Abstract
Awareness is one of the central concepts in Computer Supported Cooperative Work, though it has often been used in several different senses. Recently, researchers have begun to provide a clearer conceptualization of awareness that provides concrete guidance for the structuring of empirical studies of awareness and the development of tools to support awareness. Such conceptions, however, do not take into account newer understandings of shared intentionality among cooperating actors that recently have been defined by philosophers and empirically investigated by psychologists and psycho-linguists. These newer conceptions highlight the common ground and socially recursive inference that underwrites cooperative behavior. And it is this inference that is often seamlessly carried out in collocated work, so easy to take for granted and hence overlook, that will require computer support if such work is to be partially automated or carried out at a distance. Ignoring the inferences required in achieving common ground may thus focus a researcher or designer on surface forms of “heeding” that miss the underlying processes of intention shared in and through activity that are critical for cooperation to succeed. Shared intentionality thus provides a basis for reconceptualizing awareness in CSCW research, building on and augmenting existing notions. In this paper, we provide a philosophically grounded conception of awareness based on shared intentionality, demonstrate how it accounts for behavior in an empirical study of two individuals in collocated, tightly-coupled work, and provide implications of this conception for the design of computational systems to support tightly-coupled collaborative work.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
We thank one of the anonymous reviewers for the phrase “the aggregation of myriad atomic acts” as a gloss on what we had been trying to express.
The organization name is anonymized, as are the employee names.
We use the term transaction to denote the relationship between people at work. This recognizes that relations and conversations cannot be reduced to the independent but interacting contributions of individuals but instead mutually implicate each other (Roth and Jornet 2013). This approach is consistent with the analytic stance described below of taking turn pairs as the minimum analytic unit.
We use the following notational conventions for the transcripts, standard in conversation analysis (see as well Appendix A of (Roth 2013)). Unless modified, all words are written with lowercase letters. A number in parentheses indicates the length of a pause in the speech in seconds, while a period inside parentheses indicates a hearable pause of less than 0.1 s. Descriptions in double parentheses are transcriber’s comments. Colons indicate lengthening of a phoneme, about 0.1 s per colon. Square brackets in consecutive lines by different speakers indicate overlap of speech between these speakers. Speech within angle brackets preceded by “p” (or “pp”) standing for piano (or pianissimo) indicates lower (or much lower) speech volume than normal, as in “<<pp > scavenger hunt > .” Speech within angle brackets preceded by “len” (or “all”) indicates lento (or allegro), i.e. slower (or faster) than normal speed. A word inside parentheses ending with “?” indicates difficulty in hearing the word on the recording and that the word in parentheses is the closest approximation. A question mark inside a parenthesis is a word that could not be approximated. Capital letters indicate speaker’s emphasis using a change in speech volume. An equal sign at the end of a word indicates that there is no hearable pause prior to the next word uttered. Downward and upward arrows indicate the pitch jumping downward and upward. The punctuation marks “,?;.” indicate movement of pitch (intonation) toward the end of an utterance: slightly and strongly upward, slightly and strongly downward, respectively.
We follow the suggestion to write irreducible analytic pairs using the Sheffer stroke “|” to indicate that each part of the pair co-implicates and determines the other part of the pair and, in this, the pair as a whole (e.g. (Roth 2013)).
In a strong sense, the statement does not just belong to Danny, whose vocal organs have produced the sound-words, but also belongs to Hank, in whose ears the sound-words resonate at the same time (Roth 2014a, b). Hank’s verbal articulation not only implies whatever he has heard, which has come from Danny, but also is for Danny. An articulation, therefore, cannot be ascribed to an individual but inherently belongs to both speaker and recipient. Speaker and recipient, thus, are oriented to and own, the same sound-words; this co-ownership constitutes, in part, the we-intention.
References
“mutual, adj. and n.” (2014). Retrieved November 11, 2014, from http://www.oed.com/
Baheti, Prashant, Edward F. Gehringer, and David Stotts. (2002). Exploring the Efficacy of Distributed Pair Programming. In XP Universe pp. 208–220
Beck, Kent. (1999). Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Professional.
Bratman, Michael. (1992). Shared Cooperative Activity. The Philosophical Review, vol. 101 no. 2, pp. 327–341.
