En designers främsta uppgift är att hitta lösningar på problem som är svårformulerade vilket kräver full förståelse för designsituationen. Interaktionsdesignern fungerar dessutom som länk mellan olika aktörer i en beställarprocess med syfte att tillgodose slutanvändarens behov, som ofta faller mellan stolarna. Avsikten med denna rapport är att studera hur interaktionsdesignern kan vara den kommunikatör som krävs. Detta har gjorts genom att titta på hur objekt används i kommunikationen mellan designern och dess klient. Studien är gjord genom en videoanalys som tolkats utifrån Herbert H. Clarks kommunikationsanalytiska termer. Common ground används som representation för den ömsesidiga förståelse som här önskas belysas. Videomaterialet är hämtat från ett större forskningsprojekt där olika designgrupper tillsammans med kronofogdemyndigheten arbetar i workshops för att ta fram ett nytt IT-stöd. Objekt visar sig vara viktiga verktyg för att orientera sig i ett samtal och för att representera information. De blir därmed viktiga för att hänvisa till common ground och säkra dess innehåll. Det är viktigt att lyfta interaktionsdesignerns roll för slutanvändaren och de verktyg och metoder denne kan behöva för att kommunicera och hitta lösningar på designproblem. Det finns därmed behov av fungerande ramverk för studier kring kommunikation, vilket visar sig kräva mer kunskap.

Les situations de collaboration à distance dans l’industrie induisent de nouvelles contraintes pour les opérateurs. Dans le contexte de l’utilisation d’environnements virtuels collaboratifs immersifs, nous avons mis en place une série d’études portant sur la compréhension mutuelle, et plus particulièrement au partage d’information de nature spatiale. Les résultats de la première étude ont permis de mettre en évidence l’influence du rôle des participants, guides ou manipulateurs, sur les énoncés spatialisés. Les énoncés étaient centrés préférentiellement sur l’action du manipulateur, suggérant la recherche d’un moindre effort collaboratif. Les résultats de deux études sur la production d’énoncés spatialisés ont permis d’identifier que l’exigence mentale pour la production d’énoncés est modulée notamment par la position de la cible à décrire par rapport au destinataire. En effet, selon la position de la cible, le locuteur doit opérer ou non des transformations mentales coûteuses pour prendre la perspective du destinataire. Cet effort peut être amoindri en présence d’indices visuels distaux. La dernière étude, portant sur la compréhension d’énoncés spatialisés, a permis de mettre en évidence que les énoncés centrés sur le destinataire sont les plus simples à comprendre pour une tâche de nature égocentrée. Certains énoncés exocentrés induisent également une moindre exigence mentale, mais uniquement selon certaines conditions. Les résultats sont discutés selon le principe du moindre effort collaboratif et la théorie des cadres de référence. Ce travail a permis de proposer des pistes de développement pour faciliter la collaboration à distance dans les environnements virtuels. / Remote collaborative situations in industry involve new constraints for workers. In the context of using immersive virtual environments to collaborate, we set up a series of experiments focusing on the mutual comprehension, and more specifically on the process of sharing spatial information. Results of the first experiment showed the influence of one collaborator’s role on spatial statements. Guides and manipulators both used statements preferentially centered on manipulator’s action, which supports the least collaborative effort principle. Results of two experiments about spatial statements production allowed to point out that mental workload is modulated by the target position relative to the addressee. According to the target location, the speaker must operate or not cognitively costly mental transformations to take the addressee perspective. However this workload could be lowered by means of visual cues. The last experiment focused on the understanding of spatial statements. It showed that statements centered on the addressee are the easiest to understand when the task is also centered on the addressee. Some exocentered statements could also induce a lower mental workload but only in some conditions. Results are discussed in relation to the least collaborative effort principle and the spatial frames of reference theory. This work opens new leads to facilitate remote collaboration through virtual environments.

Objectives: The objective of this thesis is to identify and understand communication and information exchange events and their influencing factors that are precursors to medical errors. Methods: Palliative Sedation Therapy is used as a case study to understand how communication and information sharing occur on an in-patient palliative care unit. Data sources were non-participant observation and interviews. Directed content analysis was used to analyze the data, with previously published conceptual models of communication acting as the guides for this analysis. Results/Discussion: Results identified several communication issues that have the potential to act as precursors to medical error at different points in the communication act. A model identifying the points where these precursors can impact communication was created. Conclusion: These results can be used to identify how improvements to communication and information exchange can increase the effectiveness of communication and reduce the likelihood of medical errors occurring.

Despite disaster managers’ best efforts, inter-organizational disaster management suffers from varying levels of success. One factor that is likely to account for these variations is team mutual understanding, also known as common ground. To validate the potential effect of common ground in disaster management, the thesis investigates common ground in several interviews with disaster managers and in an experimental study involving an inter-organizational disaster event scenario. Analysis of interviews revealed that disaster managers perceived gaps in understanding between responders, the importance of mutual understanding, and perceived common ground similarly to depictions in theory with a few exceptions. Analyses of the experimental study indicated that contextual factors of Team composition, Problem solving approach and Type of tasks differently impacted measures of performance and implicit coordination, and that implicit coordination partially mediated and supressed the relationship between contextual factors and decision quality. Findings suggest the variation in disaster managers’ performance can be ascribed to common ground, implicit coordination, and contextual factors. Moreover, results showed the satisfaction with outcome did not correlate with expert rated quality of decision; and that while satisfaction related to consensus and quality of the decision was linked to generating alternative ideas and debate. Collaboration proved to be more effective in public communication tasks, especially for homogenous team composition. The findings support initiatives for more cross-training and further lab and field experiments.

