1. technology and computing

Computer Supported Cooperative Work 11: 299–316, 2002.
© 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
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The Public Availability of Actions and Artefacts
TONI ROBERTSON
Faculty of Information Technology, University of Technology, Sydney, PO Box 123, Broadway, NSW
2007, Australia (E-mail: [email protected])
Abstract. This paper introduces and describes some concepts basic to a phenomenological understanding of human perception that is derived from the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty. His account
of the lived experience of the embodied subject, as the basis of both our experience in our world and
our agency in our actions within it, is consistent with the focus on designing CSCW technology for
flexible use that underlies so much of the recent work on awareness. My aim is to approach a complex
and difficult body of work from the perspective of technology design in order to extract from it some
relevant insights and theoretical principles that may, in turn, extend our understanding of what the
public availability of actions and artefacts means in virtual space and how it might be supported.
For Merleau-Ponty perception is active, embodied and always generative of meaning. This paper
prioritises the relations between awareness, perception and the public availability of actions and
artefacts because the challenge for designers of awareness resources for shared virtual spaces is that
if people are to be aware of anything, then it has to be explicitly made available to their perceptions
within those virtual spaces.
Key words: awareness, Merleau-Ponty, perception, phenomenology, public availability
Most computer interfaces are designed for people to pay attention to them.
But people deal with a complex environment by not attending to most of
it most of the time. It is important not to saturate people with things they
cannot ignore . . . On the other hand, people are very aware of what goes on
in their environment; without such awareness they would feel isolated. The
environment needs to be very rich with many things (including other people)
that could be attended to. The environment needs to signal the availability
of these things by tapping on people’s ability to peripherally process the nonattended parts of the environment so that they can redirect their attention when
appropriate.
Moran, T. and Anderson, R. (1990) The Workaday World as a Paradigm for
CSCW Design, p. 386, original emphasis.
The view of action that ethnomethodology recommends is neither behaviouristic, in any narrow sense of that term, nor mentalistic. It is not behaviouristic
in that it assumes that the significance of action is not reducible to uninterpreted bodily movements. Nor is it mentalistic, however, in that the significance of an action is taken to be based, in ways that are fundamental rather
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than secondary or epiphenomenal, in the physical and social world. The basic
premise is twofold: first, that what traditional behavioural sciences take to
be cognitive phenomena have an essential relationship to a publicly available,
collaboratively organised world of artefacts and actions, and secondly, that the
significance of artefacts and actions, and the methods by which their significance is conveyed, have an essential relationship to their particular, concrete
circumstances.
Suchman, L. (1987). Plans and Situated Actions, p. 50, my emphasis.
1. Introduction
In one of the classic papers of the CSCW literature, Moran and Anderson (1990)
wrote “We feel it should be possible for designers to explicate the grounds for
our design principles rather than leave them intuitive or implicit” (p. 383). Sandor,
Bogdan and Bowers (1997) acknowledged both the grounds for their own design
principles as well as the attention that awareness has received in CSCW research.
They noted that the “emphasis of much of this research is to provide an alternative way of supporting cooperative work to that found in, for example, workflow
systems . . . which often stipulate[s] how the contributions of different participants
are to be coordinated” (p. 221). Sandor et al. maintained that if the participants
in a cooperative process can be aware of what other people are doing, or have
done, then they have resources to coordinate their work themselves (ibid.). Put
more strongly, for my interests here, if the participants in a cooperative process can
be aware of what other people are doing, or have done, then the agency for structuring interaction and cooperative processes in the workplace can be claimed and
practiced by the people using the technology. This is a better solution to embedding
this agency within the technology itself because the potential always remains for
those who use the technology to assert, or reassert, their social agency within the
social institutions that they create and maintain through their work. Awareness,
then, is an important issue in CSCW because it ties into some of the fundamental
ethical questions of technology design that emerge from a focus on technology use
(Robertson, in press).
Phenomenologically motivated approaches to the understanding of cooperative work and the design of technology to support it have become the norm
for researchers concerned with supporting actual workplace activity. They have
developed from the recognition that it is the lived experience of the people who
will use technology in their work that needs to be understood if the technology to
support that work is to be robust, flexible and useable in the workplace. Moran and
Anderson (1990) maintained that any design paradigm is motivated by a philosophical orientation and “relies upon a set of relevant scientific disciplines” (p. 383).
