Despite the availability of awareness servers and casual interaction systems, distributed groups still cannot maintain artifact awareness -the easy awareness of the documents, objects, and tools that other people are using -that is a natural part of co-located work environments. To address this deficiency, we designed an awareness tool that uses screen sharing to provide information about other people's artifacts. People see others' screens in miniature at the edge of their display, can selectively raise a larger view of that screen to get more detail, and can engage in remote pointing if desired. Initial experiences show that people use our tool for several purposes: to maintain awareness of what others are doing, to project a certain image of themselves, to monitor progress and coordinate joint tasks, to help determine when another person can be interrupted, and to engage in serendipitous conversation and collaboration. People have also been able to balance awareness with privacy, by using the privacy protection strategies built into our system: restricting what parts of the screen others can see, specifying update frequency, hiding image detail, and getting feedback of when screenshots are taken.
Cooking is a daily activity for many people. However, traditional text recipes are often prohibitively difficult to follow for people with language disorders, such as aphasia. We have developed a multi-modal application that leverages the retained ability of aphasic individuals to recognize image-based representations of objects, providing a presentation format that can be more easily followed than a traditional text recipe. Through a systematic approach to developing a visual language for cooking, and the subsequent case study evaluation of a prototype developed according to this language, we show that a combination of visual instructions and navigational structure can help individuals with relatively large language deficits to cook more independently.
Co-located collaborators can see the artifacts that others are working on, which in turn enables casual interactions. To help distributed collaborators maintain mutual awareness of people's electronic work artifacts, we designed and implemented an awareness tool that leverages screen-sharing methods. People see portions of others' screens in miniature, can selectively raise larger views of a screen to get more detail, and can engage in remote pointing. People balance awareness with privacy by using several privacy-protection strategies built into the system. A preliminary evaluation with two groups using this system shows that people use it to maintain awareness of what others are doing, project a certain image of themselves, monitor progress, coordinate joint tasks, determine others' availability, and engage in serendipitous conversation and collaboration. While privacy was not a large concern for these groups, a theoretical analysis suggests that privacy risks may differ for other user communities. r
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