Showing papers by "Richard Harper published in 2014"

Everyday dwelling with WhatsApp

Abstract: In this paper, we present a study of WhatsApp, an instant messaging smartphone application. Through our interviews with participants, we develop anthopologist Tim Ingold's notion of dwelling, and discuss how use of WhatsApp is constitutive of a felt-life of being together with those close by. We focus on the relationship "doings" in WhatsApp and how this togetherness and intimacy are enacted through small, continuous traces of narrative, of tellings and tidbits, noticings and thoughts, shared images and lingering pauses; this is constitutive of dwelling. Further, we discuss how an intimate knowing of others in these relationships, through past encounters and knowledge of coming together in the future, pertain to the particular forms of relationship engagements manifest through the possibilities presented in WhatsApp. We suggest that this form of sociality is likely to be manifest in other smartphone IM-like applications.

"Real, but Glossy": technology and the practical pursuit of magic in modern weddings

Abstract: Planning a wedding is arguably one of the most complicated collaborative tasks people ever undertake. Despite the commonplace use of technologies in "wedding work," little research has looked at this from an HCI perspective. Based on an interview study, we illustrate how technology is used to deliver the sought-after fantasy and a practical, yet entertaining, affair. We identify four ways that technology helps people do this: (a) by allowing much of the practical planning work to become "invisible;" (b) by easing navigation through the delicate rules of family configurations made manifest in the guest list; (c) by helping create a spectacle-like event that adroitly balances excess and realism; and (d) by documenting the wedding in ways that allows re-experiencing the magic after the event. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of this pursuit on social graphs, place, and photography, contributing to the literature on technology and major life events.

\(\mathrm{CPS}^2\): A Contextual Privacy Framework for Social Software

Abstract: Social software has become one of the most prominent means for communication. Context is essential for managing privacy and guiding communication. In social software, context can be ambiguous due to the overload of data and the mix of various audiences. Such ambiguity may result in privacy issues.

Reflections on Trust, Computing, and Society

Abstract: The topics covered in this collection have been wide and varied. Some have been investigated in depth, others merely identified. As we move now to summarize what has been covered, it is important to remember that the goal has been to provide the reader with a sensibility for the various perspectives and points of view that can be brought to bear on the combined subject of trust, computing, and society. The book commenced with a call to arms: Chapter 2 by David Clark. Part of the sensibility in question demands one be alert, he argues, alert to the way issues of trust in society come in by the back door provided by technology and the Internet in particular. Other chapters made it clear that other capacities are required, too. A further sensibility is to be open to the diverse treatments that different perspectives (or disciplines) offer and to have the acuity not to allow those treatments to muddle each other. One has to be sensitive too to how the concept of “trust” is essentially a vernacular, used by ordinary people in everyday ways. Analysis of it must focus on that use and not be distracted by hypothesized uses, ones constructed through, say, theory or experiment – although these treatments might afford more nuanced understandings of the vernacular. Part of these vernacular practices entails inducing fear and worry. Such fear and worry can undermine some of the other aspects of the sensibility already mentioned; such as awareness of differences in points of view, and of course, beyond this, simply clarity and calmness of thought that might lead one to correctly resist the “crowding out” of other explanations that use of the word trust sometimes produces. © Richard H.R. Harper 2014.

Social NUI: social perspectives in natural user interfaces

Abstract: Natural User Interfaces (NUI) offer rich ways for interacting with the digital world that make innovative use of existing human capabilities. They include and often combine different input modalities such as voice, gesture, eye gaze, body interactions, touch and touchless interactions. However much of the focus of NUI research and development has been on enhancing the experience of individuals interacting with technology. Effective NUIs must also acknowledge our innately social characteristics, and support how we communicate with each other, play together, learn together and collaboratively work together. This workshop concerns the social aspects of NUI. The workshop seeks to better understand the social uses and applications of these new NUI technologies -- how we design these technologies for new social practices and how we understand the use of these technologies in key social contexts.