They argued that an understanding of the distinctions between these disciplines
and their underlying philosophies can be useful for technology designers because it
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opens up possibilities to be much more creative and coherent in drawing from them
(ibid.). They suggested that a methodological use of phenomenology could enable
designers of CSCW technology to gain understanding of the practical activity and
commonsense reasoning involved in cooperative work (p. 385). Phenomenology
can be broadly defined as a philosophy of both existence and existential beginnings that prioritises experiential understandings and uses methods of relativistic
and ecologically descriptive analysis (Ihde, 1993; Macann, 1993; Lyotard, 1991;
Merleau-Ponty, 1968, 1962). Moran and Anderson (1990) defined a phenomenologically motivated design paradigm, the Workaday World, that was not intended
to be interpreted or used either as a scientific paradigm, or a technology-centred
one. Instead its value is its potential function as a heuristic for bringing forward the
important issues facing the designer (p. 382).
The profound contribution of work practice studies to the current interest in
awareness is demonstrated by their early recognition of the importance of publicly
available practices and artefacts to the accomplishment of cooperative work. Heath
and Luff (1991b) studied the collaborative work practices and procedures that
enabled coordination in a control room of the London Underground. They showed
how the railway timetable is not just an abstract description of the operation of
the service but its public availability meant that it was be used by the controllers to coordinate traffic flow and passenger movement (see also Luff, Heath and
Greatbatch, 1992, pp. 164–165). In a series of papers about the work of air traffic
controllers, researchers from Lancaster University exposed the complexity of the
interactions between the air traffic controllers and the technological artefacts they
use to coordinate their work (Hughes, Randall and Shapiro, 1992; Bentley, Hughes,
Randall, Rodden, Sawyer, Shapiro and Sommerville, 1992; Hughes Randall and
Shapiro, 1993; Harper and Hughes, 1993; Hughes, King, Rodden and Andersen,
1994). Hughes et al. (1992) recognised that much of the controllers’ knowledge
about what was happening depended on their active monitoring of their workplace, including the actions of their co-workers, changes in shared artefacts and
publicly available “at-a-glance” environmental information, such as the number,
colour and position of the flight progress control strips. These are small strips of
cardboard used to record details about a particular flight. The researchers showed
that automating the controllers’ work of actively organising and monitoring their
work environment would change their understanding about what was happening
that the controllers gained from doing this coordination work in the first place. The
analysis exposed how it is precisely this understanding that enabled the controllers
to safely coordinate the movement of planes (see also Bentley et al., 1992).
Within the awareness literature, Pedersen and Sokoler (1997) relied on an
explicitly phenomenological approach to understanding awareness: “The kind of
awareness we are after is our ability to maintain and constantly update a sense of
our social and physical context. We do so in an apparently effortless manner and
without being aware that we do so” (p. 51). This statement demonstrates vividly
the slipperiness of meaning that is evident in the usages of the term awareness in
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CSCW. It is something that is desirable for us to have without consciously knowing,
or even noticing, that we have it. The authors resolved this potential contradiction
by arguing for a phenomenological reading of awareness that would enable them
to avoid the problems that arise because “Awareness, like attention, is one of the
tricky and dangerous terms in psychology, easily leading to circular arguments”
(ibid.). Their comment that “further studies of more theoretical nature may prove
useful in our design” (p. 52) is particularly relevant to my current project.
Phenomenological approaches, such as the Workaday World paradigm (Moran
and Andersen, 1990), participatory design (Bødker, Knudsen, Kyng, Ehn and
Madsen, 1988), ethnomethodology and particularly situated action (Suchman,
1987), have played a major role in the shaping and progress of CSCW research.
But these phenomenological perspectives have not been matched by a consistent
rethinking, from the perspective of technology design and use, of related theoretical
concepts of human activity, such as perception and awareness, that are implicated
by their adoption. In particular, although the importance of human perception to
the design of CSCW technology has been widely, even explicitly recognised, there
has been little consistent attention given to understanding just what kind of activity
human perception is (for some exceptions see Heath and Luff, 1991a; Gaver, 1991,
1992; Heath, Luff and Sellen, 1995; Robertson, 1997; 2000). Recognising this lack
of attention provides some insight into the variations of meaning apparent in the
usage of awareness as a concept in CSCW.
