Mutual engagement

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Mutual engagement [1] occurs when people creatively spark together and enter a state of group flow. [2] It involves engagement with both the products of a joint activity and with the other participants who are contributing to those products. Mutual engagement is essential for technologically mediated creative collaborations such as group improvisation with new musical interfaces, [3] distributed brainstorming, and so on.

Contents

Identifying mutual engagement

Mutual engagement is about the points at which participants engage with each other in a creative collaboration. These points may be indicated by co-location of contributions, mutual modification of the joint product, discussions of quality of the joint product, or repetition and reinterpretation of others' contributions. [1] These rely on participants' skills and expertise with the system.

Designing for mutual engagement

User interfaces designed for mutual engagement should support mutual awareness of actions, shared and consistent representations, mutual modifiability, and annotation. [1]

Mutual engagement is critical to creative collaborations which rely on technology. The field of computer supported cooperative work is closely related, but focusses more on work, task, and office based activities. Wenger's characterization of mutual engagement in a community of practice focuses on participants ability to "engage with other members and respond in kind to their actions". From Wenger's perspective, mutual engagement is about the work involved in learning how to interact with other people in an emerging community of practice whereas the definition given here is about informing design of collaborative user interfaces.

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Industrial design Process of design applied to products that are to be manufactured through techniques of mass production

Industrial design is a process of design applied to products that are to be manufactured through techniques of mass production. Its key characteristic is that design is separated from manufacture: the creative act of determining and defining a product's form and features takes place in advance of the physical act of making a product, which consists purely of repeated, often automated, replication. This distinguishes industrial design from craft-based design, where the form of the product is determined by the product's creator at the time of its creation.

The term computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) was first coined by Irene Greif and Paul M. Cashman in 1984, at a workshop attended by individuals interested in using technology to support people in their work. At about this same time, in 1987 Dr. Charles Findley presented the concept of Collaborative Learning-Work. According to Carstensen and Schmidt, CSCW addresses "how collaborative activities and their coordination can be supported by means of computer systems". On the one hand, many authors consider that CSCW and groupware are synonyms. On the other hand, different authors claim that while groupware refers to real computer-based systems, CSCW focuses on the study of tools and techniques of groupware as well as their psychological, social, and organizational effects. The definition of Wilson (1991) expresses the difference between these two concepts:

CSCW [is] a generic term, which combines the understanding of the way people work in groups with the enabling technologies of computer networking, and associated hardware, software, services and techniques.

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Human-centered computing (HCC) studies the design, development, and deployment of mixed-initiative human-computer systems. It is emerged from the convergence of multiple disciplines that are concerned both with understanding human beings and with the design of computational artifacts. Human-centered computing is closely related to human-computer interaction and information science. Human-centered computing is usually concerned with systems and practices of technology use while human-computer interaction is more focused on ergonomics and the usability of computing artifacts and information science is focused on practices surrounding the collection, manipulation, and use of information.

Collaborative product development (CPD) is a business strategy, work process and collection of software applications that facilitates different organizations to work together on the development of a product. It is also known as collaborative product definition management (cPDM).

Design thinking refers to the cognitive, strategic and practical processes by which design concepts are developed. Many of the key concepts and aspects of design thinking have been identified through studies, across different design domains, of design cognition and design activity in both laboratory and natural contexts.

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Contextual design (CD) is a user-centered design process developed by Hugh Beyer and Karen Holtzblatt. It incorporates ethnographic methods for gathering data relevant to the product via field studies, rationalizing workflows, and designing human-computer interfaces. In practice, this means that researchers aggregate data from customers in the field where people are living and applying these findings into a final product. Contextual design can be seen as an alternative to engineering and feature driven models of creating new systems.

Brand engagement is the process of forming an emotional or rational attachment between a consumer and a brand. It comprises one aspect of brand management.

A community of practice (CoP) is a group of people who share a craft or a profession. The concept was first proposed by cognitive anthropologist Jean Lave and educational theorist Etienne Wenger in their 1991 book Situated Learning. Wenger then significantly expanded on the concept in his 1998 book Communities of Practice.

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Collaborative information seeking (CIS) is a field of research that involves studying situations, motivations, and methods for people working in collaborative groups for information seeking projects, as well as building systems for supporting such activities. Such projects often involve information searching or information retrieval (IR), information gathering, and information sharing. Beyond that, CIS can extend to collaborative information synthesis and collaborative sense-making.

User experience evaluation (UXE) or user experience assessment (UXA) refers to a collection of methods, skills and tools utilized to uncover how a person perceives a system before, during and after interacting with it. It is non-trivial to assess user experience since user experience is subjective, context-dependent and dynamic over time. For a UXA study to be successful, the researcher has to select the right dimensions, constructs, and methods and target the research for the specific area of interest such as game, transportation, mobile, etc.

Open-source architecture (OSArc) is an emerging paradigm that advocates new procedures in imagination and formation of virtual and real spaces within a universal infrastructure. Drawing from references as diverse as open-source culture, modular design, avant-garde architectural theory, science fiction, language theory, and neuro-surgery, it adopts an inclusive approach as per spatial design towards a collaborative use of design and design tools by professionals and ordinary citizen users. The umbrella term citizen-centered design harnesses the notion of open-source architecture, which in itself involves the non-building architecture of computer networks, and goes beyond it to the movement that encompass the building design professions, as a whole.

Produsage is a portmanteau of the words production and usage, coined by Australian media scholar Axel Bruns and popularized in his book Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From Production to Produsage. Produsage is the type of user-led content creation that takes place in a variety of online environments, open source software, and the blogosphere. The concept blurs the boundaries between passive consumption and active production. The distinction between producers and consumers or users of content has faded, as users play the role of producers whether they are aware of this role or not. The hybrid term produser refers to an individual who is engaged in the activity of produsage. This concept is similar and related to commons-based peer production, a term coined by Yochai Benkler.

Cross-domain interoperability exists when organizations or systems from different domains interact in information exchange, services, and/or goods to achieve their own or common goals. Interoperability is the method of systems working together (inter-operate). A domain in this instance is a community with its related infrastructure, bound by common purpose and interests, with consistent mutual interactions or rules of engagement that is separable from other communities by social, technical, linguistic, professional, legal or sovereignty related boundaries.

Distributed Collaboration is a way of collaboration wherein participants, regardless of their location, work together to reach a certain goal. This usually entails use of increasingly popular cyberinfrastructure, such as emails, instant messaging and document sharing platforms to reduce the limitations of the users trying to work together from remote locations by overcoming physical barriers of geolocation and also to some extent, depending on the application used, the effects of working together in person. For example, a caller software that can be used to bring all collaborators into a single call-in for easier dissemination of ideas.

Susanne Bødker is a Danish computer scientist known for her contributions to human–computer interaction, computer-supported cooperative work, and participatory design, including the introduction of activity theory to human–computer interaction. She is a professor of computer science at Aarhus University, and a member of the CHI Academy.

References

  1. 1 2 3 Bryan-Kinns, Nick; Hamilton, Fraser (2012). "Identifying mutual engagement". Behaviour & Information Technology. 31 (2): 101–125. doi:10.1080/01449290903377103.
  2. Sawyer, K. (2003). Group creativity: Music, theater, collaboration. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates (LEA), NJ, USA.
  3. Bryan-Kinns, N. (2004). "Daisyphone: The Design and Impact of a Novel Environment for Remote Group Music Improvisation". In Proceedings of DIS 2004, Boston, USA, pp. 135-144.