Publication statistics
Pub. period:1992-2013
Pub. count:92
Number of co-authors:99
Co-authors
Number of publications with 3 favourite co-authors:
W. Keith Edwards:7Anthony LaMarca:6Amanda Williams:6 Productive colleagues
Paul Dourish's 3 most productive colleagues in number of publications:
Steve Benford:121Tom Rodden:105Bill Buxton:78
“
For a list of all the ways technology has failed to improve the quality of life, please press three.
”
-- Alice Kahn
Featured chapter
Read the fascinating history of Wearable Computing, told by its father, Steve Mann
Read Steve's chapter !
Paul Dourish
Has also published under the name of:
"P. Dourish"
Personal Homepage:
http://www.dourish.com/contact.htmlI am Professor of Informatics in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine, with courtesy appointments in Computer Science and in Anthropology. In addition to our Informatics program, I also teach in (and currently direct) our interdisciplinary graduate program in Arts, Computation, and Engineering (ACE). My research lies at the intersection of computer science and social science, with a particular interest in ubiquitous and mobile computing and the cultural practices surrounding new media.
Publications by Paul Dourish (bibliography)
Dourish, Paul (2013): Reading and Interpreting Ethnography. In: Kellogg, Wendy and Olson, Judy (eds.). "HCI Ways of Knowing".
Cited in the following chapter:
» Ethnography: [Not yet published]
Lindtner, Silvia, Anderson, Ken and Dourish, Paul (2012): Cultural appropriation: information technologies as sites of transnational imagination. In: Proceedings of ACM CSCW12 Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work 2012. pp. 77-86.
“The diverse ways in which technologies are modified and appropriated into local contexts are an important theme in CSCW research. Today, translocal processes such as the formation of international corporations and the movement of people and ideas across nation states increasingly shape these local contexts of technology use and design. We draw from prior work on appropriation in CSCW and meld it with work from transnational studies to illustrate appropriation as a cultural phenomenon and as it unfolds in relation to emerging translocal processes. We ground our explorations in findings from ethnographic research on collaborations and exchange among IT professionals in urban China. This work makes two main contributions. First, it expands CSCW's focus on socio-technical systems by taking seriously socio-political and socio-economic processes. Second, it contributes to debates on cross-cultural and global technological development by employing transnational imagination as an analytical tool.”
© All rights reserved Lindtner et al. and/or ACM Press
Dourish, Paul and Mainwaring, Scott D. (2012): Ubicomp's colonial impulse. In: Proceedings of the 2012 International Conference on Uniquitous Computing 2012. pp. 133-142.
“Ubiquitous computing has a grand vision. Even the name of the area identifies its universalizing scope. In this, it follows in a long tradition of projects that attempt to create new models and paradigms that unite disparate, distributed elements into a large conceptual whole. We link concerns in ubiquitous computing into a colonial intellectual tradition and identify the problems that arise in consequence, explore the locatedness of innovation, and discuss strategies for decolonizing ubicomp's research methodology.”
© All rights reserved Dourish and Mainwaring and/or ACM Press
Vertesi, Janet and Dourish, Paul (2011): The value of data: considering the context of production in data economies. In: Proceedings of ACM CSCW11 Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work 2011. pp. 533-542.
“In this paper we argue that how scientific collaborations share data is bound up in the ways in which they produce and acquire that data. We draw on ethnographic work with two robotic space exploration teams to show how each community's norms of "data-sharing" are best understood as arising not from the context of the use or exchange of data, but from the context of data production. Shifting our perspective back to the point of production suggests that digital artifacts are embedded in a broader data economy. We present implications for analysis of data in interactional context, and for introducing systems or policies that conflict with the value of data in its context of production.”
© All rights reserved Vertesi and Dourish and/or their publisher
Dourish, Paul (2010): HCI and environmental sustainability: the politics of design and the design of politics. In: Proceedings of DIS10 Designing Interactive Systems 2010. pp. 1-10.
“Many HCI researchers have recently begun to examine the opportunities to use ICTs to promote environmental sustainability and ecological consciousness on the part of technology users. This paper examines the way that traditional HCI discourse obscures political and cultural contexts of environmental practice that must be part of an effective solution. Research on ecological politics and the political economy of environmentalism highlight some missing elements in contemporary HCI analysis, and suggest some new directions for the relationship between sustainability and HCI. In particular, I propose that questions of scale -- the scales of action and the scales of effects -- might provide a useful new entry point for design practice.”
© All rights reserved Dourish and/or his/her publisher
Shklovski, Irina, Lindtner, Silvia, Vertesi, Janet and Dourish, Paul (2010): Transnational times: locality, globality and mobility in technology design and use. In: Proceedings of the 2010 International Conference on Uniquitous Computing 2010. pp. 515-518.
“This workshop will bring together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to explore the role of ubiquitous computing, the use of information and communication technologies and the politics of technological design in transnational practices. The ultimate goal of this workshop is to investigate the implications for the design and development of ubiquitous technologies in non-western contexts. We will consider the implications for conducting research and technology design within and across global and networked sites of technology production and use. The aim of the workshop is to gain a deeper understanding of the social, cultural and economic practices within global IT development.”
© All rights reserved Shklovski et al. and/or their publisher
Irani, Lilly, Vertesi, Janet, Dourish, Paul, Philip, Kavita and Grinter, Rebecca E. (2010): Postcolonial computing: a lens on design and development. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2010 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2010. pp. 1311-1320.
“As our technologies travel to new cultural contexts and our designs and methods engage new constituencies, both our design and analytical practices face significant challenges. We offer postcolonial computing as an analytical orientation to better understand these challenges. This analytic orientation inspires four key shifts in our approach to HCI4D efforts: generative models of culture, development as a historical program, uneven economic relations, and cultural epistemologies. Then, through reconsideration of the practices of engagement, articulation and translation in other contexts, we offer designers and researchers ways of understanding use and design practice to respond to global connectivity and movement.”
© All rights reserved Irani et al. and/or their publisher
Cohn, Marisa Leavitt, Sim, Susan Elliott and Dourish, Paul (2010): Design methods as discourse on practice. In: GROUP10 International Conference on Supporting Group Work 2010. pp. 45-54.
“In this paper, we present a view of design methods as discourse on practice. We consider how the deployment of a particular set of design methods enables and constrains not only practical action but also discursive action within the design practice. A case study of agile software development methods illustrates the ways that methods establish conditions for who can speak in the design process and how. We identify three main kinds of discourse work performed in the invoking of design methods. These are the establishing of ontologies, the authorizing of voices, and the legitimizing of practices. We then discuss implications of this view on methods for CSCW research on the relationship between methods and practice as well as implications for participation in the design process.”
© All rights reserved Cohn et al. and/or their publisher
Møller, Naja Holten and Dourish, Paul (2010): Coordination by avoidance: bringing things together and keeping them apart across hospital departments. In: GROUP10 International Conference on Supporting Group Work 2010. pp. 65-74.
“Coordination is central in CSCW systems design, where it is often considered as a process of bringing artifacts and activities together and making them part of a larger system. In this paper, we argue that existing conceptualizations of coordination in CSCW can be successfully extended with the notion of coordination by avoidance. We introduce this notion to describe particular coordination mechanisms whereby actors avoid routines or routes of actions when it conflicts with those of other actors. In a study of pre-diagnostic work, we found that actors coordinate by avoidance when they realize alternative routes of action or that a routine has to be set to a halt to ensure that practices stay coordinated. Routines in diagnostic work are for instance the rescheduling of patients and requesting of relevant patient records that are mundane practices, however, necessary when responsibility is shared or shifts between various actors collaborating to diagnose a patient. Thus, the contribution of this paper lies in empirically identifying practices of avoidance and extending dominant conceptualizations of coordination through the notion of avoidance. We identify four ways that actors coordinate their practices by avoidance; by demarcating, procrastinating, delegating and accommodating routines or routes of action. Furthermore, we conceptualize coordination by avoidance as a distinct type of coordination mechanism to be taken into consideration in CSCW information systems design.”
© All rights reserved Møller and Dourish and/or their publisher
Satchell, Christine and Dourish, Paul (2009): Beyond the user: use and non-use in HCI. In: Proceedings of OZCHI09, the CHISIG Annual Conference on Human-Computer Interaction 2009. pp. 9-16.