This paper introduces and describes some concepts basic to a phenomenological understanding of perception. Taking my motivation both from Moran and
Anderson’s (1990) recognition of the value of designers’ understandings of the
philosophies underlying their disciplines, and from the commitment of researchers
working with awareness to “finding alternative ways to supporting cooperative
work” (Sandor et al., 1997, p. 221), I want to articulate the theoretical foundations
for an understanding of human perception from a phenomenological perspective
that privileges the lived experience of those perceiving. In particular, my aim is to
prioritise the relations between perception, awareness and the public availability of
“things in the environment” (Moran and Anderson, 1990, p. 386) and to consider
how this public availability shapes the potential support that environment can
provide for participants in a cooperative process.
The paper is structured as follows: in the body of the paper I describe an
understanding of human perception that is derived from the phenomenology of
Merleau-Ponty (1962, 1964, 1968). His account of the lived experience of the
embodied subject, as the basis of both our experience in our world and our agency
in our actions within it, is consistent with the focus on designing CSCW technology
for flexible use that underlies so much of the recent work on awareness. My goal
in this part of the paper is to approach a complex and difficult body of work from
the perspective of technology design. The relevant insights and theoretical principles from this process might prove useful to our understanding of how actions
and artefacts in virtual space can be made publicly available to those who act
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in these spaces. My hope is that filtering Merleau-Ponty’s work from a CSCW
design perspective might make a phenomenological understanding of perception
and awareness more accessible to technology designers, who can, in turn, use this
understanding to shape their own design decisions. I end the paper with some
reflections on the implications of a phenomenologically motivated methodology
for supporting awareness in virtual spaces.
For participants in a cooperative process to be aware of anything, it must be
publicly available to them. And the public availability of anything is dependent
on its perceivability. Public availability, central to so many studies of work practice and defining of the workaday world, situated action and awareness, calls for
a consideration not just of human perception but also an understanding of how
human perception relates to the way in which the significance of artefacts and
actions is negotiated and conveyed in practice. The term, as it is used here, is
intended to convey something more than perceivability so as to include aspects of
the potential communicative function of specific actions and artefacts in particular
situations over time. Of particular relevance in any discussion of awareness is the
fact that the actual significance of artefacts and actions moves constantly, over
time, along a continuum stretching from warranting full attention to something
“that could be attended to” (Moran and Anderson, 1990, p. 386). It is the latter
that we need only to be aware of; by definition whether we then attend to it or not
depends entirely on our choices in specific contexts, including specific moments
of time. Moreover, the significance of the same artefacts and actions is negotiated
in different ways for different people embodied within the same workplace. The
public availability of a “collaboratively organised world of artefacts and actions”
(Suchman, 1987, p. 50) is my starting point here because it enables the communicative potential of actions and artefacts within any shared environment. In turn,
it is this communicative function of action that enables people to engage in the
full range of cooperative activities upon which any coordination of work depends
(Robertson, 1997, 2000). People can only shape their own actions so that they are
meaningful in relation to those of others if the ongoing activity is publicly available
to each of the participants; that is to say, if they can be aware of it.
2. Perception as Lived Cognition
The focus of any phenomenological account of perception must, by definition, be
directed to gaining an understanding of perception as it is lived. It can not be limited
to, or even give priority to, an observer’s account. For a phenomenologist it makes
no sense to speak of perception, cognition and motor action, as if these are quite
different activities with some definable boundary between them. This is not how
they are lived. We do not perceive the world in front of us, like a picture. We
are in it. Nor can perception be reduced to uninterpreted sensory input as it is
commonly represented in diagrams of light bouncing off an object onto the retina of
an externally observed viewer; nor in the more common cognitivist view, as passive
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and uninterpreted input into an information processing brain. Merleau-Ponty wrote
“Nothing goes from things to the eyes, and from the eyes to vision” (1964, p. 132).
Cognitivist explanations of perception cannot support the richness of analysis that
we need to understand why, and in what ways, public availability is so central to
awareness as it is lived.