Button, Graham, and Wes Sharrock. (2000). Design by problem-solving. In P. Luff, J. Hindmarsh, and C. Heath (Eds.): Workplace Studies Recovering Work Practice and Informing System Design pp. 46–67. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press
Cadoz, Claude. (1994). Les réalités virtuelles. Paris, France: Flammarion.
Calefato, Fabio, and Filippo Lanubile. (2012). Augmenting Social Awareness in a Collaborative Development Environment. 2012 5th International Workshop on Co-Operative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering (CHASE), pp. 13–15
Clark, Herbert H. (1993). Arenas of language use. Chicago, IL USA: University of Chicago Press.
Clark, Herbert H. (2003). Pointing and Placing. In S. Kita (Ed.): Pointing: Where Language, Culture, and Cognition Meet pp. 243–68. Mahwah, NJ USA: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates
Clark, Herbert H. (2005). Coordinating with each other in a material world. Discourse Studies, vol. 7 no. 4–5, pp. 507–525.
Clark, Herbert H., and Susan E. Brennan. (1991). Grounding in communication. In L. B. Resnick, J. M. Levine, and S. D. Teasley (Eds.): Perspectives on socially shared cognition Vol. 13, pp. 127–149. American Psychological Association
Cohn, Marisa Leavitt, Susan Elliott Sim, and Charlotte P. Lee. (2009). What Counts as Software Process? Negotiating the Boundary of Software Work Through Artifacts and Conversation. Computer Supported Cooperative Work, vol. 18, pp. 401–443.
Convertino, Gregorio, Helena M. Mentis, Aleksandra Slavkovic, Mary Beth Rosson, and John M. Carroll. (2011). Supporting Common Ground and Awareness in Emergency Management Planning: A Design Research Project. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, vol. 18 no. 4
Dajda, Jacek, and Grzegorz Dobrowolski. (2007). How to build support for distributed pair programming. In Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Agile processes in software engineering and extreme programming (XP’07) pp. 70–73. Springer-Verlag
Dourish, Paul, and Victoria Belotti. (1992). Awareness and Coordination in Shared Workspaces. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work pp. 107–114
Dreyfus, Hubert. (1991). Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I. Cambridge, MA USA: MIT Press.
Fleck, Ludwik. (1935). Entstehung und Entwicklung einer wissenschaftlichen Tatsache. Einfuhrung in die Lehre vom Denkstil und Denkkollectiv. (S. und Co., Ed.). Basel, Switzerland
Fleck, Ludwik. (1979). Genesis and development of a scientific fact. (T. J. Trenn & R. K. Merton, Eds.). Chicago, IL USA: University of Chicago Press
Flor, Nick V. (2006). Globally distributed software development and pair programming. Communications of the ACM, vol. 49 no. 10, pp. 57
Gergle, Darren, and Alan T. Clark. (2011). See what i’m saying?: using Dyadic Mobile Eye tracking to study collaborative reference. In Proceedings of the ACM 2011 conference on Computer supported cooperative work (CSCW’11) pp. 435–444.
Gilbert, Margaret. (1989). On Social Facts. London, UK: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd.
Gilson, Richard D., Daniel J. Garland, and Jefferson M. Koonce (Eds.). (1994). Situational Awareness in Complex Systems. Daytona Beach, FL USA: Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University Press
Goodwin, Charles. (1994). Professional Vision. American Anthropologist, vol. 96 no. 3, pp. 606–633.
Goodwin, Charles. (2000). Action and embodiment within situated human interaction. Journal of Pragmatics, vol. 32, pp. 1489–1522.
Goodwin, Charles, and Marjorie Harness Goodwin. (1996). Seeing as a Situated Activity: Formulating Planes. In Y. Engeström and D. Middleton (Eds.): Cognition and Communication at Work. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Goodwin, Charles, and John Heritage. (1990). Conversation Analysis. Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 19, pp. 283–307.
Grice, Paul. (1975). Logic and conversation. In P. Cole and J. Morgan (Eds.): Syntax and Semantics, 3: Speech Acts. New York: Academic Press.
Gross, Tom. (2013). Supporting Effortless Coordination: 25 Years of Awareness Research. Computer Supported Cooperative Work, vol. 22, pp. 425–474.
