Sean Rintel

Microsoft · Human Experience and Design

This paper reports on how asynchronous mobile video messaging presents users with a challenge to doing 'being ordinary'. 53 participants from three countries were recruited to try Skype Qik at launch for two weeks. Some participants embraced Skype Qik as a gift economy, emphasizing a special relationship enacted through crafted self-presentation. H...

The concept of omnirelevance in Membership Categorisation Analysis refers to participants invoking categories that reflexively treat the understanding of particular interactional moments as controlled by the context of the current activity. This concept is of fundamental value to the analysis of computer-mediated communication (CMC), as it relates...

Sonic Atomic Interaction Radio (SonicAIR) is an ambient awareness technology probe designed to explore how connecting the soundscapes of friends or family members might reduce the isolation of seniors living independently. At its core, SonicAIR instruments kitchen activity sites to produce an always-on real-time aural representation of remote domes...

Crisis memes are the ghoulish and satirical posts that spread through social media concurrently with serious journalistic reportage. They are folk productions that respond to challenging events based on thematic and structural templates of popular online image macros. This article explores how templatability is relevant to the underpinnings, develo...

Hybrid meetings limit inclusion for remote participants. The Hybridge experimental system provides different interfaces for remote and room endpoints, focusing on improving inclusion via shared spatiality and remote agency. In-room participants see remotes on displays around a table, and remotes see video integrated into a digital twin. Remotes can...

Generative AI tools can help users with many tasks. One such task is data analysis, which is notoriously challenging for non-expert end-users due to its expertise requirements, and where AI holds much potential, such as finding relevant data sources, proposing analysis strategies, and writing analysis code. To understand how data analysis workflows...

With the shift to hybrid meetings in work spaces, there is an increasing need to create a more inclusive hybrid meeting experience where people meeting together in a room interact with those joining remotely. This paper describes a design exploration, implementation, and evaluation of Perspectives, a novel hybrid meeting system that aimed to create...

In recent years virtual meetings have become the predominant alternative to face-to-face meetings. Ongoing efforts in the design of telepresence robots promise remote access to physical settings and a greater sense of presence, leading to improved remote collaboration. However, a comparable sense of physical presence and utility has yet to be achie...

In recent years, research on collaborative interaction has relied on manual coding of rich audio/video recordings. The fine-grained analysis of such material is extremely time-consuming and labor-intensive. This is not only difficult to scale, but, as a result, might also limit the quality and completeness of coding due to fatigue, inherent human b...

When COVID-19 led to mandatory working from home, significant blind spots in supporting the sociality of working life—in the moment and over time—were revealed in enterprise video meetings, and these were a key factor in reports about videoconferencing fatigue. Drawing on a large study (N = 849) of one global technology company’s employees’ experie...

Online labour platforms promise efficient, low-friction matching of workers with clients at scale and on-demand. Prior studies on Upwork have shown that the combination of specialized knowledge and expertise, high autonomy, and extent of client-worker engagement makes macrotasks a unique category of 'on-demand' work. However, there is a need to unp...

Interest in hybrid collaboration and meetings (HCM), where several co-located participants engage in coordinated work with remote participants, is gaining unprecedented momentum after the rapid shift in working from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, while the interest is new, researchers have been exploring HCM phenomena for decades, albe...

Video conferencing systems have long facilitated work-related conversations among remote teams. However, social distancing due to the COVID-19 pandemic has forced colleagues to use video conferencing platforms to additionally fulfil social needs. Social talk, or informal talk, is an important workplace practice that is used to build and maintain bo...

The world is entering a new normal of hybrid organisations, in which it will be common that some members are co-located and others are remote. Hybridity is rife with asymmetries that affect our sense of belonging in an organisational space. This paper reports a study of an XR Telepresence technology probe to explore how remote workers might present...

Virtual meetings are critical for remote work because of the need for synchronous collaboration in the absence of in-person interactions. In-meeting multitasking is closely linked to people's productivity and wellbeing. However, we currently have limited understanding of multitasking in remote meetings and its potential impact. In this paper, we pr...

Via audiovisual communications and a controllable physical embodiment, Mobile Robotic telePresence (MRP) systems aim to support enhanced collaboration between remote and local members of a given setting. But MRP systems also put the remote user in positions where they frequently rely on the help of local partners. Getting or 'recruiting' such help...