“For many, an interest in Human-Computer Interaction is equivalent to an interest in usability. However, using computers is only one way of relating to them, and only one topic from which we can learn about interactions between people and technology. Here, we focus on not using computers -- ways not to use them, aspects of not using them, what not using them might mean, and what we might learn by examining non-use as seriously as we examine use.”
© All rights reserved Satchell and Dourish and/or their publisher
Foth, Marcus, Paulos, Eric, Satchell, Christine and Dourish, Paul (2009): Pervasive Computing and Environmental Sustainability: Two Conference Workshops. In IEEE Pervasive Computing, 8 (1) pp. 78-81.
Troshynski, Emily, Lee, Charlotte and Dourish, Paul (2008): Accountabilities of presence: reframing location-based systems. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2008 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems April 5-10, 2008. pp. 487-496.
“How do mobility and presence feature as aspects of social life? Using a case study of paroled offenders tracked via Global Positioning System (GPS), we explore the ways that location-based technologies frame people's everyday experiences of space. In particular, we focus on how access and presence are negotiated outside of traditional conceptions of "privacy." We introduce the notion of accountabilities of presence and suggest that it is a more useful concept than "privacy" for understanding the relationship between presence and sociality.”
© All rights reserved Troshynski et al. and/or ACM Press
Dourish, Paul, Hayes, Gillian R., Irani, Lilly, Lee, Charlotte P., Lindtner, Silvia, Nardi, Bonnie A., Patterson, Donald J. and Tomlinson, Bill (2008): Informatics at UC Irvine. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2008 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems April 5-10, 2008. pp. 3651-3656.
“Computer Science, as a single discipline, can no longer speak to the broad relevance of digital technologies in society. The Department of Informatics in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine, serves as the institutional home for research on relationships between technological, organizational, and social aspects of information technology. Here, we describe the research landscape of the Department of Informatics and its relation to the diverse field of Human-Computer Interaction.”
© All rights reserved Dourish et al. and/or ACM Press
Paulos, Eric, Foth, Marcus, Satchell, Christine, Kim, Younghui, Dourish, Paul and Choi, Jaz Hee-jeong (2008): Ubiquitous Sustainability: Citizen Science & Activism. In: In Proceedings Tenth International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing UbiComp 2008, Seoul, South Korea. .
“In this workshop we propose to explore new approaches to bring about real environmental change by looking at the success of empowering technologies that enable grassroots activism and bottom up community participation. Ubiquitous computing is transforming from being mostly about professional communication and social interaction to a sensor rich personal measurement platform that can empower individuals and groups to gain an awareness of their surroundings, engage in grassroots activism to promote environmental change, and enable a new social paradigm citizen science. This workshop brings together fresh ideas and approaches to help elevate individuals to have a powerful voice in society, to act as citizen scientists, and collectively learn and lobby for change worldwide.”
© All rights reserved Paulos et al. and/or ACM
Irani, Lilly C., Hayes, Gillian R. and Dourish, Paul (2008): Situated practices of looking: visual practice in an online world. In: Proceedings of ACM CSCW08 Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work 2008. pp. 187-196.
“Graphical virtual worlds are increasingly significant sites of collaborative interaction. Many argue that the simulation of the everyday environment makes them particularly effective for collaboration. Based on a study of visual practice in Second Life, we argue: first, that the practice of looking is more varied than it might at first seem; second, that we need to look beyond the virtual in understanding virtual worlds; and third, that implementations blend interactional practice. We suggest that the value of virtual worlds as sites of collaboration might lie more in their richness and openness to appropriation than in their simulation of everyday interaction.”
© All rights reserved Irani et al. and/or ACM Press
Williams, Amanda, Anderson, Ken and Dourish, Paul (2008): Anchored mobilities: mobile technology and transnational migration. In: Proceedings of DIS08 Designing Interactive Systems 2008. pp. 323-332.
“Mobile technologies are deployed into diverse social, cultural, political and geographic settings, and incorporated into diverse forms of personal and collective mobility. We present an ethnography of transnational Thai retirees and their uses of mobile technology, highlighting forms of mobility that are spatially, temporally, and infrastructurally anchored, and concepts of the house as a kinship network that may be globally distributed. We conclude in pointing out several ways in which our observations and analysis can influence design.”
© All rights reserved Williams et al. and/or ACM Press
Brewer, Johanna, Mainwaring, Scott and Dourish, Paul (2008): Aesthetic journeys. In: Proceedings of DIS08 Designing Interactive Systems 2008. pp. 333-341.
“Researchers and designers are increasingly creating technologies intended to support urban mobility. However, the question of what mobility is remains largely under-examined. In this paper we will use the notion of aesthetic journeys to reconsider the relationship between urban spaces, people and technologies. Fieldwork on the Orange County bus system and in the London Underground leads to a discussion of how we might begin to design for multiple mobilities.”
© All rights reserved Brewer et al. and/or ACM Press
Foth, Marcus, Paulos, Eric, Satchell, Christine and Dourish, Paul (2008): Pervasive computing and environmental sustainability : two conference workshops. In IEEE Pervasive Computing, 8 (1) pp. 78-81.
“Two workshops held at Pervasive 2008 and UbiComp 2008 brought together people who work on pervasive computing and HCI to tackle ecological concerns and use their expertise, skills, and insights to contribute to societys sustainability and well-being.”
© All rights reserved Foth et al. and/or IEEE Computer Society
Brewer, Johanna and Dourish, Paul (2008): Storied spaces: Cultural accounts of mobility, technology, and environmental knowing. In International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 20 (12) pp. 963-976.
“When we think of mobility in technical terms, we think of topics such as bandwidth, resource management, location, and wireless networks. When we think of mobility in social or cultural terms, a different set of topics come into view: pilgrimage and religious practice, globalization and economic disparities, migration and cultural identity, daily commutes and the suburbanization of cities. In this paper, we examine the links between these two aspects of mobility. Drawing on non-technological examples of cultural encounters with space, we argue that mobile information technologies do not just operate in space, but they are tools that serve to structure the spaces through which they move. We use recent projects to illustrate how three concerns with mobility and space -- legibility, literacy, and legitimacy -- open up new avenues for design exploration and analysis.”
© All rights reserved Brewer and Dourish and/or Academic Press
Boehner, Kirsten, Vertesi, Janet, Sengers, Phoebe and Dourish, Paul (2007): How HCI interprets the probes. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2007 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2007. pp. 1077-1086.
“We trace how cultural probes have been adopted and adapted by the HCI community. The flexibility of probes has been central to their uptake, resulting in a proliferation of divergent uses and derivatives. The varying patterns of adaptation of the probes reveal important underlying issues in HCI, suggesting under acknowledged disagreements about valid interpretation and the relationship between methods and their underlying methodology. With this analysis, we aim to clarify discussions around probes, and, more importantly, around how we define and evaluate methods in HCI, especially those grounded in unfamiliar conceptions of how research should be done.”
© All rights reserved Boehner et al. and/or ACM Press
Brewer, Johanna, Williams, Amanda and Dourish, Paul (2007): A handle on what's going on: combining tangible interfaces and ambient displays for collaborative groups. In: Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Tangible and Embedded Interaction 2007. pp. 3-10.
“While tangible interfaces open up new possibilities for input and interaction, they are also interesting because of the ways in which they occupy the physical world just as we do. We have been working at the intersection of three research areas -- tangible interfaces, ambient displays, and collaboration awareness. Our system, Nimio, uses engaging physical objects as both input devices (capturing aspects of individual activity) and output devices (expressing aspects of group activity). We present our design and experiences, focusing in particular on the tension between legibility and ambiguity and its relevance in collaborative settings.”
© All rights reserved Brewer et al. and/or ACM Press
Boehner, Kirsten, dePaula, Rogerio, Dourish, Paul and Sengers, Phoebe (2007): How emotion is made and measured. In International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 65 (4) pp. 275-291.
“How we design and evaluate for emotions depends crucially on what we take emotions to be. In affective computing, affect is often taken to be another kind of information -- discrete units or states internal to an individual that can be transmitted in a loss-free manner from people to computational systems and back. While affective computing explicitly challenges the primacy of rationality in cognitivist accounts of human activity, at a deeper level it often relies on and reproduces the same information-processing model of cognition. Drawing on cultural, social, and interactional critiques of cognition which have arisen in human-computer interaction (HCI), as well as anthropological and historical accounts of emotion, we explore an alternative perspective on emotion as interaction: dynamic, culturally mediated, and socially constructed and experienced. We demonstrate how this model leads to new goals for affective systems -- instead of sensing and transmitting emotion, systems should support human users in understanding, interpreting, and experiencing emotion in its full complexity and ambiguity. In developing from emotion as objective, externally measurable unit to emotion as experience, evaluation, too, alters focus from externally tracking the circulation of emotional information to co-interpreting emotions as they are made in interaction.”
