Special issue on user-centred design and evaluation of ubiquitous groupware

In the 1970s and 1980s, most work on supporting group and teamwork by means of computer technology focused on supporting decision processes for groups of people being physically together. With the advent of network technology, the focus shifted towards supporting group and teamwork at a distance and indeed for many people CSCW has become synonymous with supporting distributed collaboration, both synchronous and a-synchronous. Recently, with the advent of perceptual technologies (mainly computer vision, speech recognition), research projects have emerged that again focus on co-located collaboration. Today, the ambition is to develop systems that are able to perceive what is going on and to provide meaningful services to the group or team. The European Commission sponsors two large projects in this area: computers in the human interaction loop (CHIL, see http://chil.server.de) and augmented multi-party interaction (AMI, see http:// www.amiproject.org/). In the US, DARPA sponsors the project Cognitive Agent that Learns and Organizes (CALO, http://www.cse.ogi.edu/CHCC/Projects/CALO/ main.html). Canada has its Network for Effective Collaboration Technologies through Advanced Research (NECTAR, see http://www.nectar-research.net), which among other things focuses on the use of perceptual technologies to support collaboration. These projects have a strong technology focus and aim primarily at developing the perceptual and cognitive technologies and building demonstrators exemplifying the range of services that become possible through these technologies. However, from a design point of view, a strong technology focus raises two important issues. In the first place, in order to guide technology development so that our efforts will in the end provide services that are in fact useful and meaningful to society, we need to take a human-centred approach. In the second place, once we have service prototypes available, we need to assess the alleged benefits that those services provide. For instance, the CHIL project has chosen meetings and lectures (or rather seminars) as its application domain and aims to provide services that help people to increase the productivity of their meetings or seminars. Questions are then raised as to what services would be useful in those contexts and how we can measure the productivity of people in meetings and seminars and the acceptance of these services. On the one hand, we feel that people have much experience with meetings and seminars, and have tuned the existing tools (such as pen and paper) and communicative strategies to optimize their productivity in such contexts. From this perspective, one should be extremely cautious to introduce computer technology in these contexts, since interacting with the services and applications may easily monopolize attention and distract people from their primary activity, and may therefore interfere with people’s existing work practices instead of enhancing them. On the other hand, there is the widespread J. Terken (&) Faculteit Industrial Design, Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, Eindhoven, The Netherlands e-mail: j.m.b.terken@tue.nl