Gutwin, Carl, and Saul Greenberg. (2002). A descriptive framework of workspace awareness for real-time groupware. Computer Supported Collaborative Work, vol. 11 no. 3/4, pp. 411–446.
Gutwin, Carl, and Saul Greenberg. (2001). The Importance of Awareness for Team Cognition in Distributed Collaboration. Report 2001-696-19, Dept Computer Science, University of Calgary, Alberta, CANADA.
Hanks, Brian. (2008). Empirical evaluation of distributed pair programming. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, vol. 66, pp. 530–544.
Heath, Christian, and Paul Luff. (2000). Technology in Action. Cambridge U.K.; New York NY USA: Cambridge University Press
Heath, Christian, Marcus Sanchez Svensson, Jon Hindmarsh, Paul Luff, and Dirk Vom Lehn. (2002). Configuring awareness. Computer Supported Cooperative Work, vol. 11 no. 3/4, pp. 317–347.
Heidegger, Martin. (1962). Being and Time. (J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson, Trans.). New York, NY USA: Harper and Row
Holzkamp, K. (1983). Grundlegung der Psychologie. Frankfurt/M, Germany: Campus
Hutchins, Edwin. (1993). Learning to Navigate. In S. Chaiklin and J. Lave (Eds.): Understanding Practice: Perspectives on Activity and Context pp. 35–63. Cambridge University Press.
Ishii, H., M. Kobayashi, and Jonathan Grudin. (1992). Integration of inter-personal space and shared workspace: ClearBoard design and experiments. In Proceedings of ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work pp. 33–42
Jones, Capers. (1991). Applied software measurement: assuring productivity and quality. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Jordan, Brigette Brigitte, and Austin Henderson. (1995). Interaction Analysis: Foundations and Practice. The Journal of the Learning Sciences, vol. 4 no. 1, pp. 39–103.
Kirk, David, Andy Crabtree, and Tom Rodden. (2005). Ways of the Hands. In Proceedings of the Ninth European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work pp. 1–22
Kirk, David, Tom Rodden, and Stanton Danaë Fraser. (2007). Turn It This Way: Grounding Collaborative Action with Remote Gestures. In Proceedings of the 25th annual ACM conference on Human factors in computing systems - CHI’07 pp. 1039–1048.
Kopelman, J. Mark Weber, and David M. Messick. (2002). Factors Influencing Cooperation in Commons Dilemmas: A Review of Experimental Psychological Research. In E. Ostrom, T. Dietz, N. Dolšak, P. C. Stern, S. Stonich, and E. U. Weber (Eds.): The Drama of the Commons. Washington, DC USA: National Academies Press
Koschmann, Timothy, and Curtis D. LeBaron. (2003). Reconsidering Common Ground: Examining Clark’s Contribution Theory in the OR. In Proceedings of the Eighth European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, ECSCW’03.
Kraut, Robert, Susan Fussell, Susan E. Brennan, and Jane Seigel. (2002). Understanding Effects of Proximity on Collaboration: Implications for Technologies to Support Remote Collaborative Work. In P. Hinds and S. Kiesler (Eds.): Distributed Work pp. 137–162. Cambridge, MA USA: MIT Press
Kuhn, Thomas S. (1962). The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago, IL USA: University of Chicago Press.
Larkin, Michael, Virginia Eatough, and Mike Osborn. (2011). Interpretative phenomenological analysis and embodied, active, situated cognition. Theory & Psychology, vol. 2 no. 13, pp. 318–337.
Leont’ev, A. N. (1978). Activity, Consciousness, and Personality. (M. J. Hall, Trans.). Upper Saddle River, NJ USA: Prentice Hall
Luff, Paul, Christian Heath, and Marcus Sanchez Svensson. (2008). Discriminating Conduct: Deploying Systems to Support Awareness in Organizations. International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, vol. 24 no. 4, pp. 410–436.
