Randi Thomas and Richard C. Davis

CSCW Notes:

Social, Organizational, & Spatial Considerations (9/23/97)

Paper #1 (Randi Thomas):

Re-Place-ing Space: The Roles of Place and Space in Collaborative Systems

• We are located in "space", but we act in "place"--> "places" are spaces that are valued:
  • House vs home,

  • A space is always what it is, but a place is how it's used.
    • Place is the creative result of the user --> bend the space to the user's need.
    • Behavior is associated with place, not space.
    • Space can only be made a place by its occupants. The best that designers can do is to put the tools into their hands.

  • A place is a space with something added-->
    • Social meaning,
    • Convention,
    • Cultural understandings about role, function and nature, which help us to frame our behavior --> this is a "cultural phenomenon" --> learning them is part of our assimilation and socialization:
      • These norms vary from place to place.
      • As cultural understandings change, the sense of appopriate behavior also changes.
    • More than simply a point in space.
    • Places can have temporal properties --> the same space can be different places at different times.

  • The sense of place transforms the space.

  • Places that "work" are ones in which people want to be.

• The relationship between space and place is social, not technological.
  • CSCW tools and technologies create NEW social places based on the ways their users ascribe new social meanings to new features.
  • Carrying over real world organizations gives us an easy way to establish shared social meaning.
    • Does it limit the way users can adopt and appropriate the technologies to create their own new meanings?

• The idea of place derives from a tension between CONNECTEDNESS and DISTINCTION.
  • CONNECTEDNESS: the degree to which a place fits with its surroundings, maintaining a pattern in the surrounding environment or reponding to those patterns.
    • When these relationships are broken down, something is "out of place".
      • dancing in a conference hall,
      • walking nude in the street.
  • DISTINCTIVENESS: A place is distinct from its context.

• Placeness is created and sustained by patterns of use.
  • Don't design IN
  • Design FOR

  -->The sense of placement must be forged by the users; it cannot be inherent in the system itself.

• There should be support for participation, adaptation and appropriation of technology by the user community.
  • Make a house into a home by arranging it to suit our lives and reflect ourselves.
  • If users cannot appropriate the space and make it theirs, i.e. if there is a separation between users and technology, then this inhibits adoption of the technology.

• The sense of place takes time to develop within a community. Look for it in studies of long-term use. (It takes periods of 2-3 years for new patterns of behaviour to emerge.)

• Space-less places:
  • Examples: USENET news groups & Internet mailing lists.
    • Different groups exhibit different notions of place. For example,
      • Neophyte postings
      • Flames
      are handled differently by the different groups --> since there are different social norms, they are different places.
    • For both there is no notion of space.
  • Placeful navigation without physical space examples:
    • Personal hotlists on WWW --> creates links from anywhere to anywhere. There is no physical space analogy.
    • Interest-matching systems --> place based behavior without underlying space.

• Hybrid spaces: comprised of both physical and virtual space.
  • Framed by the physical space, the virtual space and the relationship between the two.
    • Media spaces --> the space (connection) is virtual, but the projections are real physical space.
    • After a long time behavioral transformations take place, for example:
      • The office space is virtually shared not physically shared. However the office was treated as if it was a shared office space by everyone who came into the office.
  • Media space is a balance between:
    • Shared nature of audio space
    • Translocated nature of the visual space
    • Melding of virtual & physical space.

• We should design interfaces based on spatial organizations BUT if we embed placeness in spatial metaphors we can accidentally undermine the very thing that makes place work such as:
  • The shared understandings of appropriate use,
  • The social interpretation of cues in the physical environment.

Questions and Points Raised during the discussion:

• Is the concept of "designing FOR place" a useful way to frame thoughts for CSCW designers?

• What are some other examples of places that have no space at all?

• When is it appropriate to build space into a system and when does it go too far? (How can designers think about it.)

• How much trade off should there be between geometry of space and place? --> The best design keeps as free from constraints as is possible while still being useful.

• If designs only try to emulate physical space, then they are limited. Designs that do not do this can use the entire virtual world, not just what is real!

• Since users appropriate space and define appropriateness, users define the rules for different places and police inappropriate behavior from others themselves. This function, therefore, does not have to be built into the tool.

• Not all tools have to be built this way, but if you build a big tool for lots of people, it is best (for success) to make it so that people can appropriate it.

Paper #2 (Randi Thomas):

• Lotus Notes was introduced to a corporation.

• Author examined the introduction and early use of Notes.

• Individuals didn't understand that the tools were collaborative, they thought of them as single-user tools. This could have been helped by
  • Communicating the group value of Notes to all the users,
  • Training the users on how to use Notes and how Notes could transform the way they did their work (i.e. that Notes could be a MAJOR CHANGE for the organization because it is a firm productivity tool.)

• The structure of the corporation influences how Notes is used.
  • Reward Systems --> Employees were rewarded for "billable hours".
    • There was no provision for them to spend time learning Notes.
    • They did not see Notes as a client-related activity so it was less legitimate than client work.
    • They were unwilling to spend personal time learning Notes because they didn't see the value in doing so.
  • Policies & Procedures --> Employees were cautious using the tools because the tools made data more accessible, and no policies existed to advise employees as to what kind of use was acceptable/not acceptable. They were concerned with:
    • Security,
    • Who would have access to the info,
    • Losing data,
    • Personal liability,
    • Embarassment,
    • Responsibility.
  • Culture --> Competition was fierce. Employees fought for stature/promotions and therefore were not encouraged to collaborate or share knowledge with their peers.
    • Members feared loss of power, control, prestige, and promotion opportunities if they shared their ideas, or if their lack of knowledge or misinterpretations were made visible.
    • However, the technologists, not being subject to the competitive culture, used Notes to share their knowledge and experience in order to aide them in conducting their work of solving technical problems.

