Volume 23, Issue 1 - Special Issue Section on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) – Past, Present and Future; Guest Editors: Michael Prilla, Alexander Richter, Michael Koch

In 1994, Jonathan Grudin wrote his famous paper Eight Challenges for Groupware Developers; The question is whether these challenges still persist, or have we moved on here 30 years later? We revisit the challenges empirically through ethnographic observations in two companies examining their work practices, organizational structure, and cooperative setups concerning their use of groupware technologies. Today, groupware is seamlessly integrated into organizations, considered essential infrastructure that becomes part of the daily work routine. Contextualizing the original challenges proposed by Grudin, we categorize them into cooperative challenges, social challenges, and organizational challenges, and refine their phrasings to reflect present and future considerations faced by developers of groupware technologies. While the main arguments of the social and organizational challenges remain consistent, we rephrase the cooperative challenges as emergent exception handling and exaggerated accessibility to reflect the emerging characteristics associated with the ubiquity and seamless integration of groupware.

As work is shifting and changing, we, CSCW researchers, must consider our role in creating work futures, and what experiences we want to produce through technology design. What qualities are important to consider about the human experience when designing work technologies for the future? Exploring the potentials of artistic practices for epistemological inquiry, we demonstrate Research through Art as a novel futuring approach for CSCW research, leveraging the power of artistic practice for exploring questions of human experience. We engaged with young artists who created art pieces that manifested their hopes, intuitions, and anxieties on the future of work . Our analytical inquiry of these artistic practices allowed us to explore what different futures might be imaginable and what might these futures feel like. We find that futuring entails engaging with ambiguities, which can be a productive resource for design. We identified the ambiguities of time, purpose, body, identity, and agency as foundational for the imaginaries produced by the artists. By intersecting the ambiguities, we can begin to systematically frame novel design questions for CSCW technologies of the future by conceptualizing these ambiguities as multifinalities – single points from which many possibilities emerge.

This paper describes an empirical user study with 24 participants during collaborative decision-making at large wall displays. The main objective of the user study is to analyze combinations of mid-air pointing gestures with other gestures or gaze. Particularly, we investigate gesture sequences (having pointing gestures as an initiator gesture) and gaze-pointing gesture misalignments. Our results show that most pointing gestures are part of gesture sequences and more precise gestures lead to touch gestures on the wall display, likely because they are associated with precise concepts. Regarding combinations of pointing gestures and gaze, misalignments often happen when users touch the display to make a change and want to observe the effect of that change on another display. The analyses conducted as part of this study clarify which natural awareness cues are more frequent in face-to-face collaboration, so that appropriate choices can be made regarding the transmission of equivalent cues to a remote location.

We begin this conceptual paper, by outlining three recent developments in the context of the changing the nature of work: (1) the increasing proportion of remote work, (2) the quickly expanding use of (generative) AI applications, and (3) the growing advancements in virtual world technologies and platforms. We argue that the synthesis of these developments will vastly impact traditional work models and practices. This transformation warrants a critical rethinking of the traditional understanding of hybrid work which, so far, has predominantly focused on the spectrum of in-person and remote work. We suggest adjusting this perspective and posit grand challenges and related research questions in order to do so.

The study of gaze tracking is a significant research area in computer vision. It focuses on real-world applications and the interface between humans and computers. Recently, new eye-tracking applications have boosted the need for low-cost methods. The eye region is a crucial aspect of tracking the direction of the gaze. In this paper, several new methods have been proposed for eye-tracking by using methods to determine the eye area as well as find the direction of gaze. Unmodified webcams can be used for eye-tracking without the need for specialized equipment or software. Two methods for determining the eye region were used: facial landmarks or the Haar cascade technique. Moreover, the direct method, based on the convolutional neural network model, and the engineering method, based on distances determining the iris region, were used to determine the eye’s direction. The paper uses two engineering techniques: drawing perpendicular lines on the iris region to identify the gaze direction junction point and dividing the eye region into five regions, with the blackest region representing the gaze direction. The proposed network model has proven effective in determining the eye’s gaze direction within limited mobility, while engineering methods improve their effectiveness in wide mobility.

With more people living physically separated from beloved ones, technologies which support relatedness over distance can play an important role for wellbeing. For this purpose, these so-called relatedness technologies use different strategies such as awareness of the other’s activities, simulating physical proximity, or joint action. It appears that only few research concepts turn into commercial concepts or are actually adopted in everyday life. Also, published concepts often show a lack of theoretical foundations and systematic exploration of relevant factors for acceptance and user experience. The present research aims to provide a better theoretical basis for the research and development of relatedness technologies by combining theory from psychology and HCI with empirical insights from four focus groups ( n  = 21). As a result, we present a UX factors-checklist consisting of motivators, hygiene factors, and meta topics that can be used when designing and evaluating relatedness technologies in order to ensure actual use and a positive user experience and highlight next research steps.

In the future, cognitive activity will be tracked in the same way how physical activity is tracked today. Eye-tracking technology is a promising off-body technology that provides access to relevant data for cognitive activity tracking. For building cognitive state models, continuous and longitudinal collection of eye-tracking and self-reported cognitive state label data is critical. In a field study with 11 students, we use experience sampling and our data collection system esmLoop to collect both cognitive state labels and eye-tracking data. We report descriptive results of the field study and develop supervised machine learning models for the detection of two eye-based cognitive states: cognitive load and flow. In addition, we articulate the lessons learned encountered during data collection and cognitive state model development to address the challenges of building generalizable and robust user models in the future. With this study, we contribute knowledge to bring eye-based cognitive state detection closer to real-world applications.