In this section I want to explore important concepts from Merleau-Ponty’s
phenomenology of perception that do provide this richness. The first is his analysis
of perception as active, embodied and always generative of meaning; perception
is not some private, inner representation of some public, outer world but instead
a practical and material involvement in that world (Williams and Bendelow, 1998,
pp. 52–53). The second is the interconnection of skilful action and perception; our
bodies determine what is available to us in our world in different ways according
to their specific history. The third is his analysis of the two, always intertwined,
aspects of our embodiment; our bodies are physical structures available to our own
and others’ perceptions at the same time as they are lived by us as our thinking and
acting selves. Finally, his notion of reversibility provides a name for the complex
intertwining between the perceiver, the perceived and the physical environment that is the essential condition for our interaction with the world and with
others.
2.1. PERCEPTION AS THE MEANS OF CONNECTION BETWEEN A BODY AND
THE WORLD
Merleau-Ponty insisted on the ontological and epistemological primacy of our
perceptual experience. Much of his work is directed towards understanding how
we can simultaneously constitute the meaning and structures of experience yet find
that these are already constituted by meanings we have not given them. In other
words, how it is that we can act and create meaning in an already existing social
and physical world? Put crudely, Merleau-Ponty’s explanation rests on his account
of human embodiment and how the human body immerses itself, spatially and
temporally, in its lived world. This immersion is both constituted and maintained
by perception. For Merleau-Ponty a theory of the body is always “already a theory
of perception” because he does not conceive of bodies as objects in the world but
as our sole means of communication with it (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 92). For
Merleau-Ponty perception is always an active, embodied process that is generative
of meaning. Meaning does not come after perception but is, in the first instance,
achieved by it. This is why perception is defining of lived cognition; it belongs to
neither body nor mind but is constitutive of both.
Perception always has a perspective. As an active process, it goes outwards into
the world, from someone who is always somewhere at a specific point in time,
taking hold of whatever is available in the environment that is already meaningful
to that individual. This is how we have the capacity for peripheral awareness of
anything in the first place; if we are to recognise something, then we need to already
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know what it is. But because people live as individual bodies with specific histories,
what is already meaningful to each will depend on their history; shared understandings must always assume, or be provided by, common experiences. Over time, as
it is lived by any particular person, the meanings generated during perception are
continually shaped by what has been lived before, or as Merleau-Ponty described
perception as it is lived, “It is like a net with its knots showing up more and more
clearly” (p. 12). It is these knots that I associate with awareness because they enable
the significance of something in the environment to be grasped by the activity of
perception itself; that is to say as part of the ongoing, normal activity of a particular
person immersing themselves, moment by moment, in their lived world.
2.2. PERCEPTION AS EMBODIED SKILL
Dreyfus (1996, pp. 1–2) identified three different understandings of embodiment
in Merleau-Ponty’s work that each contribute to the acquisition of embodied skills.
The first fundamentally structures how the world is available to people; interestingly Merleau-Ponty described it in the context of how the structure of the body
shapes the boundaries of human freedom (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, pp. 434–456). It
relates to the actual shape and innate capacities of the human body; bodies have
two arms with hands that can move in certain ways, two legs, eyes and ears with
specific sensitivities, a certain size, gender, weight, a front and back and so on.
“In so far as I have hands, feet, a body, I sustain around me intentions which are
not dependent upon my decisions and which affect my surroundings in a way I
do not choose” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 440). The second recognises that over
time, but particularly when we are very young, we learn how to refine the use of
these primary actions and capacities and become skilled in their doing. “[The body]
manifests through them a core of new significance: this is true of motor habits
such as dancing” (ibid., p. 146). Finally, Merleau-Ponty argued that the acquired
cultural skills that immerse us in our cultural worlds also correlate with our bodies.
Dreyfus (1996, p. 1) used the example of knowing that a letter box is for posting
letters. This is not based just on body structure, nor even structure plus a universally
acquired human skill, but also requires experience with letter boxes and posting
letters. Successfully using information technology, including virtual workspaces,
is another example of an acquired cultural skill. As we refine our various embodied
skills for coping with whatever comes along that requires our skilful response, that
is to say, as we learn, we encounter increasingly more finely discriminated claims
for our actions (Dreyfus, 1996, p. 1). Our relations to the world are transformed
as we acquire skills from acting within it and these skills, in turn, will shape how
situations show up for us as requiring our response (ibid.).