© All rights reserved Boehner et al. and/or Academic Press
Dourish, Paul (2007): Seeing like an interface. In: Proceedings of OZCHI07, the CHISIG Annual Conference on Human-Computer Interaction November 28-30, 2007, Adelaide, Australia. pp. 1-8.
“Mobile and ubiquitous computing systems are increasingly of interest to HCI researchers. Often, this has meant considering the ways in which we might migrate desktop applications and everyday usage scenarios to mobile devices and mobile contexts. However, we do not just experience technologies in situ -- we also experience everyday settings through the technologies we have at our disposal. Drawing on anthropological research, I outline an alternative way of thinking about the relationship between technology and "seeing" everyday life and everyday space.”
© All rights reserved Dourish and/or ACM Press
Dourish, Paul (2007): Responsibilities and implications: further thoughts on ethnography and design. In: Proceedings of DUX07 Designing for User eXperiences 2007. p. 25.
“Many researchers and practitioners in user experience design have turned towards social sciences to find ways to understand the social contexts in which both users and technologies are embedded. Ethnographic approaches are increasingly prominent as means by which this might be accomplished. However, a very wide range of forms of social investigation travel under the "ethnography" banner in HCI, suggesting that there is still considerable debate over what ethnography is and how it can best be employed in design contexts. Building on earlier discussions and debates around ethnography and its implications, this paper explores how ethnographic methods might be consequential for design. In particular, it illustrates the implications for design that might be derived from classical ethnographic material and shows that these may not be of the form that HCI research normally imagines or expects.”
© All rights reserved Dourish and/or ACM Press
Bell, Genevieve and Dourish, Paul (2007): Back to the shed: gendered visions of technology and domesticity. In Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 11 (5) pp. 373-381.
Bell, Genevieve and Dourish, Paul (2007): Yesterday's tomorrows: notes on ubiquitous computing's dominant vision. In Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 11 (2) pp. 133-143.
Bassoli, Arianna, Brewer, Johanna, Martin, Karen, Dourish, Paul and Mainwaring, Scott D. (2007): Underground Aesthetics: Rethinking Urban Computing. In IEEE Pervasive Computing, 6 (3) pp. 39-45.
Dourish, Paul, Anderson, Ken and Nafus, Dawn (2007): Cultural Mobilities: Diversity and Agency in Urban Computing. In: Baranauskas, Maria Cecília Calani, Palanque, Philippe A., Abascal, Julio and Barbosa, Simone Diniz Junqueira (eds.) DEGAS 2007 - Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Design and Evaluation of e-Government Applications and Services September 11th, 2007, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. pp. 100-113.
Brewer, Johanna, Williams, Amanda and Dourish, Paul (2007): A handle on what's going on: combining tangible interfaces and ambient displays for collaborative groups. In: Ullmer, Brygg and Schmidt, Albrecht (eds.) Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Tangible and Embedded Interaction 2007, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, USA, February 15-17, 2007 2007. pp. 3-10.
Dourish, Paul (2006): Implications for design. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2006 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2006. pp. 541-550.
“Although ethnography has become a common approach in HCI research and design, considerable confusion still attends both ethnographic practice and the criteria by which it should be evaluated in HCI. Often, ethnography is seen as an approach to field investigation that can generate requirements for systems development; by that token, the major evaluative criterion for an ethnographic study is the implications it can provide for design. Exploring the nature of ethnographic inquiry, this paper suggests that "implications for design" may not be the best metric for evaluation and may, indeed, fail to capture the value of ethnographic investigations.”
© All rights reserved Dourish and/or ACM Press
Cited in the following chapters:
» Ethnography: [Not yet published]
» Ethnography: [Not yet published]
Dourish, Paul (2006): Re-space-ing place: "place" and "space" ten years on. In: Proceedings of ACM CSCW06 Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work 2006. pp. 299-308.
“In the ten years since the distinction between "place" and "space" emerged as a consideration for CSCW researchers and designers, the concepts have proven useful across a range of domains. In that same period of time, wireless and mobile technologies have given us new sites at which to examine the issues of space, practice, and mobility. These changes suggest that it might be fruitful to re-examine the issues of place and space in light of recent developments. In particular, the nature of space and spatiality deserve further consideration.”
© All rights reserved Dourish and/or ACM Press
Lee, Charlotte P., Dourish, Paul and Mark, Gloria (2006): The human infrastructure of cyberinfrastructure. In: Proceedings of ACM CSCW06 Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work 2006. pp. 483-492.
“Despite their rapid proliferation, there has been little examination of the coordination and social practices of cyberinfrastructure projects. We use the notion of "human infrastructure" to explore how human and organizational arrangements share properties with technological infrastructures. We conducted an 18-month ethnographic study of a large-scale distributed biomedical cyberinfrastructure project and discovered that human infrastructure is shaped by a combination of both new and traditional team and organizational structures. Our data calls into question a focus on distributed teams as the means for accomplishing distributed work and we argue for using human infrastructure as an alternative perspective for understanding how distributed collaboration is accomplished in big science.”
© All rights reserved Lee et al. and/or ACM Press
Dourish, Paul and Anderson, Ken (2006): Collective Information Practice: Exploring Privacy and Security as Social and Cultural Phenomena. In Human-Computer Interaction, 21 (3) pp. 319-342.
“As everyday life is increasingly conducted online, and as the electronic world continues to move out into the physical, the privacy of information and action and the security of information systems are increasingly a focus of concern both for the research community and the public at large. Accordingly, privacy and security are active topics of investigation from a wide range of perspectives-institutional, legislative, technical, interactional, and more. In this article, we wish to contribute toward a broad understanding of privacy and security not simply as technical phenomena but as embedded in social and cultural contexts. Privacy and security are difficult concepts to manage from a technical perspective precisely because they are caught up in larger collective rhetorics and practices of risk, danger, secrecy, trust, morality, identity, and more. Reductive attempts to deal with these issues separately produce incoherent or brittle results. We argue for a move away from narrow views of privacy and security and toward a holistic view of situated and collective information practice.”
© All rights reserved Dourish and Anderson and/or Taylor and Francis
Dourish, Paul and Friday, Adrian (eds.) Poceedings of the 8th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing September 17-21, 2006, Orange County, CA, USA.
Rode, Jennifer Ann, Johansson, Carolina, DiGioia, Paul, Filho, Roberto Silva, Nies, Kari, Nguyen, David H., Ren, Jie, Dourish, Paul and Redmiles, David F. (2006): Seeing further: extending visualization as a basis for usable security. In: Proceedings of the 2006 Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security 2006. pp. 145-155.
“The focus of our approach to the usability considerations of privacy and security has been on providing people with information they can use to understand the implications of their interactions with a system, as well as, to assess whether or not a system is secure enough for their immediate needs. To this end, we have been exploring two design principles for secure interaction: visualizing system activity and integrating configuration and action. Here we discuss the results of a user study designed as a broad formative examination of the successes and failures of an initial prototype based around these principles. Our response to the results of this study has been twofold. First, we have fixed a number of implementation and usability problems. Second, we have extended our visualizations to incorporate new considerations regarding the temporal and structural organization of interactions.”
© All rights reserved Rode et al. and/or ACM Press
Dourish, Paul and Friday, Adrian (eds.) UbiComp 2006 Ubiquitous Computing - 8th International Conference September 17-21, 2006, Orange County, CA, USA.
Williams, Amanda and Dourish, Paul (2006): Imagining the City: The Cultural Dimensions of Urban Computing. In IEEE Computer, 39 (9) pp. 38-43.
Souza, Cleidson de, Froehlich, Jon and Dourish, Paul (2005): Seeking the source: software source code as a social and technical artifact. In: GROUP05: International Conference on Supporting Group Work November 6-9, 2005, Sanibel Island, Florida, USA. pp. 197-206.
“In distributed software development, two sorts of dependencies can arise. The structure of the software system itself can create dependencies between software elements, while the structure of the development process can create dependencies between software developers. Each of these both shapes and reflects the development process. Our research concerns the extent to which, by looking uniformly at artifacts and activities, we can uncover the structures of software projects, and the ways in which development processes are inscribed into software artifacts. We show how a range of organizational processes and arrangements can be uncovered in software repositories, with implications for collaborative work in large distributed groups such as open source communities.”
