Workshop at CSCW2012: Exploring collaboration in challenging environments: From the car to the factory and beyond

Specific and difficult environments offer a variety of methodological challenges to explore cooperation under very specific contextual conditions. Difficult and challenging environments we understand as contexts going beyond traditional working/office settings offering very specific characteristics to be explored. Examples for these environments
can be the automotive context (studying cooperation in the car) or the context of a semiconductor factory. The aim is to generate a framework of influence factors for collaboration in the sphere of difficult environments, focusing on the methodological challenges of analyzing requirements, introducing novel technologies and working together with representative users in these contexts (e.g. requirement analysis in the cleanroom of a semiconductor factory, integrating novel technology in an operating room, collaboration devices in a car). The forum is open to researchers and practitioners from a variety of fields. Through position papers and interactive discussions participants will explore current issues and future approaches.

Deadlines:

* Deadline position papers: 25 November 2011

* Notification for workshop participants: 12 December 2011

* Deadline for the final position papers: 15 January 2011

* Workshop at CSCW2012: 11 February 2012

Website: http://workshops.icts.sbg.ac.at/cscw2012/

Position papers about contextual influence factors and the
methodological challenges they pose in challenging and difficult
research environments, such as automotive, factory, hospital, school,
etc. are invited.

Submissions are invited on the following topics:

* Influencing factors for the different instances of “difficult”
environments

* Challenges and comparisons towards methods and measures for
investigating collaboration such as:
* Lab vs. field studies
* Simulating contexts vs. in-situ
* Forms of ethnographic methods
* Experience and context sampling
* Narration and storytelling

* Human factors and ergonomics issues such as
* Ergonomics in collaboration with and supporting collaboration by
intelligent adaptive systems (e.g. robots, driving assistance systems)
* Human in the loop and joint interaction
* Human-Machine Interaction (HMI) vs. machine mediated human-human
interaction

* Future emerging interaction possibilities to support collaboration
in “difficult” environments such as
* Potential of multitouch, haptics, and gestures
* Speech and gaze interfaces
* Situated display

Position papers should be submitted to the workshop organizers, no later
than 25 November 2011. The position paper will form the bases for the
position statements at the beginning of the workshop. The position paper
(min 800 words, but no longer than 4 A4 pages) about current research
and viewpoints on the topics should be sent to the organizers at
Difficult-CSCW@hciunit.org.

There are no prerequisites for attending the workshop. All members of
the CSCW community, as well as members from related communities, such as
HCI, HRI, Social Science, Communication Science etc. are encouraged to
attend and participate in the discussions.

Workshop Organizers:

Manfred Tscheligi (HCI & Usability Unit, University of Salzburg)
Astrid Weiss (HCI & Usability Unit, University of Salzburg)
Alexander Meschtscherjakov (HCI & Usability Unit, University of Salzburg)
Volker Wulf (Institute for Information Systems, University of Siegen)
Vanessa Evers (Human Media Interaction (HMI) group, University of Twente)
Bilge Mutlu (Department of Computer Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Madison)