A phenomenology of skill poses particular challenges for designers of CSCW
technology, including those exploring the concept of awareness. Dourish, Adler,
Bellotti and Henderson (1996) reported the experiences of two pairs of researchers
who worked for long periods of time with audio/visual connections between their
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offices (see also Adler and Henderson, 1994). This study documented communicative practices that evolved as the researchers became more familiar with the
technology. Most importantly, for the concerns of this paper, the researchers
reported that they adapted their perceptions over time in response to some of the
transformations of their actions that the technology produced, including those identified by Heath and Luff (1991). They learned to distinguish between themselves
and the images of themselves on the video screen and to act accordingly. Eventually
they learned how to organise their own actions, such as gesture, and to perceive
other’s actions, such as gazing, so that their communicative impact was retained.
A major conclusion of the study was that mediated interaction can be regarded
as a developed skill. The skill is the organisation of action and perception so that
they match the physical properties of virtual spaces. The reported experiences of
Dourish et al. confirm Merleau-Ponty’s insight that over time, as it is lived by
a particular individual, the meanings generated during perception are continually
shaped by what has been lived before (Merleau-Ponty, 1962). Put very simply,
perception is learned, embodied, skilful action. So is awareness. Awareness can
never be a “property” of a virtual workspace, nor can any technology “produce” it.
Awareness can only be achieved by the skilful activity of participants in a shared
space if the resources they have learned to recognise, and therefore understand, are
publicly available to them.
2.3. PERCEPTION IS ALWAYS SELF - PERCEPTION
Merleau-Ponty emphasised that at the same time as we live our bodies, as our acting
selves, our bodies are physical objects in the world that are publicly available to
our perceptions and the perceptions of others. He called these two aspects of human
embodiment “the body as sensible” (as in available to the senses) and “the body as
sentient” (1968, p. 136). It is our sentient body, as a lived experiential body that,
through our awareness and control of our perceivable body, is able to act in ways
that are situated. Merleau-Ponty considered that in the life of any particular person,
these two aspects of human embodiment are differentiated from each other but they
are definitely not related by a traditional opposition. There is no either/or relationship here. Instead the two aspects of human embodiment are profoundly enveloped
in each other; he described their relationship to be as close as that “between the sea
and the strand” (1968, pp. 131–132) that, by definition, involves a continual ebb
and flow that constantly produces and softens the boundaries between them. This
ebb and flow is enabled by the overlap between our different senses; we can see
ourselves being touched at the same time as we feel it, and we can both see and
feel our bodily movements. The fact that we are able to perceive at least some of
our own bodily surfaces at the same time as we live our perceiving bodies, is an
important one for the concerns of this paper. It is the reason why we can recognise
and understand others’ actions by the same process that we shape our own actions
for their interpretation by others.
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Merleau-Ponty argued that each individual develops, through social relations
with others, a body image that he defined as a total awareness of our own posture in
the intersensory world (pp. 99–100) and, more actively, as “a way of stating that my
body is in-the-world” (p. 101). He maintained that it is this sense of orientation of
a lived body in the physical environment, in relation to other bodies, that provides
a perspective on the world that makes a human body into an active human subject
capable of social agency and institution-shaping behaviour (Gatens, 1996, p. 70).
This point is crucial to the design and use of technology that provides a shared
virtual space to support remote cooperation. The technology has to mediate this
orientation of a lived body in a specific physical space to other lived bodies in
different, yet equally specific, physical spaces. It is a fact of human embodiment
that individual participants in any cooperative activity will always be acting in their
local physical space. Some actions may be enabled by the technology, others will
not. But all will occur within any individual’s immediate physical environment. To
contribute to the group activity, any individual’s action has to be available to the
perceptions of any of the participants in that activity for whom that action might
potentially be relevant and so must be both represented in, and mediated by, the
shared virtual workspace. At stake in this representation and mediation is not just
the success of the collaboration but the very basis whereby the subjectivity, or
identity, of each of the participants is achieved in the interaction.
I am increasingly convinced of the importance of the roles that the representations of activity in virtual space play in the ongoing development of the capacities
for self-definition and social agency enjoyed by those whose interaction is mediated by technology. Publicly available resources for awareness are at the heart of
these capacities. The questions that need to be asked about such resources centre
around awareness of what and what for? There is a difference between providing
resources for awareness to support work activities that are not defined by the
participants in the interaction and providing resources for awareness of activities
that are defined by and controlled by those participants. Different kinds of capacities for action can be supported by different resources for awareness and, as ethics
is about actions, these are ethical questions (Jonas, 1973). It is beyond the scope
of this paper to pursue these issues further. But if designers are to take seriously
Moran and Anderson’s (1990) call for making our design principles explicit, then
accounting for the purpose of various kinds of awareness resources in terms of the
capacities for self-definition and social agency they engender, is basic to any ethics
of awareness (for a more thorough discussion of ethical issues that emerge in the
design of cooperative work see Robertson, in press).