© All rights reserved Souza et al. and/or ACM Press
Dourish, Paul (2005): Book Review: Social Thinking - Software Practice, Yvonne Dittrich, Christiane Floyd and Ralf Klischewski (eds.), MIT Press, Cambridge, 2002. In Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 14 (1) pp. 87-90.
Dourish, Paul (2005): Book review: The Locales Framework: Understanding and Designing for Wicked Problems, Geraldine Fitzpatrick, (ed.), The Kluwer International Series on Computer Supported Cooperative Work 2003, 254 pp. Hardcover ISBN: 1-4020-1190-3. In Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 14 (3) pp. 283-285.
Paula, Rogerio de, Ding, Xianghua, Dourish, Paul, Nies, Kari, Pillet, Ben, Redmiles, David F., Ren, Jie, Rode, Jennifer Ann and Filho, Roberto Silva (2005): In the eye of the beholder: A visualization-based approach to information system security. In International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 63 (1) pp. 5-24.
“Computer system security is traditionally regarded as a primarily technological concern; the fundamental questions to which security researchers address themselves are those of the mathematical guarantees that can be made for the performance of various communication and computational challenges. However, in our research, we focus on a different question. For us, the fundamental security question is one that end-users routinely encounter and resolve for themselves many times a day -- the question of whether a system is secure enough for their immediate needs. In this paper, we will describe our explorations of this issue. In particular, we will draw on three major elements of our research to date. The first is empirical investigation into everyday security practices, looking at how people manage security as a practical, day-to-day concern, and exploring the context in which security decisions are made. This empirical work provides a foundation for our reconsideration of the problems of security to a large degree as an interactional problem. The second is our systems approach, based on visualization and event-based architectures. This technical approach provides a broad platform for investigating security and interaction, based on a set of general principles. The third is our initial experiences in a prototype deployment of these mechanisms in an application for peer-to-peer file sharing in face-to-face collaborative settings. We have been using this application as the basis of an initial evaluation of our technology in support of everyday security practices in collaborative workgroups.”
© All rights reserved Paula et al. and/or Academic Press
Dourish, Paul, Brewer, Johanna and Bell, Genevieve (2005): Information as a cultural category. In Interactions, 12 (4) pp. 31-33.
Kabisch, Eric, Williams, Amanda and Dourish, Paul (2005): Symbolic objects in a networked gestural sound interface. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2005 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2005. pp. 1513-1516.
“SignalPlay is a sensor-based interactive sound environment in which familiar objects encourage exploration and discovery of sound interfaces through the process of play. Embedded wireless sensors form a network that detects gestural motion as well as environmental factors such as light and magnetic field. Human interactions with the sensors and with each other cause both immediate and systemic changes in a spatialized soundscape. Our investigation highlights the interplay between expected object-behavior associations and new modes of interaction with everyday objects. Here we present observations on embodied network interaction and suggest opportunities for further investigation in this field.”
© All rights reserved Kabisch et al. and/or ACM Press
Paula, Rogerio de, Ding, Xianghua, Dourish, Paul, Nies, Kari, Pillet, Ben, Redmiles, David F., Ren, Jie, Rode, Jennifer Ann and Filho, Roberto Silva (2005): Two experiences designing for effective security. In: Proceedings of the 2005 Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security 2005. pp. 25-34.
“In our research, we have been concerned with the question of how to make relevant features of security situations visible to users in order to allow them to make informed decisions regarding potential privacy and security problems, as well as regarding potential implications of their actions. To this end, we have designed technical infrastructures that make visible the configurations, activities, and implications of available security mechanisms. This thus allows users to make informed choices and take coordinated and appropriate actions when necessary. This work differs from the more traditional security usability work in that our focus is not only on the usability of security mechanism (e.g., the ease-of-use of an access control interface), but how security can manifest itself as part of people's interactions with and through information systems (i.e., how people experience and interpret privacy and security situations, and are enabled or constrained by existing technological mechanisms to act appropriately). In this paper, we report our experiences designing, developing, and testing two technical infrastructures for supporting this approach for usable security.”
© All rights reserved Paula et al. and/or ACM Press
DiGioia, Paul and Dourish, Paul (2005): Social navigation as a model for usable security. In: Proceedings of the 2005 Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security 2005. pp. 101-108.
“As interest in usable security spreads, the use of visual approaches in which the functioning of a distributed system is made visually available to end users is an approach that a number of researchers have examined. In this paper, we discuss the use of the social navigation paradigm as a way of organizing visual displays of system action. Drawing on a previous study of security in the Kazaa peer to peer system, we present some examples of the ways in which social navigation can be incorporated in support of usable security.”
© All rights reserved DiGioia and Dourish and/or ACM Press
Williams, Amanda, Kabisch, Eric and Dourish, Paul (2005): From Interaction to Participation: Configuring Space Through Embodied Interaction. In: Beigl, Michael, Intille, Stephen S., Rekimoto, Jun and Tokuda, Hideyuki (eds.) UbiComp 2005 Ubiquitous Computing - 7th International Conference September 11-14, 2005, Tokyo, Japan. pp. 287-304.
Boehner, Kirsten, dePaula, Rogerio, Dourish, Paul and Sengers, Phoebe (2005): Affect: from information to interaction. In: Bertelsen, Olav W., Bouvin, Niels Olof, Krogh, Peter Gall and Kyng, Morten (eds.) Proceedings of the 4th Decennial Conference on Critical Computing 2005 August 20-24, 2005, Aarhus, Denmark. pp. 59-68.
“While affective computing explicitly challenges the
primacy of rationality in cognitivist accounts of human
activity, at a deeper level it relies on and reproduces the
same information-processing model of cognition. In
affective computing, affect is often seen as another kind of
information - discrete units or states internal to an
individual that can be transmitted in a loss-free manner
from people to computational systems and back. Drawing
on cultural, social, and interactional critiques of cognition
which have arisen in HCI, we introduce and explore an
alternative model of emotion as interaction: dynamic,
culturally mediated, and socially constructed and
experienced. This model leads to new goals for the design
and evaluation of affective systems - instead of sensing and
transmitting emotion, systems should support human users
in understanding, interpreting, and experiencing emotion in
its full complexity and ambiguity.”
© All rights reserved Boehner et al. and/or ACM Press
dePaula, Rogerio and Dourish, Paul (2005): Cognitive and Cultural Views of Emotions. In: Proceedings of the Human Computer Interaction Consortium Winter Meeting 2005, Douglas, CO, USA. .
Fisher, Danyel and Dourish, Paul (2004): Social and temporal structures in everyday collaboration. In: Dykstra-Erickson, Elizabeth and Tscheligi, Manfred (eds.) Proceedings of ACM CHI 2004 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems April 24-29, 2004, Vienna, Austria. pp. 551-558.
“Everyday work frequently involves coordinating and collaborating with others, but the structure of collaboration is largely invisible to conventional desktop applications. We are exploring ways to support everyday collaboration by allowing applications access to the social, organizational, and temporal settings within which work is conducted. In this paper, we present two generations of systems supporting everyday collaboration, focusing on ways to recover and represent the temporal and social structures of online activity.”
© All rights reserved Fisher and Dourish and/or ACM Press
Barkhuus, Louise and Dourish, Paul (2004): Everyday Encounters with Context-Aware Computing in a Campus Environment. In: Davies, Nigel, Mynatt, Elizabeth D. and Siio, Itiro (eds.) UbiComp 2004 Ubiquitous Computing 6th International Conference September 7-10, 2004, Nottingham, UK. pp. 232-249.
Dourish, Paul (2004): What we talk about when we talk about context. In Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 8 (1) pp. 19-30.
Dourish, Paul, Grinter, Rebecca E., Flor, Jessica Delgado de la and Joseph, Melissa (2004): Security in the wild: user strategies for managing security as an everyday, practical problem. In Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 8 (6) pp. 391-401.
Dourish, Paul (2004): Software as an Embodied Phenomenon: Cognitive, Social and Cultural Aspects of Programs and Programming. In: VL-HCC 2004 - IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing 26-29 September, 2004, Rome, Italy. pp. 3-3.
