The paper session on the morning after the social event – not so many participants in yet (45 just before the first talk started) – but numbers are increasing ;-)

Before I address the papers presented (it really was worth visiting this session – as it was with most other session at this conference), some comments on a discussion I had yesterday evening (around the social event): While new media like Blogs are helping to move some traffic away from email, they generate new problems of media choice and overload – how to deal with the input all the feeds deliver you have subscribed to? One solution is a change of view on the side of the consumer: feed reader inboxes are not the same as email inboxes – it is okay to just discard some entries in the feed reader inbox. We might also try some technical support: perhaps building on the former work on collaborative filtering for Usenet News? (Blog) feeds provide more meta data then Usenet News groups, so it might even work better than with them – especially regarding the cold start problem.

But now the papers:

• “Making the Home Network at Home: Digital Housekeeping”, Peter Tolmie: “maintaining the PC has become a household chore”, “home networks are no longer geek experiments, they are an ordinary solution to burgeoning technological complexity” – quite interesting observations – The authors studied three households in the UK; very interesting observations of how home networks are “integrated” in the household – both physically and regarding processes and routine – and what tasks have to be addressed (and what practices have been developed for these); they identified some “orderly characteristics” in digital housekeeping; some implications for design: handling legacy in the home, providing for transparency; “How can this be extended to encompass how people reason about the home as their home, not just the home network as a home network?”
  
  Discussion: There were questions on how digital housekeeping is distributed over genders, how it works in single parent households – but because of the three family sample there was not much to say about these questions – there surely is need for broader studies …
  
  I very much like the term “digital housekeeping” … “normal people” have to deal with the complexities of technology … not primarily a CSCW topic, but nevertheless very interesting …

• “Behaviours and Preferences when Coordinating Mediated Interruptions: Social and System Influence”, Agnieszka Szostek: focus: interruption behaviour of interruptors and interruptees and user preferences; controlled (game) experiment to derive some insights (two participants, individual tasks, possibility to ask each other – interruptions, time pressure, awareness display about status of other person); tested some hypotheses about social and system influences; the underlying question was how the system can decide if the user should be interrupted by questions, what systems can/should do – highly relevant in CMC environments!; just one interesting outcome: it was better to have automatic rejection (in addition to manual rejection) and not to show to the rejected person how it was done – to allow the rejector to “save face”; Implications for design: desired behaviour of the systems depends on moment-to-moment activities of both actors; need for: manual and automatic interruption filtering, mechanisms to present interruption costs, buffer to queue interruptions
  
  I like this application of the “awareness” concept … Never have thought about further researching on how to (semi-)automatically react on awareness information to address interruption handling (in CMC) … might be a good field for further research
  
  A collection of papers on interruptions in hci

• “Health Care Categories have Politics too: Unpacking the Managerial Agendas of Electronic Triage Systems”, Ellen Balka: research question: “how can an understanding of the agenda embedded within the design of an it.application help us to explain failure of the application in practice?”; research method: discourse analysis of academic literature; work practice study in the emergency department of a Canadian children hospital; Research finding: insight into the political agenda behind the it-application lead to identify conflicts …