2.4. THE REVERSIBILITY OF PERCEPTION
For Merleau-Ponty, the body’s presence to itself as both perceiving and perceived
at the same time, for any single moment of perception, provides us with our
fundamental knowledge in which the self, the world and other people are consti-
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tuted. Instead of conceptualising the perceiver and the perceived as opposite and
exclusive terms, as is implicit in the use of the more familiar term reciprocity, he
introduced the term reversibility to describe the relations between them (MerleauPonty, 1968). Reversibility requires the continual intertwining of the two aspects
of embodiment, the body as an object in the world, that we perceive and others
perceive, and the sentient body as it is lived by an particular person (ibid.). Reversibility also includes within its meaning a recognition that the physical world and
the physical body are made of the same stuff; Merleau-Ponty actually refers to this
common stuff as flesh and describes the relations between the physical objects,
including our bodies, and the physical world using the anatomical term chiasm,
meaning a crossing over or intersection (ibid.). Merleau-Ponty uses the metaphor
of the flesh of the world to refer to the perceivability of the physical world that is
not created by human perception but in practice “made active by it” (Cataldi, 1993,
p. 61). Reversibility therefore implies a far more profound understanding of perception than is contained within the more common term, reciprocity. Reciprocity has
been used in the CSCW literature to denote the principle “if you can see me, I can
see you” (e.g. Fish, Kraut, Root and Rice, 1992; Cool, Fish, Kraut and Lowery
1992, p. 26; Sellen, 1992; Bly, Harrison and Irwin, 1993, p. 45; Tang and Rua,
1994; Prinz, 1999). As a design principle, reciprocity requires that any person being
perceived can themselves perceive who is perceiving them. But reciprocity does not
require, as reversibility does, that as an inseparable part of any single perceptual
act the person being perceived can perceive not just that they are being perceived
but how they are being perceived by others. An individual has to simultaneously be
both perceiver and perceived of their own actions as well as the perceiver of others’
actions if those actions are to fulfil a communicative role that is controlled by the
participants in the interaction. Moreover, as Grosz (1994) recognised, MerleauPonty is making a much stronger claim about perception than that every person
who sees is capable of being seen by others. She argued that his understanding
of perception is ontological rather than interpersonal in that the “attribution of
visibility as well as vision to the seer . . . is a claim regarding the seer’s mode
of material existence” (p. 101).
Reversibility is an important concept for technology intended to support remote
cooperation because reversibility is a fact of embodiment in physical space because
of the material properties of our bodies and the physical world in which we are
embedded. Reversibility does not hold in virtual space where the public availability
of actions and artefacts does not rely on their being made of the same stuff but on
their transformation and representation by the mediating technology. Here, then, I
suspect is the crux of the dilemma faced by designers of CSCW technology. People
and physical space are made of the same stuff, but people and virtual space are not.
Moreover, the fact that perceivability is basic to the definition of this common stuff
highlights just how daunting a challenge faces technology designers. The challenge
is to enable alternative relations between people and the perceivability of actions
and artefacts in virtual spaces without this common stuff. The phenomenology of
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skill, examined above, offers us insights into resolving this dilemma. “Sometimes,
finally, the meaning aimed at cannot be achieved by the body’s natural means; it
must then build itself an instrument, and it projects thereby around itself a cultural
world” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 146). According to Merleau-Ponty it is our body
image, that is, our awareness of our own posture in the intersensory world (1968,
p. 99), that allows us to act purposefully within this cultural world – providing the
resources that we need to project ourselves and our activities into a virtual world
are available to us and we are able to use them. In virtual spaces each of these
resources, and their various parts, need to be explicitly designed and built in such
a way that they can be made publicly available within the specific structures and
organising principles of the technology and, at the same time, be publicly available
to the lived perceptions, existing understandings and ongoing activities of those
who act in those spaces.