Palen, Leysia and Dourish, Paul (2003): Unpacking "privacy" for a networked world. In: Cockton, Gilbert and Korhonen, Panu (eds.) Proceedings of the ACM CHI 2003 Human Factors in Computing Systems Conference April 5-10, 2003, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, USA. pp. 129-136.
Dourish, Paul (2003): The Appropriation of Interactive Technologies: Some Lessons from Placeless Documents. In Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 12 (4) pp. 465-490.
“Appropriation is the process by which people adopt and adapt technologies, fitting them into their working practices. It is similar to customisation, but concerns the adoption patterns of technology and the transformation of practice at a deeper level. Understanding appropriation is a key problem for developing interactive systems, since it critical to the success of technology deployment. It is also an important research issue, since appropriation lies at the intersection of workplace studies and design. Most accounts of appropriation in the research literature have taken a social perspective. In contrast, this paper explores appropriation in terms of the technical features that support it. Drawing examples from applications developed as part of a novel document management system, it develops an initial set of design principles for appropriable technologies. These principles are particularly relevant to component-based approaches to system design that blur the traditional application boundaries.”
© All rights reserved Dourish and/or Kluwer Academic Publishers
Souza, Cleidson R. B. de, Redmiles, David F. and Dourish, Paul (2003): "Breaking the code", moving between private and public work in collaborative software development. In: Tremaine, Marilyn M. and Simone, Carla (eds.) Proceedings of the International ACM SIGGROUP Conference on Supporting Group Work 2003 November 9-12, 2003, Sanibel Island, Florida, USA. pp. 105-114.
“Software development is typically cooperative endeavor where a group of engineers need to work together to achieve a common, coordinated result. As a cooperative effort, it is especially difficult because of the many interdependencies amongst the artifacts created during the process. This has lead software engineers to create tools, such as configuration management tools, that isolate developers from the effects of each other's work. In so doing, these tools create a distinction between private and public aspects of work of the developer. Technical support is provided to these aspects as well as for transitions between them. However, we present empirical material collected from a software development team that suggests that the transition from private to public work needs to be more carefully handled. Indeed, the analysis of our material suggests that different formal and informal work practices are adopted by the developers to allow a delicate transition, where software developers are not largely affected by the emergent public work. Finally, we discuss how groupware tools might support this transition.”
© All rights reserved Souza et al. and/or ACM Press
Dourish, Paul, Fitzpatrick, Geraldine and Schmidt, Kjeld (eds.) Proceedings of the Fifth European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (ECSCW2003) September 14-18, 2003, Helsinki, Finland.
Reddy, Madhu and Dourish, Paul (2002): A finger on the pulse: temporal rhythms and information seeking in medical work. In: Churchill, Elizabeth F., McCarthy, Joe, Neuwirth, Christine and Rodden, Tom (eds.) Proceedings of the 2002 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work November 16 - 20, 2002, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA. pp. 344-353.
“Most cooperative work takes place in information-rich environments. However,
studies of "information work" tend to focus on the decontextualized access and
retrieval problems faced by individual information seekers. Our work is
directed towards understanding how information management is seamlessly
integrated into the course of everyday activities. Drawing on an ethnographic
study of medical work, we explore the relationship between information and
temporal coordination and discuss the role of temporal patterns or "rhythms" in
providing individuals with the means to coordinate information and work.”
© All rights reserved Reddy and Dourish and/or ACM Press
Dourish, Paul and Hoek, André van der (2002): Émigré: Metalevel Architecture and Migratory Work. In: Paterno, Fabio (ed.) Mobile Human-Computer Interaction - 4th International Symposium - Mobile HCI 2002 September 18-20, 2002, Pisa, Italy. pp. 281-285.
Dourish, Paul (2001): Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction. MIT Press
“Computer science as an engineering discipline has been spectacularly successful. Yet it is also a philosophical enterprise in the way it represents the world and creates and manipulates models of reality, people, and action. In this book Paul Dourish addresses the philosophical bases of human-computer interaction. He looks at how what he calls "embodied interaction" -- an approach to interacting with software systems that emphasizes skilled, engaged practice rather than disembodied rationality -- reflects the phenomenological approaches of Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and other twentieth-century philosophers. The phenomenological tradition emphasizes the primacy of natural practice over abstract cognition in everyday activity. Dourish shows how this perspective can shed light on the foundational underpinnings of current research on embodied interaction. He looks in particular at how tangible and social approaches to interaction are related, how they can be used to analyze and understand embodied interaction, and how they could affect the design of future interactive systems.”
© All rights reserved Dourish and/or MIT Press
Moran, Thomas P. and Dourish, Paul (2001): Introduction to This Special Issue on Context-Aware Computing. In Human-Computer Interaction, 16 (2) pp. 87-95.
Dourish, Paul (2001): Seeking a Foundation for Context-Aware Computing. In Human-Computer Interaction, 16 (2) pp. 229-241.
“Context-aware computing is generally associated with elements of the ubiquitous computing program, and the opportunity to distribute computation and interaction through the environment rather than concentrating it at the desktop computer. However, issues of context have also been important in other areas of human-computer interaction research. I argue that the scope of context-based computing should be extended to include not only ubiquitous computing, but also recent trends in tangible interfaces as well as work on sociological investigations of the organization of interactive behavior. By taking a view of context-aware computing that integrates these different perspectives, we can begin to understand the foundational relations that tie them all together, and that provide a framework for understanding the basic principles behind these various forms of embodied interaction. In particular, I point to phenomenology as a basis for the development of a new framework for design and evaluation of context-aware technologies.”
© All rights reserved Dourish and/or Taylor and Francis
Dourish, Paul (2001): Process descriptions as organisational accounting devices: the dual use of workflow technologies. In: Ellis, Clarence and Zigurs, Ilze (eds.) Proceedings of the International ACM SIGGROUP Conference on Supporting Group Work 2001 September 30 - October 3, 2001, Boulder, Colorado, USA. pp. 52-60.
“Workflow technologies present a problem for CSCW. On the one hand, they are perhaps the most successful form of groupware technology in current use; but on the other, they have been subject to sustained and cogent critiques, particularly from perspective of the analysis of everyday working activities. This leads inevitably to the question: in the face of these critiques, just why and how do workflow technologies prove effective? This paper suggests that part of the solution lies in the fact that workflow technologies play more than one role in organisations, and that, in fact, the success of workflow technologies may have little to do with the typical relationship of those technologies to the accomplishment of everyday work. On the basis of the notion of a dual role for workflow technologies, I lay out a framework for considering the design and analysis of workflow systems that may help to bridge between these two roles.”
© All rights reserved Dourish and/or ACM Press
Reddy, M. C., Dourish, Paul and Pratt, W. (2001): Coordinating heterogeneous work: Information and representation in medical care. In: Ecscw 2001 - Proceedings of the Seventh European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work 16-20 September, 2001, Bonn, Germany. pp. 239-258.
Dieberger, A., Dourish, Paul, Höök, Kristina, Resnick, Paul and Wexelblat, Alan (2000): Social navigation: techniques for building more usable systems. In Interactions, 7 (6) pp. 36-45.
“The term "navigation" conjures images of maps, compasses, and guidebooks. These may be tools we use to get around from time to time, but are they how we usually find our way? Imagine walking down a street in your hometown, trying to decide what to do. You notice a crowd outside your favorite cafe. Knowing that the cafe often has live music, you can guess that a special event must be happening tonight. You might decide that you're in the mood for a lively evening and join the line, or you might decide that you prefer a quiet night and look for a different cafe. Or imagine you're in a library, looking for a book about interface design. One of the books on the shelf is much more worn and dog-eared than the other, suggesting that lots of people have read it. You may decide it's a better place to start learning than the pristine books beside it on the shelf. In both cases, you didn't rely on maps or guides; instead, you used information from other people to help make your decision. This is a different sort of "finding your way." We call it "social navigation," a topic we discussed on a panel at CHI'99 in Pittsburgh.”
© All rights reserved Dieberger et al. and/or Lawrence Erlbaum Associates
Dourish, Paul, Edwards, W. Keith, Howell, Jon, LaMarca, Anthony, Lamping, John, Petersen, Karin, Salisbury, Michael, Terry, Doug and Thornton, Jim (2000): A Programming Model for Active Documents. In: Ackerman, Mark S. and Edwards, Keith (eds.) Proceedings of the 13th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology November 06 - 08, 2000, San Diego, California, United States. pp. 41-50.
