HCC-Small: Human Micro-Coordination in a World of Pervasive Computing: Understanding Emotional, Personal, Interpersonal and Behavioral Interconnections

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This project in Human-Centered Computing is a study of micro-coordination and interactions with technology of young adults. It examines the emotional, personal, interpersonal and behavioral effects that technology design and use practices have on young adults in the course of solving micro-coordinational problems. The research will explore and evaluate the theory that (a) the fundamental experience of growing up in America today has been altered by what young people have not experienced but which earlier generations did experience, (b) these aspects of interaction are discounted in the public discourse about technology, (c) assumptions in the design of technology that contribute to these problems have not been sufficiently examined, and (d) ultimately the design of technologies can address some of the same problems to which it also contributes.To build a system architecture that accommodates complexity and richness, this research will use technology experimentally to create and solve palpable problems in the micro-coordination of interpersonal interaction. It will explore four themes intimately tied to social negotiation and coordination: (1) exerting social agency, (2) regulating interpersonal attention, (3) managing conflict, and (4) establishing the moral order. Each of these themes represents a kind of interpersonal challenge that children in the past have learned about through playground and street games. That is, children in the playground encounter situations in coordination and social negotiation that allow them to experiment taking agentic stances with respect to others and seeing the results. They witness the consequences of their actions for other people and they see how different stances make them feel about themselves. They may experience pride, shame, alienation, affiliation, comfort, achievement, and hatred. They hit the boundaries between self and other, rules and volition, individual and group, transgression and concession, over and over again. Previous work has shown that young adult populations, deprived of sustained, significant playground and street experiences during childhood, exhibit some unexpected behaviors, such as failing to take charge of creating meaningful coordinative experiences when the computer does not give them guidance. This research will examine changes to technologies that influence such behaviors by making the interactional challenges a direct focus, that is, a "seam" in the technology. The result is expected to be a much better picture of human micro-coordination in relationship to challenges in pervasive, distributed computing and the interconnections between behavior and emotional, personal, interpersonal states. Thus, the research will address the societal challenge of maintaining the skills for connectivity in an increasingly distracted, disconnected world.