But if designers of virtual spaces are to build cultural worlds for embodied
users to successfully project themselves into, they need to rely on the abstractions, the geometry and the algorithms that derive from the positivist, objectifying
perspective of traditional computer science and mathematics. This perspective has
traditionally been considered the opposite of the phenomenological approach to
technology design that I have argued for here. Put crudely, this opposition pits the
observer’s perspective against that of the participants who become the observed
rather than the initiators and interpreters of their own experiences. It would seem
then, that in the design of resources to support awareness, this opposition needs to
be rethought in a similar way to that between the perceiving and perceived human
subject. Both need to exist enveloped in each other; they are not the same, nor
are they in opposition. The ebb and flow between them needs to be supported by
ensuring that human activities in virtual worlds are shaped by the participants and
are neither directed, nor constrained, by the algorithms that create that world, the
various objects within it and, most importantly, the kinds of relations that can exist
between them.
3. Discussion
Merleau-Ponty sought to account for how we could act and create meaning in an
already existing social and physical world. The same question needs to be asked
in already existing social and virtual worlds. Except that the “already existing”
in these cases refer to worlds that are, though by no means virtual primordial
soup, still ambiguous, experimental and often unfamiliar ones. Designers can
only assume already existing skills and shared understandings that have been
developed within the perceptual resources provided by physical space. Nevertheless, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception can provide useful, motivated
and noncontradictory heuristics for designers of CSCW technology (Moran and
Andersen, 1990, p. 382). Some of these have already been discussed in this paper.
In this final section I want to reflect more broadly on some of the implications
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of a phenomenologically motivated approaches to supporting awareness in virtual
spaces.
Perhaps the potentially most productive point to come from a focus on perception as it is lived is that perception is learned. This is why the phenomenon of
awareness is possible at all. Merleau-Ponty’s metaphor for embodied perception,
the “net with its knots showing up more and more clearly” as we learn (1962,
p. 12), encourages the exploitation of these “knots” by recognising those that
already exist and are common to people who have shared the same physical world,
as well as those common to people who have shared similar social and cultural
experiences. In these early stages of the development of shared virtual workspaces
identifying and exploiting existing “knots” may be more productive than trying
to make new ones in unfamiliar environments and work practices. Designers have
clearly followed this heuristic intuitively if not via any philosophically-motivated
methodology; it is no coincidence that sounds of tea or coffee being made (Gaver,
1991), pictures of coffee cups (Fitzpatrick, Mansfield, Kaplan, Arnold, Phelps and
Segall, 1999) and associated already familiar representations of opportunities for
socialising were the first developed awareness resources. But the recognition that
these “knots” develop by learning, over time, explains why people have learned
to exploit publicly available cues that signify predictable changes in familiar
processes, whether explicitly formalised or not, to stay aware of what is going on in
their workspace (Fuchs, Pankoke-Babatz and Prinz, 1995; Grinter, 1997). In these
cases people have learned for themselves the significance of these cues in relation
to something that they already know. It also seems to be the case that the reported
effectiveness of event notification services stems from their ability to make publicly
available information about changes in already understood activities and artefacts
within both the physical and virtual aspects of a shared environment (Fuchs et al.,
1995; Ramduny, Dix and Rodden, 1998; Fitzpatrick et al., 1999; Fuchs 1999; Prinz,
1999).
Awareness must be one of the most extensively qualified concepts in CSCW.
Reflecting on the use of early media spaces, Bly et al. (1993) observed that their
most powerful use was peripheral awareness of the ongoing activities at the distant
place (p. 34). They reported that this led them to consider “whether awareness
of people and activities in a working group had value that was independent of
other mechanisms that might be available for collaboration” (p. 41). By 1996,
Gutwin identified workspace, organisational, situation, informal, social and structural as qualifiers for awareness (p. 1). Pedersen and Sokoler (1997) distinguished
between intentional and unintentional awareness (p. 53) and we have also seen
synchronous awareness (Edwards and Mynatt, 1997), user awareness (Ramduny
et al., 1997), activity awareness (Nomura, Hayashi, Hazama and Gudmundson,
1998; 1999), task-oriented awareness (Prinz, 1999), cross-application awareness
(Fuchs, 1999) and presence awareness (Godefroid, Herbsleb, Jagadeesan and Li,
199). In turn awareness has been itself used as a qualifier of awareness widgets
(Gutwin, Roseman and Greenberg, 1996), awareness functions, dynamic aware-
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311
ness scopes, awareness nodes and awareness presentation schema (Hayashi et al.,
1999), awareness frameworks and infrastructure (Fuchs, 1999), horizontal and
vertical awareness bars (Olsen, Hudson, Phelps, Heiner and Verratti, 2000) and
even awareness moments (Nardi, Whittaker and Bradner, 2000).
