A list of publications and works under review can be found in my scholarship section below.
Research Platform for Studying Human-Human Interaction Via Interface Manipulation
My central applied research project, conducted under the supervision of Stephen B. Gilbert, serves as a research platform for a variety of studies I want to conduct looking at how interfaces can be used to promote and demote group work behaviors. It is designed to be both scalable and flexible so that future research can be conducted on a flexible budget and in a variety of domains. This platform, that I have dubbed "ConvoCons," short for conversational icons, was inspired by observations I made during an otherwise dismal (due to interface ambiguity and hardware problems) failure of a study of collaborative virtual Lego design. Theoretically, the ConvoCon system seeks to reify concepts from Bonnie Nardi's framework for sustained collaboration and Goffman's analysis of role distance, frame analysis, and interaction rituals. Currently, the work only skims the surface of the larger work I hope to conduct. So far, my focus has been on dyadic collaboration on a simple puzzle game (tangrams) with initial qualitative work conducted to inform the design and a mixed methods approach to the effectiveness of the system in a co-located environment (the final task had a 40% difference in overall affinity in favor of the experimental group). During the spring semester of 2010, I am repeating the original study using remote dyads (and greater control over group composition).A video showing one version of ConvoCons
ConvoCons is a project that I have found myself describing as simultaneously deceptively simple and deceptively complex. Deceptively simple because from a layman point of view, all that is being done is that some text is being displayed to users collaborating. Deceptively complex because at one level ConvoCons are effective because they initiate incidental conversation (and thus interaction rituals) that have been socialized into people. Thus, one challenge has been simply one of presentation--simplifying the concept so an interdisciplinary audience can understand it while simultaneously trying not to oversimplify it to the point where only the basic concept is conveyed.
Another key challenge to this project was designing the specifications in a way to ensure it would be flexible to test a variety of phenomena over a variety of hardware configurations and software systems while also being able to easily manipulate the design (e.g. layout, content, etc). I was fortunate enough to work with fantastic programmers include Prasad Rahmanahally, Jay Roltgen, and Tony Milosch that were able to take my vision and system specs and turn it into a modular server-client system.
For the studies that are the focus of my dissertation, I have focused on building affinity between dyad members. However, social affinity is typically ill defined or focuses on romantic affinity as opposed to work-related affinity. Additionally, while affinity as a concept is similar to concepts such as rapport or cohesion where there surveys have been developed, my focus on dyads prevented accurate survey results as dyads are highly prone to social desirability bias that prevents accurate self-reporting. In fact, while I had participants complete a survey it was common to see self-reports of work distribution to disagree with empirical observations, where participants would self-report equal work distribution at times when one participant did all of the work and made all decisions (this occurred most frequently within the control condition). As such, I operationalized the concept of affinity and tagged (with a second person for validation) blocks of the video for behavioral and conversational affinity in order to develop a quantitative measure for comparison between groups.
The design of the system also presented a unique challenge both in the co-located and remote conditions. Here, I needed to simultaneously make ConvoCons salient enough that participants would attend to them and unobtrusive enough that they would not affect work performance. Similarly, I had to find content for the ConvoCons that would simultaneously encourage discussion without becoming the dominant focus of discussion (or attention). In one co-located version, a single rotating ConvoCon text was used but the ultimate design was a two piece ConvoCon with each piece at a fixed orientation, giving participants privileged information. Additionally, one design challenge I have worked to overcome for the remote study is making individuals aware that his/her collaborator has privileged information since the natural assumption tends to be that everybody has the same information. In order to overcome these design challenges, I used a combination of looking at literature on these topics as well as a rapid, iterative design process during the pilot phase.
Research Importance:
Part of the inspiration for this research comes from my work with interdisciplinary teams. When individuals from different disciplinary cultures collaborate, they often struggle to effectively collaborate when focusing directly on the task and may require a tertiary topic or task to begin building affinity and common ground. This research seeks to address that problem while the off-task nature of ConvoCons is also intended to help inspire divergent thinking that aids in creativity. Additionally, it is my hope that the empirical measure of affinity I have created will be useful to other researchers. Finally, it is my hope that some of my design findings can be applied to other systems, particularly in terms of having users with privileged information and making collaborators aware of it.
Exploration of the Intersections of Social Theory and HCI
This research stands at the nexus of my intellectual and teaching interests. While social theory has found its way into HCI, much of the theory has come from the atheoretical focus of ethnomethodology, which has rejected the classic sociological theories that stand at the core of sociology. Thus, one of my research interests is to explore the ways that classic sociological theory and methods can be applied within HCI. In particular, I have noticed the need for sociological theory on organizational structures and institutional influence on groups is missing from HCI and can potentially offer a great deal of new insight into the design and evaluation of traditional and ubiquitous computing systems. On the flip side, little research conducted in HCI has found its way back into the social sciences and technology that could be used by sociologists to help explore research questions in an empirical fashion often only slowly trickles into their awareness. In this case, I hope to serve as a bridge between disciplines through collaborations with researchers in sociology who may not be aware of what they are able to both contribute and gain from interdisciplinary collaboration.In my teaching, I have sought to explore some of these topics with classes I have taught with a graduate course in HCI, guest lectures in an introduction to sociology course, and two courses I will be teaching in the fall on the social roles of technology.
