Redesign of Existing Software Products

Abstract

This article is concerned with the problem of improving software products and investigates how to base that process on solid empirical foundations. Our key contribution is a contextual method that provides a means of identifying new features to support discovered and currently unsupported ways of working and a means of evaluating the usefulness of proposed features. Standard methods of discovery and evaluation, such as interviews and usability testing, gather some of the necessary data but fall short of covering important aspects. The shortcomings of these approaches are overcome by applying an integrated and iterative method for collecting and interpreting data about product usage in context. This article demonstrates its effectiveness when applied to the discovery and evaluation of new features for standard Web clients.     

Digital plumbing: the mundane work of deploying UbiComp in the home

Deploying UbiComp in real homes is central to realizing Weiser’s grand vision of ‘invisible’ computing. It is essential to moving design out of the lab and making it into an unremarkable feature of everyday life. Deployment can be problematic, however, and in ways that a number of researchers have already pointed to. In this paper, we wish to complement the community’s growing understanding of challenges to deployment. We focus on ‘digital plumbing’—i.e., the mundane work involved in installing ubiquitous computing in real homes. Digital plumbing characterizes the act of deployment. It draws attention to the work of installation: to the collaborative effort of co-situating prototypical technologies in real homes, to the competences involved, the practical troubles encountered, and the demands that real world settings place on the enterprise. We provide an ethnographic study of the work. It makes visible the unavoidable need for UbiComp researchers to develop new technologies with respect to existing technological arrangements in the home and to develop methods and tools that support the digital plumber in planning and preparing for change, in managing the contingencies that inevitably occur in realizing change, and in coordinating digital plumbing and maintaining awareness of change.     

Supporting information evolution on the WWW

This paper describes a simple versioning system which we have developed to support collaborative authoring on the WWW. The system provides facilities for versioning pages and allowing readers access to different versions of web pages. We discuss why such a system is needed and present the versioning model which we have developed. This model allows existing web pages to be converted to versioned entities without affecting links to these pages. Central to the model, is a set of access control facilities which allows authors to provide coauthors with access to versions of pages under development. We describe the instantiation of this model and assess our work against the requirements identified in the first part of the paper.     

Moving with the Times: IT Research and the Boundaries of CSCW

The field of CSCW research emerged with the development of distributed computing systems and attempts to understand the socially organized (‘collaborative’ or ‘cooperative’) nature of work in order to embed such systems in the workplace. As a field of interdisciplinary inquiry CSCW was motivated by technological developments and the need to understand the particular contexts within which those developments were intended to resonate. In other words, it is no mere accident that CSCW took work as its topic and resource – the historical nature of IT research from which the field emerged meant that for all practical purposes it could not be otherwise. Yet times change. IT research moves on. Today mobile, ambient, pervasive, ubiquitous, mixed reality and wearable computing, et cetera, are of fundamental concern to the contemporary computing research community. Furthermore, these developments are accompanied by a movement away from the workplace to focus on diverse settings in everyday life: homes, games, museums, photography, tourism, performances, indeed diverse bodies of people and pursuits that generally fall under the conceptual rubric of the ‘ludic’. Accompanying this shift away from work is a call for new approaches and concepts that will enable researchers to better understand the ludic and inform design appropriately. In this paper we seek to address the boundaries of CSCW and the ability of CSCW to respond to contemporary research agendas. We present an ethnomethodological study of a location-based mixed reality game to demonstrate the continued relevance of CSCW approaches and concepts to contemporary agendas in IT research.     

Hybrid ecologies: understanding cooperative interaction in emerging physical-digital environments

We consider the emergence of hybrid ecologies, which marry mixed reality environments and ubiquitous computing environments together to bridge the physical-digital divide. Hybrid ecologies are new class of digital ecology that merge multiple environments, physical and digital, together. Collaboration in these emerging environments is characterized by ‘fragmented interaction’ in that it is mediated by interaction mechanisms that are differentially distributed. Unpacking the collaborative nature of fragmented interaction requires that we uncover the ordinary interactional competences that users exploit to make differentially distributed mechanisms of interaction work and the distributed practices that articulate ‘seamful’ representations and provide for awareness and coordination.

Application of rough hard-sphere theory to diffusion in n-alkanes

Tracer diffusion coefficients are reported for n-alkane solutes in n-dodecane, n-eicosane, n-eicosane, and n-octacosane in the temperature range 304–533 K at 1.38 MPa. Rough hard-sphere theory is used to interpret the data. The translational-rotational coupling parameters are determined for each solute-solvent pair at each temperature. The nature of the coupling parameter and the possibility of relating it to molecular properties and temperature in a homologous series are discussed.Paper presented at the Tenth Symposium on Thermophysical Properties, June 20–23, 1988, Gaithersburg, Maryland, U.S.A.     

Patterns of home life: Informing design for domestic environments

This paper considers how we may provide support for the development of general design principles in domestic environments. In particular, we examine the potential for usingdesign patterns as a means of presenting ethnographic material and outlining design solutions. The paper reports on the development of an initial pattern language based on our studies of a number of domestic, environments and offers a general structure for presenting these patterns. Finally, we briefly reflect on our experiences of developing an on-line set of patterns for this class of environment.     

Review of national and state-level calibrations of AASHTOWare Pavement ME design for new jointed plain concrete pavement

For the design of new jointed plain concrete pavements (JPCPs), three national calibrations of the AASHTOWare Pavement ME Design have been necessary due to model and database updates. Local calibration is also recommended to better match a state’s experience. To date, 8 states have changed the calibration coefficients to local values, while 11 states have implemented national coefficients. This study presents a review of the national and local calibrations and a comparison in terms of, (1) pavement performance prediction and (2) thickness design. It was found that the difference between the local and national calibrations was significant in terms of predicted pavement performance, but much less with respect to thickness design. Furthermore, a full factorial was conducted to study the impact of various design features on the local calibrations. The results showed that the difference between the national and local calibrations decreased as optimum design features such as short joint spacing were used.