Despite sophisticated technologies for representational fidelity in hybrid meetings, in which co-located and remote participants collaborate via video or audio, meetings are still often disrupted by practical problems with trying to include remote participants. In this paper, we use micro-analysis of three disruptive moments in a hybrid meeting fro...

Corporations are increasingly empowering employees to hire on-demand workers via freelance platforms. We interviewed full-time employees of a global technology company who hired freelancers as part of their job responsibilities. While there has been prior work describing freelancers' perspectives there has been little research on those that hire th...

Hybrid meetings, in which co-located and remote participants connect via video or/audio, have become ubiquitous in the globalized modern workplace. Despite, or perhaps because of this ubiquity, conducting hybrid meetings is not straightforward. In this paper, we investigate the opportunities and challenges of hybrid meetings. We conducted a multi-s...

There is growth in the development of conversational agents or chatbots to support (self-)management in mental health. Previous work has shown how perceptions of conversational agents as caring or polite both can contribute to a sense of empathy and aid disclosure of sensitive information; but also risk inviting misperceptions of their emotional ca...

Traditional models of slideware assume one presenter controls attention through slide navigation and pointing while a passive audience views the action. This paradigm limits group interactions, curtailing opportunities for attendees to use slides to participate in a collaborative discourse. However, as slideware permeates contexts beyond simple one...

This paper identifies salient properties of how talk about video communication is organised interactionally, and how this interaction invokes an implied order of behaviour that is treated as ‘typical’ and ‘accountably representative’ of video communication. This invoked order will be called an interrogative gaze. This is an implied orientation to a...

The origin of this special issue was a panel organised at the International Institute of Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis (IIEMCA) on Membership Categorisation Analysis (MCA), held at Kolding in Denmark in 2015. The panel, in memory of Stephen Hester who died in 2014, brought together a number of researchers to discuss the current state o...

Slide presentations have long been stuck in a one-to-many paradigm, limiting audience engagement. Based on the concept of smartphone-based remote control of slide navigation, we present Office Social—a PowerPoint plugin and companion smartphone app that allows audience members qualified access to slides for personal review and, when the presenter e...

Edwards’ paper, ‘Categories are for talking’ (1991), is a critical dissection of the static role of categories as conceived in traditional Cognitive Psychology and the then-recent work of Lakoff’s Women, Fire and Dangerous Things (1987) through the use of Harvey Sacks’ (1974; 1992) work on membership categorisation. Edwards uses Sacks to take aim a...

In this position paper we explore ad hoc adaptability across devices in video-calling. We note the current difficulty of even simple combinations, discuss design issues, briefly report on a study of ad hoc screen mirroring, and note future directions.

In this position paper we outline the opportunities and challenges of pure asynchronous video messaging as an everyday utility. We recruited 53 users to try Skype Qik 'in the wild' for two weeks from its launch in October 2014. We found users orienting to an organizational principle that we term 'Me For You', a self-conscious yet creative orientati...

The vast distances Australians must negotiate to connect their small, highly urbanized population both nationally and internationally have long created the incentive for invention, innovation and the early adoption of communication technologies. Important also in any reflection in relation to Australia’s socio-technological evolution is this countr...

Access to social network sites (SNS) in the workplace has been much debated. While some consider SNS a distraction, others consider them a tool for professional socialisation and that recreational access positively impacts satisfaction. This exploratory study reports results from an online survey of employees from one faculty of an Australian un...

This paper concerns a single case of story telling between a long-distance couple via video chat. Our interest is on how a character’s relevance to the story is rendered uncertain by the teller, but how this uncertainty provides an avenue for the relevance of the character to be recast by the recipient. Using Membership Category Analysis and Sacks’...

This special issue brings together research from the 2012 Conference of the Australasian Institute of Ethnomethodology (EM) and Conversation Analysis (CA) (AIEMCA). The theme of the conference was the analysis of knowledge and asymmetrical organisation in interactions—in other words, the business of who knows what, and who has the rights and respon...

The importance of the domestic soundscape as a context for technological interventions has received little attention in HCI research. In this paper, we discuss how an ethnomethodological soundwalk method facilitated design principles for a phatic technology probe for seniors living alone. Taking soundscape concepts as a starting point, we suggest t...

