Current business conditions have given rise to distributed teams that are mostly collocated except for one remote member. These "hub-and-satellite" teams face the challenge of the satellite colleague being out-of-sight and out-of-mind. We developed a telepresence device, called an Embodied Social Proxy (ESP), which represents the satellite coworker 24x7. Beyond using ESPs in our own group, we deployed an ESP in four product teams within our company for six weeks. We studied how ESP was used through ethnographic observations, surveys, and usage log data. ESP not only increased the satellite worker's ability to fully participate in meetings, it also increased the hub's attention and affinity towards the satellite. The continuous physical presence of ESP in each team improved the interpersonal social connections between hub and satellite colleagues.

Most media space projects were reported as "successes" in that the participants developed or maintained close working relationships. A few reported problematic social results, but were created wholesale with groups with no media space experience. This chapter reports a case where media space users tried and failed to extend the media space to new user communities, building in part on experiences gained in the earlier "successes" and, in part, ignoring the key elements of those successes.

The EJCP presently has around 60 colleagues as permanent expert reviewers, the members of the EJCP editorial board. You find them listed in every issue of the journal. During the year 2006, as many as 224 expert reviewers outside the editorial board had been helpful with reviewing one ore more manuscripts. The commitment of all these extra reviewers, listed below, is gratefully acknowledged, as are the regular commitments of the members of our editorial board. Skilful achievements by authors as well as by reviewers and editors are working together to maintain high scientific standards of the EJCP. Thank you!

The How-To has recently emerged as a genre of online content that describes how something is done. This study focuses on computer and electronics hobbyists and their use of How-Tos-how hobbyists use existing knowledge to solve technical challenges, how they document their new knowledge for one another, and how they exchange help and feedback. Our analysis describes How-To knowledge sharing as a fully decentralized expertise-location system in which the How-To functions as both a broadcast of the author’s expertise and a personal portfolio.

This chapter contains sections titled: The Xerox Red Book: Star Functional Specifi cation, Revision 5.3 for Star-1, 1981, User Interface Specification, Consistency, Desktop Metaphor, The Xerox Red Book Today, Note

As part of an ongoing effort to understand ease of use of digital home technologies, we undertook an exploratory study of people who use their home networks for more than just broadband Internet access. In particular, we wanted to understand the overhead, or problem-time, people spent with their home network devices. As expected, we saw issues of broken hardware and broken software. We also found that problems are often caused by broken expectations, a mismatch between what a person expects to be able to do and specific device capabilities. In this paper we explore broken expectations in the digital home with examples from our study. These observations suggest further research into the ways user expectations and activities shape the digital home experience.

The home is becoming a complex and hard to manage collection of computers and digital lifestyle devices. The work to setup and maintain a network of digital living devices in the home is similar to the work of IT professionals. Indeed the growing complexity of interconnected digital devices results in more and more time spent solving problems with those devices and their configurations, an important part of computer use that we call "IT@Home". This workshop explores the complexity of framing the right problems, methods for studying those problems, and designing to support users' IT@Home.

We conducted a preliminary field study to understand the current state of personal digital archiving in practice. Our aim is to design a service for the long-term storage, preservation, and access of digital belongings by examining how personal archiving needs intersect with existing and emerging archiving technologies, best practices, and policies. Our findings not only confirmed that experienced home computer users are creating, receiving, and finding an increasing number of digital belongings, but also that they have already lost irreplaceable digital artifacts such as photos, creative efforts, and records. Although participants reported strategies such as backup and file replication for digital safekeeping, they were seldom able to implement them consistently. Four central archiving themes emerged from the data: (1) people find it difficult to evaluate the worth of accumulated materials; (2) personal storage is highly distributed both on- and offline; (3) people are experiencing magnified curatorial problems associated with managing files in the aggregate, creating appropriate metadata, and migrating materials to maintainable formats; and (4) facilities for long-term access are not supported by the current desktop metaphor. Four environmental factors further complicate archiving in consumer settings: the pervasive influence of malware; consumer reliance on ad hoc IT providers; an accretion of minor system and registry inconsistencies; and strong consumer beliefs about the incorruptibility of digital forms, the reliability of digital technologies, and the social vulnerability of networked storage.