Dourish, Paul and Edwards, W. Keith (2000): A Tale of Two Toolkits: Relating Infrastructure and Use in Flexible CSCW Toolkits. In Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 9 (1) pp. 33-51.
Benford, Steve, Dourish, Paul and Rodden, Tom (2000): Introduction to the Special Issue on Human-Computer Interaction and Collaborative Virtual Environments. In ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 7 (4) pp. 439-441.
Dourish, Paul, Edwards, W. Keith, LaMarca, Anthony, Lamping, John, Petersen, Karin, Salisbury, Michael, Terry, Douglas B. and Thornton, James D. (2000): Extending document management systems with user-specific active properties. In ACM Transactions on Information Systems, 18 (2) pp. 140-170.
“Document properties are a compelling infrastructure on which to develop document management applications. A property-based approach avoids many of the problems of traditional hierarchical storage mechanisms, reflects document organizations meaningful to user tasks, provides a means to integrate the perspectives of multiple individuals and groups, and does this all within a uniform interaction framework. Document properties can reflect not only categorizations of documents and document use, but also expressions of desired system activity, such as sharing criteria, replication management, and versioning. Augmenting property-based document management systems with active properties that carry executable code enables the provision of document-based services on a property infrastructure. The combination of document properties as a uniform mechanism for document management, and active properties as a way of delivering document services, represents a new paradigm for document management infrastructures. The Placeless Documents system is an experimental prototype developed to explore this new paradigm. It is based on the seamless integration of user-specific, active properties. We present the fundamental design approach, explore the challenges and opportunities it presents, and show our architectures deals with them.”
© All rights reserved Dourish et al. and/or ACM Press
Kaminsky, Michael, Dourish, Paul, Edwards, W. Keith, LaMarca, Anthony, Salisbury, Michael and Smith, Ian (1999): SWEETPEA: Software Tools for Programmable Embodied Agents. In: Altom, Mark W. and Williams, Marian G. (eds.) Proceedings of the ACM CHI 99 Human Factors in Computing Systems Conference May 15-20, 1999, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. pp. 144-151.
“Programmable Embodied Agents are portable, wireless, interactive devices embodying specific, differentiable, interactive characteristics. They take the form of identifiable characters who reside in the physical world and interact directly with users. They can act as an out-of-band communication channel between users, as proxies for system components or other users, or in a variety of other roles. Traditionally, research into such devices has been based on costly custom hardware. In this paper, we report on our explorations of the space of physical character-based interfaces built on recently available stock consumer hardware platforms, structured around an initial framework of applications.”
© All rights reserved Kaminsky et al. and/or ACM Press
LaMarca, Anthony, Edwards, W. Keith, Dourish, Paul, Lamping, John, Smith, Ian and Thornton, Jim (1999): Taking the work out of workflow: Mechanisms for document-centered collaboration. In: Bødker, Susanne, Kyng, Morten and Schmidt, Kjeld (eds.) ECSCW 99 - Proceedings of the Sixth European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work 12-16 September, 1999, Copenhagen, Denmark. p. 1.
Dourish, Paul, Edwards, W. Keith, LaMarca, Anthony and Salisbury, Michael (1999): Using Properties for Uniform Interaction in the Presto Document System. In: Zanden, Brad Vander and Marks, Joe (eds.) Proceedings of the 12th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology November 07 - 10, 1999, Asheville, North Carolina, United States. pp. 55-64.
“Most document or information management systems rely on hierarchies to organise documents (e.g. files, email messages or web bookmarks). However, the rigid structures of hierarchical schemes do not mesh well with the more fluid nature of everyday document practices. This paper describes Presto, a prototype system that allows users to organise their documents entirely in terms of the properties those documents hold for users. Properties provide a uniform mechanism for managing, coding, searching, retrieving and interacting with documents. We concentrate in particular on the challenges that property-based approaches present and the architecture we have developed to tackle them.”
© All rights reserved Dourish et al. and/or ACM Press
Dourish, Paul, Edwards, W. Keith, LaMarca, Anthony and Salisbury, Michael (1999): Presto: An Experimental Architecture for Fluid Interactive Document Spaces. In ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), 6 (2) pp. 133-161.
“Traditional document systems use hierarchical filing structures as the basis for organizing, storing and retrieving documents. However, this structure is very limited in comparison with the rich and varied forms of document interaction and category management in everyday document use. Presto is a prototype document management system providing rich interaction with documents through meaningful, user-level document attributes, such as "Word file," "published paper," "shared with Jim," "about Presto", or "currently in progress." Document attributes capture the multiple different roles that a single document might play, and they allow users to rapidly reorganize their document space for the task at hand. They also provide a basis for novel document systems design and new approaches to document management and interaction. In this article, we outline the motivations behind this approach, describe the principal components of our implementation, discuss architectural consequences, and show how these support new forms of interaction with large personal document spaces.”
© All rights reserved Dourish et al. and/or ACM Press
Dourish, Paul, Lamping, John and Rodden, Tom (1999): Building Bridges: Customisation and Mutual Intelligibility in Shared Category Management. In: Proceedings of the International ACM SIGGROUP Conference on Supporting Group Work 1999 November 14-17, 1999, Phoenix, Arizona, USA. pp. 11-20.
“Research into collaborative document use often concentrates on how people share document content. However, studies of real-world document practices reveal that the structures by which document corpora are organised may also, themselves, be important sites of collaborative activity. Unfortunately, this poses a problem. When category structures are used to understand a set of documents, the manipulation of those structures can interfere with shared understanding and intelligibility of the document space. We show how this problem arises in real-world settings, using a case arising from some recent field work. We outline a solution to the customisation/intelligibility problem, and show how it has been implemented in a system for personal and workgroup document management.”
© All rights reserved Dourish et al. and/or ACM Press
Dourish, Paul, Bentley, Richard, Jones, Rachel and MacLean, Allan (1999): Getting Some Perspective: Using Process Descriptions to Index Document History. In: Proceedings of the International ACM SIGGROUP Conference on Supporting Group Work 1999 November 14-17, 1999, Phoenix, Arizona, USA. pp. 375-384.
“Process descriptions are used in workflow and related systems to describe the flow of work and organisational responsibility in business processes, and to aid in coordination. However, the division of a working process into a sequence of steps provides only a partial view of the work involved. In many cases, the performance of individual tasks in a larger process may depend on interpretations and understandings of how other aspects of the work were conducted. We present an example from an ethnographic investigation of one particular organisation, and introduce a mechanism, which we call "Perspectives," for dealing with it. A "Perspective" uses the process description to provide an index into the history of a document moving through a process. Perspectives allow workflow systems to manage and present information about the execution of specific process instances within the general frame of abstract process descriptions.”
© All rights reserved Dourish et al. and/or ACM Press
Dourish, Paul (1998): Introduction: The State of Play. In Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 7 (1) pp. 1-7.
Dourish, Paul and Button, Graham (1998): On "Technomethodology": Foundational Relationships between Ethnomethodology and System Design. In Human-Computer Interaction, 13 (4) pp. 395-432.
“Over the past 10 years, the use of sociologial methods and sociological reasoning have become more prominent in the analysis and design of interactive systems. For a variety of reasons, one form of sociological inquiry -- ethnomethodology -- has become something of a favored approach. Our goal in this article is to investigate the consequences of approaching system design from the ethnomethodological perspective. In particular, we are concerned with how ethnomethodology can take a foundational place in the very notion of system design, rather than simply being employed as a resource in aspects of the process, such as requirements elicitation and specification. We begin by outlining the basic elements of ethnomethodology and discussing the place that it has come to occupy in computer-supported cooperative work and, increasingly, in human-computer interaction. We discuss current approaches to the use of ethnomethodology in systems design, and we point to the contrast between the use of ethnomethodology for critique and for design. Currently, understandings of how to use ethnomethodology as a primary aspect of system design are lacking. We outline a new approach and present an extended example of its use. This approach takes as its starting point a relationship between ethnomethodology and system design that is a foundational, theoretical matter rather than simply one of design practice and process. From this foundation, we believe, emerges a new model of interaction with computer systems, which is based on ethnomethodological perspectives on everyday human social action.”
© All rights reserved Dourish and Button and/or Taylor and Francis
Cited in the following chapter:
» Ethnography: [Not yet published]
Dourish, Paul (1998): Using Metalevel Techniques in a Flexible Toolkit for CSCW Applications. In ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 5 (2) pp. 109-155.
