Back to the Control Room: Managing Artistic Work

Control rooms have long been a key domain of investigation in HCI and CSCW as sites for understanding distributed work and fragmented settings, as well as the role and design of digital technologies in that work. Although research has tended to focus mainly on ‘command and control’ configurations, such as rail transport, ambulance dispatch, air traffic and CCTV rooms, centres of coordination shaped by artistic and performative concerns have much to contribute. Our study examines how a professional team of artists and volunteers stage manage and direct the performance of a mixed reality game from a central control room, with remote runners performing live video streaming from the streets nearby to online players. We focus on the work undertaken by team members to bring this about, exploring three key elements that enable it. First, we detail how team members oriented to the work as an artistic performance produced for an audience, how they produced compelling, varied content for online players, and how the quality of the work was ongoingly assessed. Second, we unpack the organisational hierarchy in the control room’s division of labour, and how this was designed to manage the challenges of restricted informational visibility there. Third, we explore the interactional accomplishment of the performance by looking at the role of radio announcements from the event’s director to orchestrate how the performance developed over time. Announcements were used to resolve trouble and provide instructions for avoiding future performative problems; but more centrally, to give artistic direction to runners in order to shape the performance itself. To close we discuss how this study of a performance impacts CSCW’s understandings of control room work, how the problem of ‘diffuse’ tasks like artistic work is co-ordinated, and how orientations towards quality as an artistic concern is manifest in / as control room practices. We also reflect on hierarchical and horizontal control room arrangements, and the role of video as both collaborative resource and product.Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council [grant numbers EP/G065802/1, EP/K025848/1, EP/M02315X/1, EP/T022493/1]

Disconnected Platforms, Networked Lives. Social bridging across fragmented payment systems in China

Money is increasingly accessed through multifunctional digital platforms via mobile payment and banking apps that offer various financial services, several of which integrate social media connectivity. In China, Alipay and WeChat Pay handle billions of transactions annually to the extent that physical cards and cash are rarely carried or used. These platforms have been described as ‘walled gardens’ because financial transfers cannot be made directly between them. While Alipay and WeChat Pay share similar transactional components, they differ in their financial products, constraints, interdependencies, and social media integrations, and each offers different interactional possibilities for users to meet their everyday financial needs. We examine how users navigate infrastructural payment problems, perform financial management across different platforms and accounts, deal with ‘trouble’ in making payments, and weave their social and financial lives across platforms to create interoperability between these otherwise disconnected services. Our analysis suggests these apps do not just initiate, record and track payments, but are actively configured by users through interconnected social, transactional, and money-management practices, and that user interactions and digital payment practices are shaped by complex socio-financial arrangements. We discuss the findings, drawing implications for designing social-financial interactions in bridging disconnected services.Mark Perry was supported by a Royal Society Kan Tong Po International Fellowship [KTP\R1\181004]. Part of this work was supported by an APSS Research Fund 2023 grant [P0046004] and APSS Research Cluster grant [P0052636] from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Wild interdisciplinarity: ethnography and computer science

© 2016 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Drawing on the experiences of a novel collaborative project between sociologists and computer scientists, this paper identifies a set of challenges for fieldwork that are generated by this wild interdisciplinarity. Public Access Wi-Fi Service was a project funded by an ‘in-the-wild’ research programme, involving the study of digital technologies within a marginalised community, with the goal of addressing digital exclusion. We argue that similar forms of research, in which social scientists are involved in the deployment of experimental technologies within real world settings, are becoming increasingly prevalent. The fieldwork for the project was highly problematic, with the result that few users of the system were successfully enrolled. We analyse why this was the case, identifying three sets of issues which emerge in the juxtaposition of interdisciplinary collaboration and wild setting. We conclude with a set of recommendations for projects involving technologists and social scientists.This research was supported by a research grant from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EP/K012703/1) and by Horizon Digital Economy Research, RCUK grant (EP/G065802/1)

The Organization of Turn-Taking in Pool Skate Sessions

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Research on Language and Social Interaction on 18th November 2015, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/08351813.2015.1090114.This study takes pool skating, where only one skater rides at a time, as an example of a turn-taking system, albeit one that is organized not through speech but through bodily actions. This allows us to revisit Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson’s (1974) famous “turn taking” paper—in particular, their initial broad conception of turn-taking systems as including activities other than the speech-exchange systems studied by conversation analysis. Despite the original declaration, non-speech turn-taking systems have evaded close scrutiny for the past four decades. By turning our attention to such a system here, this study makes two contributions: firstly, to the sociology of turn-organized activities (through a comparison of the central features of turn-taking for conversation with pool skating) and, secondly, to the study of how bodily actions can accomplish pre-beginnings (since in pool skate sessions, this is the place to settle the matter of turn allocation in order to avoid overlaps in riding)

News Interviews: Clayman and Heritage’s The News Interview

News interviews: Clayman and Heritage’s ‘The News Interview