Meltzoff, Andrew N. (2011). Social cognition and the origins of imitation, empathy, and theory of mind. In U. Goswami (Ed.): The Wiley-Blackwell handbook of childhood cognitive development pp. 49–75. Malden, MA USA: Wiley-Blackwell
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (1962). Phenomenology of Perception. (C. Smith, Trans.). London, UK: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (2012). Phenomenology of Perception. (D. A. Landes, Trans.). New York, NY USA; Abingdon, UK: Routledge
Meshcheryakov, A. (1979). Awakening to Life: On the Education of Deaf-blind Children in the Soviet Union. Moscow, USSR: Progress Publishers.
Neider, Mark B., Xin Chen, Christopher A. Dickinson, Susan E. Brennan, and Gregory J. Zelinsky. (2010). Coordinating spatial referencing using shared gaze. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 17 no. 5, pp. 718–724.
Ostrom, Elinor. (2005). Understanding institutional diversity. Princeton, NJ USA: Princeton University Press.
Plonka, Laura. (2012). Unpacking Collaboration in Pair Programming in Industrial Settings. Doctoral dissertation, The Open University.
Pomerantz, Anita. (1984). Agreeing and disagreeing with assessments: some features of preferred/dispreferred turn shapes. In J. M. Atkinson and J. Heritage (Eds.): Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Robertson, Toni. (1997). Designing Over Distance: A Study of Cooperative Work, Embodied Cognition and Technology to Enable remote Collaboration. Doctoral dissertation, University of Technology, Sydney.
Robertson, Toni. (2002). The public availability of actions and artifacts. Computer Supported Cooperative Work, vol. 11 no. 3/4, pp. 299–316.
Rooksby, John, Mark Rouncefield, and Ian Sommerville. (2009). Testing in the Wild: The Social and Organisational Dimensions of Real World Practice. Computer Supported Cooperative Work, vol. 18, pp. 559–580.
Roth, Wolff-Michael. (2003). From epistemic (ergotic) actions to scientific discourse: The bridging function of gestures. Pragmatics & Cognition, vol. 11 no. 1, pp. 141 – 170.
Roth, Wolff-Michael. (2004). Perceptual gestalts in workplace communication. Journal of Pragmatics, vol. 36 no. 6, pp. 1037–1069.
Roth, Wolff-Michael. (2011). Geometry as objective science in elementary classrooms: Mathematics in the flesh. New York, NY USA: Routledge.
Roth, Wolff-Michael. (2013). What More in/for Science Education: An Ethnomethodological Perspective. Rotterdam/Boston/Taipei: Sense Publishers.
Roth, Wolff-Michael. (2014a). Science language Wanted Alive: Through the dialectical/dialogical lens of Vygotsky and the Bakhtin circle. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 51, 1049–1083.
Roth, Wolff-Michael. (2014b). Working out the interstitial and syncopic nature of the human psyche: On the analysis of verbal data. Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, vol. 48, pp. 283–298.
Roth, Wolff-Michael, and Alfredo Jornet. (2013). Situated cognition. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, vol. 4 no. 5, pp. 463 – 478.
Roth, Wolff-Michael, and Kenneth Tobin. (2010). Solidarity and conflict: Aligned and misaligned prosody as a transactional resource in intra- and intercultural communication involving power differences. Cultural Studies of Science Education, vol. 5, pp. 805–847.
Ryle, Gilbert. (1949). The Concept of Mind. London, UK: Hutchinson.
Sacks, Harvey. (1992). Lectures on conversation 1964–1972, Volume I & II. (G. Jefferson, Ed.). Malden, MA USA: Blackwell Publishing
Sacks, Harvey, Emanuel Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson. (1974). A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language, vol. 50 no. 4, pp. 696–735.
Salinger, Stephan, Christopher Oezbek, Karl Beecher, and Julia Schenk. (2010). Saros: an eclipse plug-in for distributed pair programming. In Proceedings of the 2010 ICSE Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering pp. 48–55
Schmidt, Kjeld. (1997). Of maps and scripts: The status of formal constructs in cooperative work. In GROUP’97, ACM Conference on Supporting Group Work pp. 138–147.
Schmidt, Kjeld. (2002a). Remarks on the complexity of cooperative work. Revue Des Sciences et Technologies de L’information, vol. 16 no. 4–5, pp. 443–483.
Schmidt, Kjeld. (2002b). The Problem with Awareness. Computer Supported Cooperative Work, vol. 11, pp. 285–298.