"Real, but glossy" - Technology and the practical pursuit of magic in modern weddings:17th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, CSCW 2014

Abstract: Planning a wedding is arguably one of the most complicated collaborative tasks people ever undertake. Despite the commonplace use of technologies in "wedding work," little research has looked at this from an HCI perspective. Based on an interview study, we illustrate how technology is used to deliver the sought-after fantasy and a practical, yet entertaining, affair. We identify four ways that technology helps people do this: (a) by allowing much of the practical planning work to become "invisible;" (b) by easing navigation through the delicate rules of family configurations made manifest in the guest list; (c) by helping create a spectaclelike event that adroitly balances excess and realism; and (d) by documenting the wedding in ways that allows reexperiencing the magic after the event. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of this pursuit on social graphs, place, and photography, contributing to the literature on technology and major life events.

Dwelling in Software: Aspects of the felt-life of engineers in large software projects

Abstract: The organizational and social aspects of software engineering (SE) are now increasingly well investigated. This paper proposes that there are a number of approaches taken in research that can be distinguished not by their method or topic but by the different views they construct of the human agent acting in SE. These views have implications for the pragmatic outcome of the research, such as whether systems design suggestions are made, proposals for the development of practical reasoning tools or the effect of Social Network Systems on engineer’s sociability. This paper suggests that these studies tend to underemphasize the felt-life of engineers, a felt-life that is profoundly emotional though played in reference to ideas of moral propriety and ethics. This paper will present a study of this felt-life, suggesting it consists of a form of digital dwelling. The perspective this view affords are contrasted with process and ‘scientific’ approaches to the human agent in SE, and with the more humanistic studies of SE reasoning common in CSCW.

Trusting oneself:An anthropology of digital things and personal competence

Abstract: Several of the prior chapters in this book allude to the work of Harold Garfinkel and his seminal Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967). One of the great lessons that one can take from that book is the idea that society is made up of people who “do” sociological theory or, rather, people who construct and deploy “lay-sociological theorizing” to both interpret and organize the world around them. Their everyday reasoning is a form of sociology Garfinkel would have us believe. Today, of course, the idea that people theorize in this sense, that they reason sociologically, has suffused itself throughout the discipline of sociology and its cognates. Take Michel De Certeau (1984), for example, or another sociologist of the quotidian, Henri Lefebrve (2004). Both argue that the social world is constructed, “enacted” through the deployment of interpretative skills and agency – through people's capacity to reason in particular ways. And consider other social sciences, such as anthropology. Here Tim Ingold (2011) argues that people construct their places of dwelling through conscious acts of “dialogic engagement”: they attend to, work with, and reflect on the things and persons around in ways that directs them in new trajectories, lines of action. All of this is a form of reasoning, Ingold claims. The subtle differences between these various views notwithstanding, that people reason in a way that can be characterized as sociological, and that, as a result, the thing called society has the shape it has, is virtually commonplace in contemporary thinking. The word “theorizing,” however, has been ameliorated with alternate formulas by these (and other) authors. We have just listed some of the alternative words and phrases used: people enact their reasoning and they rationally engage their reasoning as part of how they produce dwellings. These and other formula stand as proxy for theorizing. One of the motivations for using alternatives is that many commentators, including those just mentioned, would appear to prefer keeping the term “theory” as a label for their own thinking rather than as one applicable to the non-professional arena. To put it directly, this move allows them to valorize what they do while giving lay persons’ actions a more prosaic, less consequential air. © Richard H.R. Harper 2014.

Evolving Rule Based Contact Exchange

Abstract: Methods and systems are described for managing a user's contact data which use evolving sequential sets of rules where the applicability of each set depends upon adherence or proper application of a prior set. In an embodiment, an initial set of restrictions are generated based on input from a first user, the restrictions relating to contact made by a second user to the first user. These initial restrictions are subsequently modified in response to the second user contacting the first user based on the contact made and a characteristic of the contact. The methods may apply to any form of contact between the first and second users and in an embodiment applies to contact made by the second user to a cellular telephone number belonging to the first user.