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Knowledge in co-action: social intelligence in collaborative design activity

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An Erratum to this article was published on 19 December 2003

Abstract

Skilled cooperative action means being able to understand the communicative situation and know how and when to respond appropriately for the purpose at hand. This skill is of the performance of knowledge in co-action and is a form of social intelligence for sustainable interaction. Social intelligence, here, denotes the ability of actors and agents to manage their relationships with each other. Within an environment we have people, tools, artefacts and technologies that we engage with. Let us consider all of these as dynamic representations of knowledge. When this knowledge becomes enacted, i.e., when we understand how to use it to communicate effectively, such that it becomes invisible to us, it becomes knowledge in co-action. A challenge of social intelligence design is to create mediating interfaces that can become invisible to us, i.e., as an extension of ourselves. In this paper, we present a study of the way people use surfaces that afford graphical interaction, in collaborative design tasks, in order to inform the design of intelligent user interfaces. This is a descriptive study rather than a usability study, to explore how size, orientation and horizontal and vertical positioning, influences the functionality of the surface in a collaborative setting.

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Notes

  1. Scheflen (1975) on the relation between kinesics (movements) and language: the former can “qualify or give instructions” about the latter in a relation that Bateson (1955) called metacommunicative, whereby the “movement of the body helps in clarifying meaning by supplementing features of the structure of language. Body moves do just this, and contribute further to the idea that the structure of language lies in its performance.

  2. Toyoaki Nishida’s summary of the idea of social intelligence in his paper at the close of the Social Intelligence Design Conference, at the Royal Holloway, London, 2003.

  3. “Acknowledge (Ack). The acknowledge move gives an idea of the attitude of the response, i.e., how the person hears and understands and perceives, what is being discussed. It shows continued attention. In the discourse act (DA) “acknowledge”, this aspect of acknowledge, which was raised by Clark and Schaefer (1989), has not been included because it leaves no trace in a dialogue transcript to be coded. However, it is a part of the body move. The hearer or listener demonstrates, with his gesture, how he is acknowledging the other’s proposal or request for agreement. The body move occurs in response to the other’s verbal information reference or suggestion, and their body release-turn or bodily placeholder. Its associated DA is the speech act “ack” or “accept. The movement creates a change in the degree of contact which indicates the nature of the acknowledgement or acceptance.” (Gill, Kawamori, Katagiri and Shimojima 2000)

  4. Some examples of behaviours are: device interface: right clicking, marker fixing, dragging, reaching, tapping, comparing, referring to paper, erasing; interaction dance: side stepping, pacing, stepping back, hand waving, cutting in, waiting, bumping, peeking, touching (others); attention control: pointing, asking permission, directing, teaching, concurrent control, posturing, calling out; team communication: reading aloud, catching up, filling in, talking, swaggering, sharing, taking turns, role-playing; personal work: reading, note-taking, scanning, browsing, watching, concentrating, viewing, drawing and pointing.

  5. For a preliminary discussion of this research, see: Borchers, Gill and To (2002).

  6. This could in part be due to the awkwardness of the interface for producing smooth drawings.

  7. The relationship between autonomy and sustainable collaboration is being developed in a forthcoming paper by the author.

  8. http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/iwork/

  9. Work at Berkeley on Transient Ink is a potential solution, leaving marks that disappear after a while (Everitt, Klemmer, Lee, and Landay, 2003)

  10. This is work in progress in a forthcoming paper by Satinder Gill.

  11. This could be another category of body move.

  12. This is a hypothesis and not a statement of fact, but is under analysis.

  13. Allwood, Nivre and Ahlsen (1991) pay special attention to the context sensitivity of feedback. Aspects of their theory were adapted for the body situation, such as ‘contact’. The four basic communicative functions are: 1) Contact; 2) Perception, 3) Understanding; 4)Attitudinal reactions. Winograd and Flores (1986)emphasise ‘the need for continued mutual recognition of commitment’ (p.63) that we find expressed in the maintenance of the ‘engagement space’ and they speak of communication as ‘dance’, a metaphor suited for Body Moves. Further, their argument for ‘sufficient coupling’ to ensure freguent breakdowns and a standing commitment by [participants] to enter into dialogue in the face of breakdown, is helpful for understanding the role of parallel coordinated motion for sustaining collaborative activity.

  14. This emerged when reflecting out loud with Renate Fruchter, Stanford University, in the Spring of 2002, about Donald Schon’s work, in relation to this study.

  15. The whiteboard is slightly unsteady if one person moves heavily upon its surface, but that is well handled and managed by the participants. In the example, where E taps the surface with the back of his hand, F has to momentarily lift his pen, yet the rhythmic coordination between them is maintained.

  16. The SANE Project at Royal Holloway, London, shows that people who overhear others talking in work environments are participants of a kind within that space and constitute part of the organisational knowledge.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks and acknowledgements to Ramit Sethi and Tiffany To for their help in this research, and to Terry Winograd for his support of this work in the iSpaces Project at Stanford University. Thanks also to Syed Shariq for his encouragement to develop the framework of “knowledge in co-action”, originally as a theoretical frame for the Real Time Venture Design Lab (ReVeL) at Stanford University. Thanks also to Renate Fruchter, Duska Rosenberg and Toyoaki Nishida for their comments on the paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI), Stanford University, USA

    Satinder P. Gill

  2. Department of Computer Science, ETH Zentrum, Switzerland

    Jan Borchers

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  1. Satinder P. Gill
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  2. Jan Borchers
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Correspondence to Satinder P. Gill.

Additional information

This paper is a revised version of the paper “Knowledge in co-action: social intelligence in using surfaces for collaborative Design Tasks’, presented at the International Workshop on Social Intelligence Design, Royal Holloway College, London, 5–7 July 2003

An erratum to this article can be found at http:dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00146-003-0295-5

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Gill, S.P., Borchers, J. Knowledge in co-action: social intelligence in collaborative design activity . AI & Soc 17, 322–339 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-003-0286-6

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