The home is becoming a complex and hard to manage collection of computers and digital lifestyle devices. The work to setup and maintain a network of digital living devices in the home is similar to the work of IT professionals. Indeed the growing complexity of interconnected digital devices results in more and more time spent solving problems with those devices and their configurations, an important part of computer use that we call "[email protected]". This workshop explores the complexity of framing the right problems, methods for studying those problems, and designing to support users' [email protected]

In this paper, we discuss the findings of an in-depth observational study of reading and within-document navigation and add to these findings the results of a second analysis of how people read comparable digital materials on the screen, given limited navigational functionality. We chose periodicals as our initial foil since they represent a type of material that invites many different kinds of reading and strategies for navigation. Using multiple sources of evidence from the data, we first characterize readers' navigation strategies and specific practices as they make their way through the magazines. We then focus on two observed phenomena that occur when people read paper magazines, but are absent in their digital equivalents: the lightweight navigation that readers use unselfconsciously when they are reading a particular article and the approximate navigation readers engage in when they flip multiple pages at a time. Because page-turning is so basic and seems deceptively simple, we dissect the turn of a page, and use it to illustrate the importance and invisibility of lightweight navigation. Finally, we explore the significance of our results for navigational interfaces to digital library materials.

As part of a focus on electronic publications, we undertook an exploratory study of how people saved and used the information they encountered while reading. In particular, we wanted to understand the role of clipping and whether it would be a necessary form of interaction with electronic publications. We interviewed 20 diverse individuals at home and at work, bringing together narrative accounts and physical and digital examples to investigate how people currently collect and use clippings from their everyday reading. All study participants had examples of materials they had deliberately saved from periodicals, ranging from ads torn from newspapers and URLs received in email messages to large stacks of magazines. Participants rarely read periodicals specifically to clip but rather recognized items of interest when they were encountered. The work highlights the importance of encountering information as an activity distinct from task-focused browsing and searching and reveals design implications for online reading and clipping technologies.

As part of a more extensive study of reading-related practices, we have explored how people share information they encounter in their everyday reading as a complement to the more traditional digital library focus on sharing intentionally retrieved materials. In twenty contextual interviews in home and work place settings, we investigated how people encounter and save published material in the form of paper and electronic clippings. We found that sharing forms a significant use for encountered materials. Furthermore, the function of these clippings extends far beyond a simple exchange of content to inform the recipient; in fact, the content itself may have little immediate value to the recipient. We also found the practice to be ubiquitous: all of our participants had both shared clippings with others and received them themselves. Specifically, this paper reports on: (1) how sharing encountered items fits into the broader spectrum of clipping practices; (2) the function and value of the shared information; and (3) the social role of sharing the encountered information We conclude that from a technological standpoint, we should think beyond an email model for sharing encountered information and, from a social perspective, we should attend to how sharing this sort of material contributes to the strength of social ties outside of a traditional information needs framework.

Computer-supported coordinated care uses technology to aid the network of people who support an elder living at home. CSCC supports improved communication among individuals and a balanced distribution of responsibilities to allow the elder to live at home despite increasing care needs. The problem of coordinating the care of elders living at home hasn't been well defined or explored. We focus on using technology to aid the elder's entire support network. To distinguish this space from the broader research issues of computer-supported cooperative work, we call it computer-supported coordinated care and propose that it is a meaningful focus for the pervasive computing, CSCW, and human-computer interaction (HCI) communities.

We introduced detail-on-demand video as a simple type of hypervideo that allows users to watch short video segments and to follow hyperlinks to see additional detail. Such video lets users quickly access desired information without having to view the entire contents linearly. A challenge for presenting this type of video is to provide users with the appropriate affordances to understand the hypervideo structure and to navigate it effectively. Another challenge is to give authors tools that allow them to create good detail-on-demand video. Guided by user feedback, we iterated designs for a detail-on-demand video player. We also conducted two user studies to gain insight into people's understanding of hypervideo and to improve the user interface. We found that the interface design was tightly coupled to understanding hypervideo structure and that different designs greatly affected what parts of the video people accessed. The studies also suggested new guidelines for hypervideo authoring.