Platform Game for Individuals with Visual Impairments
This project, which started as my senior capstone project and ended as my Masters thesis, was intended as a way of influencing the digital divide that exists between individuals with visual impairments and individuals with unimpaired vision. A common way for individuals to engage with computing technology has been through entertainment and individuals with visual impairments have been left out of modern computer entertainment while many games designed specifically for individuals with visual impairments have used oversimplified rules. One of the unique challenges I faced in creating this game was conveying 2D spatial distance to players in a manner efficient enough for the player to process and react to the stimuli in time to jump over pits and avoid or eliminate enemies that traveled both vertically and horizontally.More details on this project can be found on the project homepage.
Scholarship
Book Chapters
Drewski, E., Godby, K., Grover, T., Maximova, E., Oren, M., Parkhurst, D., Triplett, J., William, V. (2007). Shiny Happy Users. Published by Lulu.comBrown, H., Oren, M. (2005). "Living Art: Commercial Modding and Code-Illiterate Gamers." Digital Gameplay. Ed. Nathan Garrelts. McFarland Press.
Journals
Oren, M. (In Progress) “Moving Forward Without Moving Back: The Place of Classic Sociological Theory in Modern Times.”Oren, M., Gilbert, S. (In Progress) “ConvoCons: A Conversational Agent for Promoting Affinity Among Strangers in Co-Located and Remote Work.”
Oren, M. (In Progress) “Society-Computer Interaction: Moving Human-Computer Interaction Beyond Individuals and Small Groups Through Social Theory.”
Oren, M.; Harding, C.;,Bonebright, T. (December 2008). "Design and Usability Testing of an Audio Platform Game for Players with Visual Impairments." Journal of Visual Impairment and Blindness, 102(12), pp. 761-773.
Conference Presentations (Full Papers – Peer Reviewed)
Oren, M., Gilbert, S. (2010) “Building Better Design Teams: Enhancing Group Affinity to Aid Collaborative Design.” Proceedings of Design, Computing, and Cognition (DCC) 2010. (Acceptance rate: 31%)Oren, M., Gilbert, S. (July 2009). “ConvoCons: Encouraging Affinity on Multitouch Interfaces.” Proceedings of Human-Computer Interaction International 2009. San Diego, CA. (Acceptance rate: 32%)
Oren, M., Seth, U., Huang, F., Kang, S.(July 2009). “Cross-cultural Design & Evaluation of the Apple iPhone.” Proceedings of Human-Computer Interaction International 2009. San Diego, CA. (Acceptance rate: 32%)
Bennett, J., Faeth, A., Oren, M. (April 2009). “Wiicussion: Fasten Your Wrist Strap.” Proceedings of Emerging Technologies Conference (ETC). Ames, IA. (Acceptance rate: 66%)
Russell, D., Oren, M. (January 2009). “Retrospective Cued Recall: A method for accurately recalling previous user behaviors.” Proceedings of the Association of Computing Machinery’s Hawaii International Conference on System Science (HICSS) 2009. (Acceptance rate: 50%)
Faeth, A., Oren, M., Harding, C. (October 2008). "Combining 3-D geovisualization with force feedback driven user interaction." Proceedings of the Association of Computing Machinery’s Geographic Information Systems (GIS). (Acceptance rate: 20%)
Conference Presentations (Short Papers – Peer Reviewed)
Faeth, A., Oren, M., Sheller, J., Godinez, S., Harding, C. (April 2008). "Cutting, Deforming and Painting of 3D meshes in a Two Handed Viso-haptic VR System (SKETCH)." Proceedings of IEEE Virtual Reality Conference 2008. (Acceptance rate: 33%)Conference Posters (Peer Reviewed)
Oren, M., Gilbert, S. (2011) “Framework for Measuring Group Social Affinity for Computer Supported Cooperative Work.” Proceedings of Association of Computing Machiner’s Computer-Human Interaction 2011. Vancouver, Canada.Oren, M., Harding C., Bonebright, T. (October, 2008). "Evaluation of Spatial Abilities Within a 2D Auditory Platform Game." Proceedings of Association of Computing Machinery's ASSETS Conference 2008.
Oren, M. (May, 2007). "Speed Sonic Across the Span: Building a Platform Audio Game." Extended Abstracts of Association of Computing Machinery's Computer-Human Interaction 2007. San Jose, CA.
Oren, M., Harding, C., Bonebright, T. (June 2007). "Speed Sonic Across the Span: A Platform Audio Game." Proceedings of International Conference on Auditory Displays (ICAD) 2007, pp. 247-251. Montreal, Canada.
Oren, M., Schafer, L., Berque, D. (February, 2005). "Enhancing a Pen-based Groupware System through Image Caching and Gesture Recognition." Proceedings of Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group for Computer Science Education (SIGCSE) Conference 2005. St. Louis, MO. (Peer reviewed research competition, placed in top 5)
Conference Posters
Schafer, L., Oren, M., Berque, D. (November, 2004). "Enhancing a Pen-based Groupware System through Image Caching and Gesture Recognition." Argonne National Laboratory Undergraduate Research Symposium 2004. DuPage County, IL.Conference Roundtables & Workshops (Peer Reviewed)
Oren, M., Woodman, W. F. (2010). “Rethinking Social Theory: How Technology Changes Everything.” Technology and Society: Critical Perspectives roundtable. In American Sociological Association (ASA) Annual Meeting 2010.
Oren, M., Gilbert, S. (2010) “Interfaces for Communication Intervention: Utilizing social theory to support interdisciplinary design communication.” To appear in the proceedings of the Design Communication workshop at Design, Creativity, and Cognition (DCC) 2010. Stuttgart, Germany.