There are at least two reasons for this bewildering array of usage of the term
awareness. One is that different understandings of awareness are themselves an
artefact of the different philosophies and understandings of human perception and
interaction that different designers either implicitly or explicitly embed within their
designs. These different understandings are reflected in the degree to which awareness is considered an achievement of people or a property of the technology. The
second results from the fact that technology designers have to explicitly design and
build into their technology the perceivability that is a prerequisite of public availability and that is common to people and objects within physical space. Technology
can only provide resources for awareness because specific and separate functions
are explicitly designed and implemented, whereas people perceive because that is
how we embed ourselves in our world. In practice this produces a shifting meaning
in the term awareness depending on whether it is being used to refer to a particular
aspect of human behaviour or to describe the functionality of specific technology.
This shift masks a slippage between claims about the behaviour of people and the
behaviour of machines that risks reducing the former to the latter. A review paper
that mapped the awareness literature along these two dimensions of underlying
design philosophy and social and/or technical focus would be a useful guide to
those seeking to understand the different usages of the term.
My argument here is that a phenomenological perspective grounded in the
recognition that lived cognition depends on a “publicly available, collaboratively
organised world of artefacts and actions” (Suchman, 1987, p. 50) can provide a
common theoretical foundation for designers who want to privilege the agency
of their users by providing resources for awareness in their systems. If anything
in a shared workspace is to be used by the participants as a resource for them to
coordinate their activities then it will need to be publicly available to them. This
means, on the one hand, that anything that is perceivable (including changes over
time) in a shared virtual workspace can potentially be used by the participants as
a resource for awareness, whether originally intended by the designers or not. On
the other, designers populating their workspaces with artefacts, actions, and actors
can explicitly and deliberately consider how this population can be aware of each
other. Public availability is not passive.
Efforts to integrate resources to support awareness at fundamental levels of
technology design are evident in the literature, particularly in various reports on
the spatial model and extensions to it (Benford and Greenhalgh, 1997; Benford,
Greenhalgh, Bowers, Snowdon and Fahlen, 1995; Rodden, 1996; Sandor et al.,
1997) and on the use of event notification services (Fuchs et al., 1995; Ramduny
et al., 1998; Fitzpatrick et al., 1999; Fuchs 1999; Prinz, 1999). Some of the objects
in virtual environments are the embodiments of people. The phenomenological
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understanding of perception described in this paper stresses the fact that people
are sentient bodies at the same time as they are available to the perceptions of
themselves and others; perception is always self-perception. I have argued elsewhere that a basic principle in the design of technology to support cooperative
work over distance is that the perception by others of any individual’s actions needs
to be explicitly regarded as part of the same process, or act of perception, as that
individual’s perception of their own actions (Robertson, 1997, 2000). This would
indicate that some mechanism to enable self-perception, or awareness of their own
actions in the shared space, could be included to improve support for interaction
between people represented within virtual spaces.
In an early and influential paper on awareness, Dourish and Bellotti (1992)
argued that “awareness information is always required to coordinate group activities” (p. 107). The phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty is useful to designers of
awareness-oriented systems because his account of human perception is rooted
in the ontological primacy of social actors over social systems (Williams and
Bendelow, 1998, p. 5). His approach privileges the social agency of those acting
in the world to shape that world rather than find their behaviour bound by the
procedures and institutions that they find always already in it. He wrote “In the
natural attitude, I do not have perceptions, I do not posit this object beside that
one, along with their objective relationships, I have a flow of experiences which
imply and explain each other both simultaneously and successively” (MerleauPonty, 1962, p. 280). The efforts of technology designers to provide shared spaces
with resources for creating and maintaining awareness are important if we are to
be able live this “flow of experiences” in virtual spaces. The important point is that
while it is cultural skills that enable people to work together in virtual worlds these
skills are always embodied perceptual skills and perception is still the way that the
human body immerses itself in its lived world, whatever that world is made of.
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