Judith S. Olson - UC Irvine

[these notes are rougher than I usually take - she was moving at a pretty fast clip. I tried to clean them up and fill in some gaps but this will have to suffice.]

Showed a picture of her presenting at CHI 86 with an overhead projector - it was rather humorous.

She took a look back at the perspective of the evolutionary history of the HCI field and identified topics warranting more research. She came up with Social Ergonomics after talking to a bunch of folks that have been in the industry for decades. Came up with list of 25 - narrowed down to four:

1. How to design a large activity
   Like information integration. Used writing a novel as an example.
   Like emergency medical care - from all participants points of view. Is the person's time and energy valued, are we treating the whole person, is the person informed
   An informed participatory democracy - all of the videos of the debates were made available to encourage transparency.
   How would we design this?
2. Generalize across field studies
   What domains are like other domains - air traffic control, subway control, nuclear power plant control
3. Human robot interaction - i.e. Roomba
   we are trying to make them look like humans but they don't have to, sometimes human characteristics are incorporated
4. Social ergonomics
   even small distance matters - statue of two men interacting, one wanting to get closer to make a point and the other pushing back
   

Ergonomics - what are the characteristics of humans' physical and mental capabilities that guide our design - physical, cognitive.

She is adding social to the ergonomics mix - derived from anthropology.
We are not aware of rules until they are violated - get in elevator and face the back. Most people ignore them until they are broken (behavior)

Categories of Social Ergonomics

• physics of space and reciprocity
  distance, sound, reciprocal
  >10 feet - public space, do not even need to acknowledge them
  >4 feet - social space
  >1.5 feet - personal
  <1.5 - intimate
• how you speak depends on distance to recipient
  
  • public - pronouncement
• social - greetings
• personal - conversation
• intimate - whispers, not much spoken
• closeness and eye contact commands attention - proximity
• when forced to be close, avoid eye contact
• conversation
• impression management
• time
• cultural, ethnic, gender differences
• in our language - "in your face"
• seating at 90 degrees is most comfortable
• sitting closer promotes cooperation
  

broken physics of space

• if people look small, we naturally tend to speak louder because of our understanding of space
• Showed example of situation where they used three monitors for group meeting so movement appears to be moving towards or away from each other
• they can see you without seeing them - someone lurking on a video teleconference
• assume we are all in the same time zone
• when someone believes the recipient is in a distance city they are more likely to deceive, less likely to cooperate
• zooming in makes people look too close

speaking

• 2 second break
• making and breaking eye contact
• gestures support content and meaning in speech, recipients understanding is conveyed
• video becomes more important for people who have less in common - language, culture, field of study
• eye direction will be intrepreted - location of camera in proximity of their eyes on monitor is very important
• codecs generate a delay and create a mismatch between video and audio - used prairie home companion news clip
• audio only - people forget you are there, doesn't allow backchannels

impression management - clothes, stance, cleanliness, actions, rituals - standing in line
height of monitor affects appearance of height
value of time affects use of video conferencing
attribution error

design your connectivity with social ergonomics in mind

radical collocation increases productivity - aware, available, ad hoc meetings - how to achieve the same effects remotely - virtual radical collocation

video walls - putting camera in the wall

virtual 3d environments - mimic reality

embodied social proxy - venolia (2008)
designing a large activity, building from field work, human-robot interaction, social ergonomics

remote physician as robot - mashes it all up

This is Jay Steele at CHI 2009 in Boston