In this paper, we identify and analyse the problems associated with communicative overheads of a fashion design and manufacturing workflow. We conduct a multi-stage qualitative study to investigate where the rich multiple channels of communication afford and constrain the workflow during remote collaboration. From this study, we define what communi...

The definitive free and open access version with embedded video is available at http://www.cios.org/EJCPUBLIC/023/1/023123.HTML Video calling is now a realistic option for couples in distance relationships. This paper explores whether audio/video distortions block intimate relational talk. From a naturalistic two-month trial of couples trying vide...

This article reports on Leximancer and Discursis, two visual text analytic software tools developed at the University of Queensland. Both analyse spatial and temporal relationships in text data, but in complementary ways: Leximancer focuses on thematic analysis, while Discursis focuses on sequential analysis. Our report explains how they work, how...

Maintaining a relationship via video calling requires intertwining relational and technological talk. Using detailed qualitative analysis of transcripts from naturalistic recordings of couples in a video calling field trial, this paper explores how couple members use the possibility of technological distortion as a resource. for negotiating aroun...

Offshore outsourcing is on the increase as businesses seek more cost effective manufacturing options for their products. Supporting outsourcing is as much about communication of tasks as it is about the tasks themselves. We argue that there is need for more fundamental research into the relationship between communication and design for remote colla...

Data analysis sessions are a common feature of discourse analytic communi- ties, often involving participants with varying levels of expertise to those with significant expertise. Learning how to do data analysis and working with transcripts, however, are often new experiences for doctoral candidates within the social sciences. While many guides to...

Danny Boyle and his army of volunteers are to be commended on a stunning television production for the London 2012 Olympic Games opening ceremony. But if you only watched one screen, you missed a significant dimension of responses from a global audience, and that dimension was at least as interesting.

Data analysis sessions are a common feature of discourse analytic communi- ties, often involving participants with varying levels of expertise to those with significant expertise. Learning how to do data analysis and working with transcripts, however, are often new experiences for doctoral candidates within the social sciences. While many guides to...

Domestic personal videoconferencing (PV) is vulnerable to network trouble perturbations. This paper shows that long-distance couples treat perturbations as a matter of social management as much as technological resolution. Three management strategies are illustrated: technology- oriented remedies, content-oriented remedies, and non-remedial account...

This paper discusses the development of the technical methodology for remote recording to maximize environmental validity for a project on how novices develop familiarity with desktop videoconferencing (DVC). It is also a discussion of how the technical setup, as well as the resulting data, was useful for finding usability issues for the company th...

When physicians take readings of health indices such as temperature or blood pressure, the practices that physicians and patients employ in discussing the readings both reflect and propose a set of expectations regarding the level of technical medical information the patients should acquire and understand. In this article we demonstrate how physici...

The danger with a term like "joke" is that it can come to be understood as a kind of inert textual object or an authorless production plucked from the ether, the meaning of which might be understood or analyzed independently of the context of its use. Whatever might be said about the so-called technical (i.e. context-free) features of jokes-for ins...

The design of Internet Relay Chat (IRC) affords for, and itself produces, non-response situations that are not possible in FTF or telephone interaction. These system-occasioned nonresponses produce almost isomorphic stimuli to participant non-responses. Situations thus arise in which non-responses are interpersonally accountable despite agentive am...

Special issue of M/C Journal

Internet Relay Chat (IRC) was the Internet's first widely popular quasi-synchronous computer-mediated communication (CMC) system. While research has consistently demonstrated the interpersonal nature of IRC, and is now turning to more structurally-oriented topics, it is argued that IRC research now needs to systematically address links between inte...

In online television forums hosted by Television Network Websites (TNWs), viewers are invited to interact with both those involved with the television network and/or other viewers/users. This paper is a preliminary investigation of the enormous range of new interactive spaces and practices. Current online television forums in US, UK and Australian...

This article examines a set of interactions (logs) taken from the form of computer-mediated communication known as Internet Relay Chat (IRC). The authors were particularly concerned with the interaction management strategies adopted by the participants in the logs during the opening and closing phases of the interactions to develop interpersonal re...