The Design of Artifacts for Computer-Mediated Collaboration

Incorporating Indexicality and Contingency into the Design of Artifacts for Computer-Mediated Collaboration. A Dissertation Defense. Nathan Dwyer. This work presents an empirically-derived, abstract model of media appropriation in collaborative interaction and demonstrates the model's applicability to software design.

Human communicative abilities are remarkable in both their efficacy and their flexibility. Collaborative interaction is shaped by its context but also effects changes in its participants and the representations they use. This work draws on vocabulary and concepts from Ethnomethodology, Distributed Cognition, and Activity Theory to form a foundation for interpreting collaboration as situated, interactional, and mediated by co-constructed representations. This foundation suggests that a productive approach to understanding human communicative abilities is to examine the boundary between participant and representation, and, in particular, the transitions that occur in expression and perception.

Grounded theory methods were applied to three empirical studies of media appropriation in a diverse set of environments. The first study examined appropriation of paper media in a highly-constrained, constructed environment. The second study analyzed a year-long corpus of e-mail messages and wiki contributions. The final study consisted of a several month ethnographic observation of a research group using a heterogeneous collection of physical and computer-based representational media. Analysis at multiple granularities was used to identify shared, invariant properties of media appropriation in these different environments, and these were distilled into a succinct, descriptive framework.

The primary result of this work is a framework that describes the abstract principles that underlie media appropriation in collaborative interactions. The I-PMR framwork consists of four, high-level elements: Interaction, Perceptibility, Mutability, and Relatedness. These are sufficient for categorizing observed media uses at a high level of abstraction, and they form a basis for deconstructing the mechanics of higher-level social structures in terms of media use. The framework elements can be used to derive representational capabilities that are essential for collaborative interaction. Several small prototypes were developed to demonstrate the framework's application and to validate its usefulness. These generated useful feedback on the strengths of the framework and pointed to important next steps.

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