Publication statistics
Pub. period:1991-2008
Pub. count:12
Number of co-authors:17
Co-authors
Number of publications with 3 favourite co-authors:
Peter C. Wright:8Andrew Monk:4Victoria C. Miles:3 Productive colleagues
John C. McCarthy's 3 most productive colleagues in number of publications:
Alan J. Dix:108Andrew Monk:68Michael D. Harriso..:50
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John C. McCarthy
Publications by John C. McCarthy (bibliography)
Chonchúir, Mórna Ní and McCarthy, John C. (2008): The enchanting potential of technology: a dialogical case study of enchantment and the Internet. In Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 12 (5) pp. 401-409.
Wright, Peter C., Blythe, Mark and McCarthy, John C. (2008): Editorial. In Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 12 (5) pp. 343-346.
McCarthy, John C., Wright, Peter C., Wallace, Jayne and Dearden, Andy (2006): The experience of enchantment in human-computer interaction. In Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 10 (6) pp. 369-378.
Wright, Peter C., Blythe, Mark and McCarthy, John C. (2005): User Experience and the Idea of Design in HCI. In: Gilroy, Stephen W. and Harrison, Michael D. (eds.) DSV-IS 2005 - Interactive Systems, Design, Specification, and Verification, 12th International Workshop July 13-15, 2005, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. pp. 1-14.
McCarthy, John C., Fallon, Enda and Bannon, Liam (2000): Dialogues on Function Allocation. In International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 52 (2) pp. 191-201.
“Irish poet Seamus Heaney, reflecting on the co-existence of industry and agriculture, the acorn and the rusted bolt, the engine shunting and the trotting horse in Derry when he was growing up, asks: Is it any wonder when I thought I would have second thoughts? His dialogical sensibility to "both-and", Derry as both industrial and agricultural, modern and traditional, left Heaney "suffering the limits of each claim" (Heaney, 1998, p. 295). This discomfort with limiting "either-or" claims on descriptions of a personal history reminds us of the dialogicality of people's meaning making (McCarthy&O'Connor, 1999). Given that dialogicality, is it any wonder that thoughts steal second thoughts?”
© All rights reserved McCarthy et al. and/or Academic Press
McCarthy, John C., Wright, Peter C., Monk, Andrew and Watts, Leon (1998): Concerns at Work: Designing Useful Procedures. In Human-Computer Interaction, 13 (4) pp. 433-457.
“The conceptual basis for designing procedures is confused by the problematics of characterizing a relation between procedures and work practices. As they emerge from scientific management theory, procedures connote a means of rationalizing and controlling work. However, interpretations of the use of procedures reveal differences in emphasis on the work required to relate procedures to practice, from comprehending to evaluating appropriateness or reasonableness. These evaluations point to a moral character in this work, which we characterize in terms of workers' concerns. Moreover, as conceptual differences in emphasis such as these can prove intractable, we argue that a more productive approach to resolving the problematics would be to evaluate the usefulness of a sensitivity to concerns in designing procedures. Three brief case studies of the use of procedures in safety-critical settings point to workers making judgments when relating procedures to their practice, including judgments of the value of the procedures they were using. These cases also demonstrated the complexity of concerns that were multiple and interacting and that had spatial and temporal characteristics. A review of approaches to work that inform HCI design suggests that activity-based approaches, which contextualize goals and actions in terms of both origins and personal investment, provide the minimum meaningful context required to accommodate concerns. Finally, we present an analysis of the implementation of medical guidelines in Britain that exemplifies the transformation in thinking required to design practically useful procedures: from models of work that emphasize control to those that emphasize commitment, and from conceptualizations of procedures as rationalizing and controlling to conceptualizations of procedures as educational. This analysis features the sensitivity to concerns in this particular case and draws some suggestive lines from what this case reveals about concerns to the kind of contributions a sensitivity to concerns would make to a contextual design process.”
© All rights reserved McCarthy et al. and/or Taylor and Francis
McCarthy, John C., Healey, Patrick G. T., Wright, Peter C. and Harrison, Michael (1997): Accountability of Work Activity in High-Consequence Work Systems: Human Error in Context. In International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 47 (6) pp. 735-766.
“Organizational context is now accepted as a central concept in attempts to understand error in human-machine systems. However, accounts which emphasize the processes of everyday organizing, such as accountability and work activity, are needed in order to establish organizational requirements for design. In this article, we provide a framework for the consideration of organizational contexts of human error in high-consequence work systems, with a view to integrating empirical insights and supporting practical design work. We draw on computer-supported cooperative work conceptualizations of the process of everyday organizing, particularly the notion of "accountability for work activity" which is pivotal to our organizational account of error. The conceptual framework is characterized here as a set of dimensions which are expressive concerning the relationship between accountability and work activity in different contexts: (1) explicit-implicit; (2) global-local; (3) stable-transient and (4) dependent-independent. The framework is demonstrated with respect to everyday work practices in a radiology department and its analytical utility validated with respect to two documented aviation system failures. Applying the framework has enabled us to identify and define, in terms of the dimensions, a number of contexts for vulnerability in high-consequence systems: contexts for collusion, violation, deference, loss of control, buck passing and complacency. These are discussed in terms of requirements for error-tolerant design. In the final section of the article, links between the various contexts for vulnerability and the design process are explored.”