“Ideally, software toolkits for collaborative applications should provide generic, reusable components, applicable in a wide range of circumstances, which software developers can assemble to produce new applications. However, the nature of CSCW applications and the mechanics of group interaction present a problem. Group interactions are significantly constrained by the structure of the underlying infrastructure, below the level at which toolkits typically offer control. This article describes the design features of Prospero, a prototype CSCW toolkit designed to be much more flexible than traditional toolkit techniques allow. Prospero uses a metalevel architecture so that application programmers can have control over not only how toolkit components are combined and used, but also over aspects of how they are internally structured and defined. This approach allows programmers to gain access to "internal" aspects of the toolkit's operation that affect how interaction and collaboration proceed. This article explains the metalevel approach and its application to CSCW, introduces two particular metalevel techniques for distributed data management and consistency control, shows how they are realized in Prospero, and illustrates how Prospero can be used to create a range of collaborative applications.”
© All rights reserved Dourish and/or ACM Press
Button, Graham and Dourish, Paul (1996): Technomethodology: Paradoxes and Possibilities. In: Tauber, Michael J., Bellotti, Victoria, Jeffries, Robin, Mackinlay, Jock D. and Nielsen, Jakob (eds.) Proceedings of the ACM CHI 96 Human Factors in Computing Systems Conference April 14-18, 1996, Vancouver, Canada. pp. 19-26.
“The design of CSCW systems has often had its roots in ethnomethodological understandings of work and investigations of working settings. Increasingly, we are also seeing these ideas applied to critique and inform HCI design more generally. However, the attempt to design from the basis of ethnomethodology is fraught with methodological dangers. In particular, ethnomethodology's overriding concern with the detail of practice poses some serious problems when attempts are made to design around such understandings. In this paper, we discuss the range and application of ethnomethodological investigations of technology in working settings, describe how ethnomethodologically-affiliated work has approached system design and discuss ways that ethnomethodology can move from design critique to design practice: the advent of technomethodology.”
© All rights reserved Button and Dourish and/or ACM Press
Cited in the following chapter:
» Ethnography: [Not yet published]
Harrison, Steve and Dourish, Paul (1996): Re-Place-ing Space: The Roles of Place and Space in Collaborative Systems. In: Olson, Gary M., Olson, Judith S. and Ackerman, Mark S. (eds.) Proceedings of the 1996 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work November 16 - 20, 1996, Boston, Massachusetts, United States. pp. 67-76.
“Many collaborative and communicative environments use notions of "space" and spatial organisation to facilitate and structure interaction. We argue that a focus on spatial models is misplaced. Drawing on understandings from architecture and urban design, as well as from our own research findings, we highlight the critical distinction between "space" and "place". While designers use spatial models to support interaction, we show how it is actually a notion of "place" which frames interactive behaviour. This leads us to re-evaluate spatial systems, and discuss how "place", rather than "space", can support CSCW design.”
© All rights reserved Harrison and Dourish and/or ACM Press
Dourish, Paul, Holmes, Jim, MacLean, Allan, Marqvardsen, Pernille and Zbyslaw, Alex (1996): Freeflow: Mediating Between Representation and Action in Workflow Systems. In: Olson, Gary M., Olson, Judith S. and Ackerman, Mark S. (eds.) Proceedings of the 1996 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work November 16 - 20, 1996, Boston, Massachusetts, United States. pp. 190-198.
“In order to understand some problems associated with workflow, we set out an analysis of workflow systems, identifying a number of basic issues in the underlying technology. This points to the conflation of temporal and dependency information as the source of a number of these problems. We describe Freeflow, a prototype which addresses these problems using a variety of technical innovations, including a rich constraint-based process modelling formalism, and the use of declarative dependency relationships. Its focus is on mediation between process and action, rather than the enactment of a process. We outline the system and its design principles, and illustrate the features of our approach with examples from ongoing work.”
© All rights reserved Dourish et al. and/or ACM Press
Dourish, Paul (1996): Consistency Guarantees: Exploiting Application Semantics for Consistency Management in a Collaboration Toolkit. In: Olson, Gary M., Olson, Judith S. and Ackerman, Mark S. (eds.) Proceedings of the 1996 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work November 16 - 20, 1996, Boston, Massachusetts, United States. pp. 268-277.
“CSCW toolkits are designed to ease development of CSCW applications. They provide common, reusable components for cooperative system design, allowing application programmers to concentrate on the details of their particular applications. The underlying assumption is that toolkit components can be designed and implemented independently of the details of particular applications. However, there is good evidence to suggest that this is not true. This paper presents a new technique which allows programmers to express application requirements, so that toolkit structures can be adapted to different circumstances. Prospero is a toolkit which uses this technique to meet different application needs flexibly.”
© All rights reserved Dourish and/or ACM Press
Dourish, Paul, Adler, Annette, Bellotti, Victoria and Henderson, Austin (1996): Your Place or Mine? Learning from Long-Term Use of Audio-Video Communication. In Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 5 (1) pp. 33-62.
“Workstations and personal computers are increasingly being delivered with the ability to handle multimedia data; more and more of us are linked by high-speed digital networks. With multimedia communication environments becoming more commonplace, what have we learned from earlier experiences with prototype media environments? This paper reports on some of our experiences as developers, researchers and users of flexible, networked, multimedia computer environments, or "media spaces". It focusses on the lessons we can learn from extended, long-term use of media spaces, with connections that last not hours or days, but months or years. We take as our starting point a set of assumptions which differ from traditional analytical perspectives. In particular, we begin from the position that that real-world baseline is not always an appropriate point of comparison for new media technologies; that a set of complex and intricate communicative behaviours arise over time; and that media spaces connect not only individuals, but the wider social groups of which they form part. We outline a framework based on four perspectives -- individual, interactional, communal and societal -- from which to view the behaviour of individuals and groups linked by multimedia environments. On the basis of our long-term findings, we argue for a view of media spaces which, first, focuses on a wider interpretation of media space interaction than the traditional view of person-to-person connections, and, second, emphasises emergent communicative practices, rather than looking for the transfer of face-to-face behaviours.”
© All rights reserved Dourish et al. and/or Kluwer Academic Publishers
Bentley, Richard and Dourish, Paul (1995): Medium versus Mechanism: Supporting Collaboration Through Customisation. In: Marmolin, Hans, Sundblad, Yngve and Schmidt, Kjeld (eds.) ECSCW 95 - Proceedings of the Fourth European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work 11-15 September, 1995, Stockholm, Sweden. pp. 133-148.
“The study of cooperative work as a socially-situated activity has led to a focus on providing 'mechanisms' that more closely resonate with existing work practice. In this paper we challenge this approach and suggest the flexibly organised nature of work is better supported when systems provide a 'medium' which can be tailored to suit each participant's needs and organised around the detail of their work. This orientation towards 'medium' rather than 'mechanism' has consequences for cooperative system design, highlighting a need to allow participants to adapt details of policy currently embedded in the heart of the systems we build. We describe an approach which allows users to perform such 'deep customisation' through direct manipulation of user interface representations.”
© All rights reserved Bentley and Dourish and/or Kluwer Academic Publishers
Dourish, Paul (1995): The Parting of the Ways: Divergence, Data Management and Collaborative Work. In: Marmolin, Hans, Sundblad, Yngve and Schmidt, Kjeld (eds.) ECSCW 95 - Proceedings of the Fourth European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work 11-15 September, 1995, Stockholm, Sweden. pp. 215-230.
“Systems coordinating distributed collaborative work must manage user data distributed over a network. The strong consistency algorithms which designers have typically borrowed from the distributed systems community are often unsuited to the particular needs of CSCW. Here, I outline an alternative approach based on divergence and synchronisation between parallel streams of activity. From a CSCW perspective, this strategy offers three primary advantages. First, it is scalable, allowing smooth transitions from highly interactive collaboration to more extended, "asynchronous" styles of work. Second, it supports "multi-synchronous" work, in which parties work independently in parallel. Third, it directly supports observed patterns of opportunistic activities in collaborative working.”
© All rights reserved Dourish and/or Kluwer Academic Publishers
Dourish, Paul (1995): Accounting for System Behaviour: Representation, Reflection and Resourceful Action. In: Proceedings of the third decennial conference Computers In Context CIC-95 August 14-18, 1995, Aarhus, Denmark. pp. 147-156.
Dourish, Paul (1995): Developing a Reflective Model of Collaborative Systems. In ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 2 (1) pp. 40-63.