• Communicate the value of tools before installing them (concrete demonstrations of group applications was suggested).

• Ensure that propective users have an appropriate understanding of the technology as a collective rather than a personal tool.

• Make an effort to train users collectively to foster joint understanding and expectations.

• Change the culture of the corporation if it conflicts with tools. The tools can be inculcated:
  • Top-down through training, communication, leadership, and structural legitimation or,
  • Bottom-up through support for local opportunities and experimentation around the cooperation.

• Give time to members to use and experiment with the new technology.

• One person in the class had actually used NOTES? What kinds of things can be done with it that the employees of Alpha corporation did not discover?
  • User groups.
  • Large data base, or knowledge base, can be built. It contains the knowledge of the group and can be searched for something that one member needs to know.
  • Can build apps on top of it.

• Notes has an advantage in that everyone in the company is using the SAME email software so everyone can read and understand everyone else's text.

• How would you have reacted to this paper if you were the president of Alpha corporation?

• Should this study be continued and how? It would have been nice to have followed up with a further study after Notes had been in Alpha corporation for awhile and after management had read this paper!

• What kind of "introduction" to the system would be useful?

• How should training be done?
  • Train how to use system?
  • Suggest possible applications?
  • Have a pilot group experiment and then train rest of the company on what *they* did?

  NOTE: The class thought all were valid ways to do the training.

• Groupware is special --> where private tools can get spread by individuals, can the same thing happen with groupware?

• Is it realistic to expect a corporation to change its culture to support a tool?

• What is the problem Notes was trying to solve in Alpha corporation? Is this a case of having the solution first (Notes) and then trying to find the problem that it solves?

• Would a monetary incentive have changed the way Notes was received in Alpha corporation?

• Was its failure the fault of Notes or was the failure due to how Notes was introduced into the coorporation? --> Everyone agreed that how it was introduced was a major contributor to its lack of full use in Alpha corporation. --> At the very least people have to be given time to learn and become familiar with a new tool.

• Everyone also agreed that the policy issues of the corporation should have been in place before Notes was introduced.

• Suggestions were made that new tools should be taught slowly in incremental stages, not fire hosed at people all at once.

Paper #3 (Richard C. Davis):

Computer Systems and the Design of Organizational Interaction

• Theory
  • Technology can change the way people think about what they do
  • This will happen whether or not the designer thinks about it
  • Implications for designers
    • Designer brings their own perspective into design
    • Design is evaluated by the consequences of the designer's intervention into existing practices
    • Design is better if you think about these consequenes
  • Language
    • The purpose of language - allows us to ACT together in a common world
    • Tools that help communication should be aware of this structure.
    • Tool can help users by teaching them to be structured
• System
  • Structures messages as conversational moves
  • Success depends on how others use system
  • Can improve communication by structuring conversations
  • Can make some users uncomfortable because everything is so explicit

• Is this concept of making software "orient" a user's way of thinking a useful concept? Is it better to allow the user to use the system the way THEY would want to? What structure is acceptable in what contexts?

• Does this system benefit the wrong people? E.G.Managers have no problem determining people's "conversational moves" but the workers have to think about it now.

• How should communication outide this system mesh with communication within the system? Is the "free-form" message an acceptable way to do this?

• The Coordinator:
  • Should have been introduced gradually.
  • Was possibly designed as an experiment in communicating.
  • Only works in western type cultures where people are used to speaking up.
  • There was a problem with mixing things exterior to the coordinator with things pertinent to the coordinator. It might work if these two things were in balance.
  • Was too constraining. There was an attempt to build too much place into the tool without considering the need, culture, and how it could be appropriated.
  • If introduced properly, it may have had a better chance of being accepted.
  • Perhaps was designed so structured in order to support the designers' ideas of how people should communicate rather than to satisfy a real need.

• The designers could have done a better job if they had studied past, classical anthropological research of space and how it relates to language.

Compare and Contrast The Three Papers:

General:

• Does the concept of "building for place" tie together all the things we talked about today? Is it a useful way to frame thought for CSCW designers?

Papers #1 and #2

• People will embrace a place if it is pleasant and if they are getting something of value from it (Paper #1). Since NOTES (Paper #2) was shoved down the employees throats by management and didn't go along with the lifestyle of billable hours within the corporation, it was unpleasant and therefore people did not embrace it.

• The way that Notes was presented to the corporation and the fact that no underpinning was given for bringing Notes into the corporation, Notes was never given a chance to be appropriated by the employees, and therefore the employees never defined place within the Notes tool. This may be why it was not embraced. However, with time, perhaps the employees would appropriate it and in so doing give it place.

Papers #1 and #3

• It was not possible to appropriate ANY space into the employees own place with the Coordinator because it was way too constraining.

• Was the above fact the reason the Coordinator wasn't more successful? Perhaps success does not depend on appropriation as much as it does on:
  • Who will be using the tool.
  • What the users' needs are and does the tool satisfy those needs.
  • How the tool is presented.
  • Whether the users WANT to appropriate the tool or not.