This project in Human-Centered Computing is a study of micro-coordination and interactions with technology of young adults. It examines the emotional, personal, interpersonal and behavioral effects that technology design and use practices have on young adults in the course of solving micro-coordinational problems. The research will explore and evaluate the theory that (a) the fundamental experience of growing up in America today has been altered by what young people have not experienced but which earlier generations did experience, (b) these aspects of interaction are discounted in the public discourse about technology, (c) assumptions in the design of technology that contribute to these problems have not been sufficiently examined, and (d) ultimately the design of technologies can address some of the same problems to which it also contributes.
To build a system architecture that accommodates complexity and richness, this research will use technology experimentally to create and solve palpable problems in the micro-coordination of interpersonal interaction. It will explore four themes intimately tied to social negotiation and coordination: (1) exerting social agency, (2) regulating interpersonal attention, (3) managing conflict, and (4) establishing the moral order. Each of these themes represents a kind of interpersonal challenge that children in the past have learned about through playground and street games. That is, children in the playground encounter situations in coordination and social negotiation that allow them to experiment taking agentic stances with respect to others and seeing the results. They witness the consequences of their actions for other people and they see how different stances make them feel about themselves. They may experience pride, shame, alienation, affiliation, comfort, achievement, and hatred. They hit the boundaries between self and other, rules and volition, individual and group, transgression and concession, over and over again.
Previous work has shown that young adult populations, deprived of sustained, significant playground and street experiences during childhood, exhibit some unexpected behaviors, such as failing to take charge of creating meaningful coordinative experiences when the computer does not give them guidance. This research will examine changes to technologies that influence such behaviors by making the interactional challenges a direct focus, that is, a "seam" in the technology. The result is expected to be a much better picture of human micro-coordination in relationship to challenges in pervasive, distributed computing and the interconnections between behavior and emotional, personal, interpersonal states. Thus, the research will address the societal challenge of maintaining the skills for connectivity in an increasingly distracted, disconnected world.
Intellectual Merit Computerization has moved from providing a counterpoint to life, with the potential to highlight and shade experience, to constituting a constant force, almost defining our experience of life. This project investigates the impact of computing systems on exactly how people interact with one another. We argue that neither designers nor users necessarily understand all the implications of using communicative technologies. Society requires a deeper account of action. Our studies examine how modern Americans solve interactional problems using or in the presence of technology. We find that, as currently designed, computing systems may push human behavior in worrisome directions. They may undermine our notion of leadership; they may lead groups systematically and unknowingly towards more shallow rather than deeper understanding; they may lead couples into arguments. They may do these things at the same time that they also bring benefits. Broader Impact The broader impact of this work has become increasingly clear in the years since the proposal was originally written. Books such as Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together confirm and popularize the concerns that led to the original proposal. The work done here has led to popularization in HCI design community through the PI’s new blog associated with ACM Interactions and a feature article to be published in the May/June issue that outlines the theory. Additionally, four students have been trained on this support (one post-doctoral, two graduate students and one post-baccalaureate). They, in turn, have worked with 5-10 undergraduate research assistants every semester. Three examples illustrate the kind of phenomena our work identifies and highlights: 1) Just as the notion of "game" has moved in popular and scholarly discourse away from definitional examples like playground and street games, there may be a tendency to concede pride of place to the machine over the human experience. To be asked to drum with another person is to be asked to improvise with only the most general kind of goals or success criteria. If drumming is a performance that features the exchange of responsiveness, what happens when one partner does not do that? Over a series of studies, participants with and without prior drumming experience were paired with either the computer or an experienced human drummer. They were asked simply to "drum together" on a Digidrum interface. No one asked what this meant. Two main roles emerged: setting the beat and elaborating upon the beat. When there were two experienced human drummers, they took turns with these roles. When an experienced drummer was paired with an inexperienced drummer, the inexperienced drummer set the beat. In the first experiment, the computer played a set, predictable track; therefore, by definition, it set the beat, putting the inexperienced drummer in the role of the elaborator. Interestingly, in post-experiment discussion, almost all of the inexperienced drummers spontaneously brought up the idea of "leadership." They also always described the other (whether computer or human) as "leading" them. That is, the computer was described as leading by virtue of setting the beat, while the experienced human was described as leading by virtue of elaborating on the beat. The same high level descriptor "leading" was created by and associated with notably different human experiences. 2) The computer may lead people towards a lower standard of mutual understanding for current purposes than face-to-face interaction. We investigated people working on the same problem on different screens while sitting in the same room, as they increasingly do, especially with technologies such as google.docs. Does the technology effect how they solve a difficult problem (in this case, a Sudoku puzzle)? In a series of studies, we asked trios to play a collaborative Sudoku game together in the same room. Participants made surprisingly few attempts to follow or question what other people were doing. While more talk was associated with higher satisfaction, less talk was not associated with either satisfaction or puzzle performance. Additionally, different media provoke non-responses differently; people may be more likely to talk to themselves when working on separate screens than on a large piece of paper. These results suggest that assessing the role of technology in interaction requires a deeper phenomenology than we currently have, and that changing behavior may rest on the particulars of that phenomenology. 3) Couples who argue over different media may be influenced in ways that they do not understand. Ordinary couples (e.g., those not seeking therapy) discuss a topic about which they disagree using different media. Structural analysis of their discourse reveals that people discussing using Instant Messaging may be less likely to maintain ambiguity than people in face-to-face discourse at particular potentially difficult points in the conversation, thus precipitating full blown argumentation more easily. Because the observations are very contextual, they are more likely to lead to alternative designs than more general kinds of observations, such as those in less design oriented theories.