© All rights reserved McCarthy et al. and/or Academic Press
McCarthy, John C., Wright, Peter C., Healey, Patrick, Dearden, Andrew M. and Harrison, Michael D. (1997): Locating the Scene: The Particular and the General in Contexts for Ambulance Control. In: Payne, Stephen C. and Prinz, Wolfgang (eds.) Proceedings of the International ACM SIGGROUP Conference on Supporting Group Work 1997 November 11-19, 1997, Phoenix, Arizona, USA. pp. 101-110.
“Ambulance control involves distributed group work using a mix of computer and communications technologies. The implementation of computer technologies has had mixed results in this area, evidenced by serious failures in the London Ambulance Service in 1992. Often failures are due to inadequate attention to integration of organisational and technical aspects of work. We report a field study of the organisation of one aspect of the work of ambulance control, locating the scene of an emergency. The study was carried out in two ambulance control centres, one predominantly urban and highly computerised and the other largely rural and minimally computerised. Our analysis shows that the particulars of 'locating the scene' are best seen in terms of the use of different technologies to link representations and represented. This research has implications for understanding task and context and the integration of technology and organisation in design, particularly with respect to using similar computer-based technologies in both ambulance control centres.”
© All rights reserved McCarthy et al. and/or ACM Press
McCarthy, John C. and Monk, Andrew (1994): Measuring the Quality of Computer-Mediated Communication. In Behaviour and Information Technology, 13 (5) pp. 311-319.
“There is a growing literature of experiments whose purpose is to compare different configurations for computer-mediated communication. If the results of these experiments are to be useful they must: (i) use the right experimental tasks; and (ii) measure the right dependent variables. This paper is concerned with the latter problem which is illustrated using data collected in experimental comparisons of three configurations of a text-based conferencing system. No significant differences were found using a measure of task outcome. This accords with numerous previous findings. However, a number of process-related dependent variables were devised that did show significant effects. These included common ground, as measured by shared recall, and references to the topic of one message in the next available turn. Another, the use of first and second person pronouns in conversation approached significance. Finally, an approach to the selection of measures for use in studies of computer-mediated communication is commended.”
© All rights reserved McCarthy and Monk and/or Taylor and Francis
McCarthy, John C., Miles, Victoria C., Monk, Andrew, Harrison, Michael, Dix, Alan J. and Wright, Peter C. (1993): Text-Based On-Line Conferencing: A Conceptual and Empirical Analysis Using a Minimal Prototype. In Human-Computer Interaction, 8 (2) pp. 147-183.
“This article is concerned with an analysis of the requirements for text-based on-line conferencing. From a system perspective, text-based on-line conferencing can be viewed as either message passing or data sharing. These complementary views give rise to different design dimensions. For example, the message-passing view is concerned with granularity, channels, message labels, and so on. The data-sharing view is concerned with the access different individuals have to the text: read only, appending, editing, pointing, and so on. A deliberately sparse prototype was built and placed in this design space. This minimal prototype has limited functionality so that the real problems experienced by users can show through. Relevant literature from disciplines such as social psychology, conversational analysis, and linguistics is briefly reviewed in terms of three generic communication tasks: synchronizing communication, maintaining structural coherence, and maintaining referents. An empirical analysis of subjects' use of the sparse prototype was analyzed to establish the relevance of the generic communication tasks to text-based on-line conferencing. Possible forms that support for these tasks might take are discussed.”
© All rights reserved McCarthy et al. and/or Taylor and Francis
Miles, Victoria C., Johnson, C. W., McCarthy, John C. and Harrison, Michael D. (1991): Supporting Prediction in Complex Dynamic Systems. In: Diaper, Dan and Hammond, Nick (eds.) Proceedings of the Sixth Conference of the British Computer Society Human Computer Interaction Specialist Group - People and Computers VI August 20-23, 1991, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, UK. pp. 133-144.
“The classical perspective in the study of human-computer interaction has focussed upon single users operating single systems. Interactive dialogues in such applications are often assumed to be sequential and deterministic. These assumptions support operator predictions about the effects of their commands. Unfortunately, there are an increasing number of applications for which such assumptions are no longer appropriate. This paper examines approaches which support predictability in systems, such as groupware and process control, where execution may be neither sequential nor deterministic.”
© All rights reserved Miles et al. and/or Cambridge University Press
McCarthy, John C., Miles, Victoria C., Monk, Andrew, Harrison, Michael D., Dix, Alan J. and Wright, Peter C. (1991): Four Generic Communication Tasks which Must be Supported in Electronic Conferencing. In ACM SIGCHI Bulletin, 23 (1) pp. 41-43.
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