“Recent years have seen a shift in perception of the nature of HCI and interactive systems. As interface work has increasingly become a focus of attention for the social sciences, we have expanded our appreciation of the importance of issues such as work practice, adaptation, and evolution in interactive systems. The reorientation in our view of interactive systems has been accompanied by a call for a new model of design centered around user needs and participation. This article argues that a new process of design is not enough and that the new view necessitates a similar reorientation in the structure of the systems we build. It outlines some requirements for systems that support a deeper conception of interaction and argues that the traditional system design techniques are not suited to creating such systems. Finally, using examples from ongoing work in the design of an open toolkit for collaborative applications, it illustrates how the principles of computational reflection and metaobject protocols can lead us toward a new model based on open abstraction that holds great promise in addressing these issues.”
© All rights reserved Dourish and/or ACM Press
Dourish, Paul (1993): Culture and Control in a Media Space. In: Michelis, Giorgio de, Simone, Carla and Schmidt, Kjeld (eds.) ECSCW 93 - Proceedings of the Third European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work 1993. pp. 125-137.
“Media spaces integrate audio, video and computer networking technology in order to provide a rich communicative environment for collaboration. The connectivity which they provide brings with it important concerns regarding privacy, protection and control. In order to derive the fullest benefit from this technology, it is essential that these issues be addressed. As part of our investigation of media space systems, we developed a computational infrastructure addressing these problems our own working environment. A key aspect of this work is the relationship between two aspects of this control system -- the technological components which determine how the system will behave, and the social components which determine acceptable use and behaviour. This paper discusses our experiences with the privacy and control aspects of our RAVE media space environment, specifically with regard to connection management, and compares them to the experiences of other research groups. We discuss the nature of the relationship between technological and social elements in using this technology, and discuss the consequences for the design of such systems.”
© All rights reserved Dourish and/or Kluwer
Dourish, Paul, Bellotti, Victoria, Mackay, Wendy E. and Ma, Chao-Ying (1993): Information and Context: Lessons from the Study of Two Shared Information Systems. In: Kaplan, Simon M. (ed.) Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Organizational Computing Systems 1993 November 1-4, 1993, Milpitas, California, USA. pp. 42-51.
“With the increasing ease and power of computer networking technologies, many organisations are taking information which was previously managed and distributed on paper and making it available electronically. Such shared information systems are the basis of much organisational collaboration, and electronic distribution holds great promise. However, a primary focus of such systems is on the ease of information retrieval. We believe that an equally important component is the problem of information interpretation, and that this interpretation is guided by a context which many electronic systems do not fully acknowledge. We report on a study of two systems, one paper-based and one electronic, managing similar information within the same organisation. We describe the ways in which information retrieved from these systems is interpreted subjectively by individuals, and point to some of the factors contributing to this interpretation. These factors, together making up the context of the information, are of critical importance in the design of successful electronic shared information systems.”
© All rights reserved Dourish et al. and/or ACM Press
Gaver, William W., Moran, Thomas P., MacLean, Allan, Lovstrand, Lennart, Dourish, Paul, Carter, Kathleen and Buxton, Bill (1992): Realizing a Video Environment: EuroPARC's RAVE System. In: Bauersfeld, Penny, Bennett, John and Lynch, Gene (eds.) Proceedings of the ACM CHI 92 Human Factors in Computing Systems Conference June 3-7, 1992, Monterey, California. pp. 27-35.
“At EuroPARC, we have been exploring ways to allow physically separated colleagues to work together effectively and naturally. In this paper, we briefly discuss several examples of our work in the context of three themes that have emerged: the need to support the full range of shared work; the desire to ensure privacy without giving up unobtrusive awareness; and the possibility of creating systems which blur the boundaries between people, technologies and the everyday world.”
© All rights reserved Gaver et al. and/or ACM Press
Dourish, Paul and Bly, Sara A. (1992): Portholes: Supporting Awareness in a Distributed Work Group. In: Bauersfeld, Penny, Bennett, John and Lynch, Gene (eds.) Proceedings of the ACM CHI 92 Human Factors in Computing Systems Conference June 3-7, 1992, Monterey, California. pp. 541-547.
“We are investigating ways in which media space technologies can support distributed work groups through access to information that supports general awareness. Awareness involves knowing who is "around", what activities are occurring, who is talking with whom; it provides a view of one another in the daily work environments. Awareness may lead to informal interactions, spontaneous connections, and the development of shared cultures -- all important aspects of maintaining working relationships which are denied to groups distributed across multiple sites. The Portholes project, at Rank Xerox EuroPARC in Cambridge, England, and Xerox PARC in Palo Alto, California, demonstrates that awareness can be supported across distance. A data network provides a shared database of image information that is regularly updated and available at all sites. Initial experiences of the system in use at EuroPARC and PARC suggest that Portholes both supports shared awareness and helps to build a "sense of community".”
© All rights reserved Dourish and Bly and/or ACM Press
Dourish, Paul and Bellotti, Victoria (1992): Awareness and Coordination in Shared Workspaces. In: Proceedings of the 1992 ACM conference on Computer-supported cooperative work November 01 - 04, 1992, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. pp. 107-114.
“Awareness of individual and group activities is critical to successful collaboration and is commonly supported in CSCW systems by active, information generation mechanisms separate from the shared workspace. These mechanisms penalise information providers, presuppose relevance to the recipient, and make access difficult. We discuss a study of shared editor use which suggests that awareness information provided and exploited passively through the shared workspace, allows users to move smoothly between close and loose collaboration, and to assign and coordinate work dynamically. Passive awareness mechanisms promise effective support for collaboration requiring this sort of behaviour, whilst avoiding problems with active approaches.”
© All rights reserved Dourish and Bellotti and/or ACM Press
Show this list on your homepage
Join the technology elite and advance:
Changes to this page (author)
10 Apr 2013: Added23 Nov 2012: Added01 Nov 2012: Added
01 Nov 2012: Added
04 Sep 2012: Modified
03 Apr 2012: Added
27 Oct 2011: Modified
26 Jul 2011: Added
19 Apr 2011: Modified
18 Apr 2011: Added
15 Apr 2011: Added
16 Jan 2011: Added
16 Jan 2011: Added
03 Nov 2010: Added
02 Nov 2010: Added
02 Nov 2010: Added
02 Nov 2010: Added
02 Nov 2010: Added
26 Feb 2010: Modified
25 Jul 2009: Added
16 Jun 2009: Added
05 Jun 2009: Added
02 Jun 2009: Added
02 Jun 2009: Added
31 May 2009: Added
31 May 2009: Added
31 May 2009: Added
31 May 2009: Added
31 May 2009: Added
30 May 2009: Added
30 May 2009: Added
30 May 2009: Added
30 May 2009: Added
30 May 2009: Added
30 May 2009: Added
30 May 2009: Added
30 May 2009: Added
30 May 2009: Added
30 May 2009: Added
30 May 2009: Added
30 May 2009: Added
30 May 2009: Added
30 May 2009: Added
30 May 2009: Added
30 May 2009: Added
30 May 2009: Added
30 May 2009: Added
30 May 2009: Added
30 May 2009: Added
30 May 2009: Added
30 May 2009: Added
30 May 2009: Added
30 May 2009: Added
30 May 2009: Added
30 May 2009: Added
30 May 2009: Added
30 May 2009: Added
30 May 2009: Added
30 May 2009: Added
30 May 2009: Added
30 May 2009: Added
29 May 2009: Added
26 May 2009: Added
08 Apr 2009: Added
07 Apr 2009: Added
07 Apr 2009: Added
07 Apr 2009: Added
26 Aug 2008: Added
12 May 2008: Added
12 May 2008: Added
12 May 2008: Added
12 May 2008: Added
12 May 2008: Added
12 May 2008: Added
12 May 2008: Added
04 Nov 2007: Added
24 Jul 2007: Added
24 Jul 2007: Added
29 Jun 2007: Added
29 Jun 2007: Added
27 Jun 2007: Added
27 Jun 2007: Added
24 Jun 2007: Added
24 Jun 2007: Added
23 Jun 2007: Added
22 Jun 2007: Added
22 Jun 2007: Added
22 Jun 2007: Added
19 Jun 2007: Added
19 Jun 2007: Added
11 Jun 2007: Added
28 Apr 2003: Added
Page Information
Page maintainer:
The Editorial Team
URL: http://www.interaction-design.org/references/authors/paul_dourish.html
Log in !
