Call for papers for COOP'10 workshop:

"The mediation role of shared representations in cooperative activities: new challenges"

Workshop held in conjunction with the 9th International Conference on the Design of Cooperative Systems, May 18^th, 2010 in Aix-en-Provence, France.

Organisers

Workshop Program

Workshop activities and paper submission (link to important dates and paper template)

Theme

In a globalized world, where cooperation happens more and more across boundaries, the need for mediation in cooperative work is growing and we believe that there is an opportunity as well as a challenge in thinking about the design of mediation support.

In many cooperative activities related to problem framing or solving, shared representations of the object of the work are manipulated by the participants. Particularly their status and history are often central to the activities. Examples of such cooperative activities include remote troubleshooting, collaborative product design or diagnostics in healthcare. In a remote device troubleshooting context, the participants may for instance collaborate using a virtual 3D shared representation of the broken device. In a collaborative product design environment, designers can interact through CAD models of the product during distant design meetings. Many other examples can be found in every domain where an activity can be carried out remotely and collectively.

Shared representations not only represent the problem to be solved but they also constitute the medium for building the solution through cooperation among actors that may have different points of view and may be separated across location, time, organisation and expertise. Thus the design of the shared representations strongly affects the way in which the cooperation will take place. A good design of a cooperative system should therefore carefully consider the mediation role of shared representations in supporting the interaction among users. We believe that this dimension is often neglected in system design. The design of a cooperative system centered on cooperative interactions through objects is pretty different from a usual HCI design where the designers only consider the interactions between the system and the user. Here the interactions between remote users must be considered and therefore the form, the status, the role of the medium should be carefully studied. We think the CSCW community is the relevant community to discuss these points.

This workshop is aimed at contributing to characterize the dimensions related to mediation that should be considered when designing new cooperative systems involving representations of shared objects. One example of dimension related to mediation could be the degree of guidance offered through the shared representation to the users to perform a task.

We are therefore interested in gathering a wide number of points of view and interdisciplinary approaches related to the study of mediation needs or roles in cooperative systems.

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

• discussions and theoretical speculations on the concepts of shared representation, boundary objects, intermediary objects, etc.
• ethnographic work on team interactions through objects
• case studies or applications of new forms of representations for interacting (3D, annotations, voice, etc.)
• case studies or applications of new media for interacting (touch tables/screens, haptic devices, etc.)
• cognitive studies on the role of objects as shared representations

Workshop activities and paper submission

This one-day workshop will consist in oral presentations of the selected papers followed by a discussion on the theme of the workshop, informed by the contributions of the participants.

Workshop participants should submit an extended abstract (maximum 1000 words + references). 2-3 researchers will review each submission assessing the significance of the contribution and its relevance to the workshop theme.

Authors of accepted submissions will be asked to provide a short paper (between 3000 and 4000 words) before the workshop takes place.
Paper submission: papers must be sent in PDF format to COOP10-wshp-mediations@grenoble-inp.fr

Please us this template.

Outcome
This workshop aims at collecting a number of significant contributions around the proposed theme of the mediation role of shared representations in supporting collaborative activities in order to prepare a special issue of an international review (computers in industry, JCSCW, etc.).

Important dates

• 15 March, 2010 : Deadline for extended abstract submission
• 31 March, 2010: Notification of acceptance
• 23 April, 2010: Deadline for final short paper submission
• 18 May, 2010: Workshop 1 day of the COOP conference)