Schmidt, Kjeld. (2011). Cooperative Work and Coordinative Practices - Contributions to the Conceptual Foundations of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). Heidelberg, Germany: Springer-Verlag.
Schummer, T., and Stephan Lukosch. (2009). Understanding tools and practices for distributed pair programming. Journal of Universal Computer Science, vol. 15 no. 16, pp. 3101–3125.
Schütz, Alfred. (1962). Common-sense and scientific interpretations of human action. In Alfred Schütz Collected Papers, Volume 1: The Problem of Social Reality pp. 3–47. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
Searle, John. (1990). Collective Intentions and Actions. In P. R. Cohen, J. Morgan, and M. Pollack (Eds.): Intentions in Communication. Cambridge, MA USA: MIT Press.
Searle, John. (1995). The Construction of Social Reality. New York, NY USA: The Free Press.
Sharp, Helen, and Gina Venolia. (2009). Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering. IEEE Software, vol. 26 no. December, pp. 2009–2011.
Sharrock, Wes, and Graham Button. (2011). Engineering Investigations: What is Made Visible in Making Work Visible. In M. Szymanski and J. Whalen (Eds.): Making Work Visible: Ethnographically Grounded Case Studies of Work Practice pp. 34–50. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press
Spector, Robert H. (1990). Chapter 116: Visual Fields. In H. K. Walker, W. D. Hall, and J. W. Hurst (Eds.): Clinical Methods: The History, Physical, and Laboratory Examinations. 3rd ed. Boston, MA USA: Butterworths.
Stotts, David, Jason McC. Smith, and Karl Gyllstrom. (2004). Support for distributed pair programming in the transparent video facetop. In Proceedings of the Fourth Conference on Extreme Programming and Agile Methods— XP/Agile Universe pp. 92–104.
Stotts, David, and Laurie Williams. (2002). A Video-enhanced Environment for Distributed Extreme Programming. Raleigh, North Carolina USA: Internal Report, North Caroline State University.
Suchman, Lucy. (1987). Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication. Cambridge, MA USA: Cambridge University Press.
Tomasello, Michael. (2009). Why we cooperate. Cambridge, MA USA, MA: MIT Press.
Tomasello, Michael. (2014). A Natural History of Human Thinking. Cambridge, MA USA.; London, England: Harvard University Press
Tomasello, Michael, and Hannes Rakoczy. (2003). What Makes Human Cognition Unique? From Individual to Shared to Collective Intentionality. Mind & Language, vol. 18 no. 2, pp. 121–147.
Tomasello, Michael, M. Carpenter, J. Call, T. Behne, and H. Moll. (2005). Understanding and sharing intentions: The origins of cultural cognition. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, vol. 28, pp. 675–691.
Tomasello, Michael, Alicia P. Melis, Claudio Tennie, Emily Wyman, and Esther Herrmann. (2012). Two Key Steps in the Evolution of Human Cooperation: The Interdependence Hypothesis. Current Anthropology, vol. 53 no. 6, pp. 673–692.
Velichkovsky, Boris M. (1995). Communicating attention: Gaze position transfer in cooperative problem solving. Pragmatics & Cognition, vol. 3 no. 2, pp. 199–223(25).
Vygotskij, L. S. (2005). Psixologija razvitija čeloveka [Psychology of human development]. Moscow, Russia: Eksmo.
Acknowledgments
Josh Tenenberg thanks the University of Washington for granting a sabbatical leave during which much of this research was undertaken, as well as Professor Margaret-Anne Storey, the CHISEL group, and the Department of Computer Science at the University of Victoria for hosting him during this time. He also thanks Julia Schenk and Natalie Jolly for discussions during early phases of this research. David Socha thanks the Computing & Software Systems Division of the School of STEM at the University of Washington Bothell for funds to purchase recording equipment. He also was partially funded by a 2012–2013 Worthington Distinguished Scholar award from the University of Washington Bothell. Finally, all of the authors would like to thank the employees at BeamCoffer who generously offered to open their workspaces and practices to us, without whom none of this research would be possible.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Tenenberg, J., Roth, WM. & Socha, D. From I-Awareness to We-Awareness in CSCW. Comput Supported Coop Work 25, 235–278 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-014-9215-0
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-014-9215-0