In the simulation of human crowd behavior including evacuation planning, transportation management, and safety engineering in architecture design, the development of pedestrian model for higher behavior fidelity is an important task. To construct plausible facsimiles of real crowd movements, simulations should exhibit human behaviors for navigation, pedestrian decision-making, and social behaviors such as grouping and crowding. The research field is quite mature in some sense, with a large number of approaches that have been proposed to path finding, collision avoidance, and visually pleasing steering behaviors of virtual humans. However, there is still a clear disparity between the variety of approaches and the quality of crowd behaviors in simulations. Many social science field studies inform us that crowds are typically composed of multiple social groups (James, 1953; Coleman and James, 1961; Aveni, 1977). These observations indicate that one component of the complexity of crowd dynamics emerges from the presence of various patterns of social interactions within small groups that make up the crowd. Hence, realism in a crowd simulation may be enhanced when virtual characters are organized in multiple social groups, and exhibit human-like coordination behaviors. Motivated by the need for modeling groups in a crowd, we present a multi-agent model for large crowd simulations that incorporates socially plausible group behaviors. A computational model for multi-agent coordination and interaction informed by well- established Common Ground theory (Clark, 1996; Clark and Brennan, 1991) is proposed. In our approach, the task of navigation in a group is viewed as performing a joint activity which requires maintaining a state of common ground among group members regarding walking strategies and route choices. That is, group members communicate with, and adapt their behaviors to each other in order to maintain group cohesiveness while walking. In the course of interaction, an agent may present gestures or other behavioral cues according to its communicative purpose. It also considers the spatiotemporal conditions of the agent-group's environment in which the agent interacts when selecting a kind of motions. With the incorporation of our agent model, we provide a unified framework for crowd simulation and animation which accommodates high-level socially-aware behavioral realism of animated characters. The communicative purpose and motion selection of agents are consistently carried through from simulation to animation, and a resulted sequence of animated character behaviors forms not merely a chain of reactive or random gestures but a socially meaningful interactions. We conducted several experiments in order to investigate the impact of our social group interaction model in crowd simulation and animation. By showing that group communicative behaviors have a substantial influence on the overall distribution of a crowd, we demonstrate the importance of incorporating a model of social group interaction into multi-agent simulations of large crowd behaviors. With a series of perceptual user studies, we show that our model produces more believable behaviors of animated characters from the viewpoint of human observers. / Ph. D.

Sensitive and responsive parenting promotes adaptive outcomes for children. Within the domain of language development, responsiveness has been examined through the effects of temporal and semantic contingency on children’s vocabularies. The term adaptive contingency can be used to characterize the process whereby dyads co-construct common ground, establishing a co-dependence of both timing and meaningfulness. This dissertation examined the role of adaptive contingency in early verb learning by examining the learning consequences when timing is manipulated but meaning is held constant (Study 1) and when meaningfulness is manipulated but timing is held constant (Study 2). In a previous study, toddlers learned novel action words when teaching was uninterrupted, but failed to do so when caregivers were interrupted while teaching by a cell phone call from the experimenter (Reed, Hirsh-Pasek, & Golinkoff, in preparation). Study 1 explored how the timing of interruptions differentially affects word learning. Experimenters blind to study hypotheses taught two-year old toddlers novel words, and learning was assessed via the Intermodal Preferential Looking Paradigm (IPLP). During the teaching period, experimenters responded to text messages, momentarily disrupting the teaching. The timing of these interruptions occurred (1) in the middle of an utterance, such that the label and demonstration of its action referent were decoupled, (2) before the “label + action referent” event occurred, or (3) after (the control condition). At test, only children in the after condition learned the novel words. Study 2 examined whether word learning would be disrupted when teaching interactions were interrupted by an event that breaks the shared focus (e.g., a cell phone call) but not when the interruption shifts the shared context (e.g., when a lighted display suddenly shines). Novel words were learned in one of three experimental conditions (light display to shift attention, cell phone call to break attention, no interruption control), and learning was again assessed via the IPLP. Only toddlers in the shift condition learned the novel words. This dissertation contributes to the growing recognition that the quality of interactions with caregivers affects children’s language trajectories (e.g., rich and diverse vocabulary, Rowe, 2012; fluent and connected bouts of sustained joint attention, Hirsh-Pasek et al., in press). Utilizing ecologically valid interruptions, the two studies together illuminate how the social context can support or hinder early verb learning. / Psychology

This dissertation collects four papers on common knowledge and one on introspection principles in epistemic game theory. The first two papers offer a sustained argument against the importance of common knowledge and belief in explaining social behavior. Chapters 3 and 4 study the role of common knowledge of tautologies in standard models in epistemic logic and game theory. The first considers the problem as it relates to Robert Aumann’s Agreement Theorem; the second (joint work with Peter Fritz) studies it in models of awareness. The fifth paper corrects a claimed Agreement Theorem of Geanakoplos (1989), and exploits the corrected theorem to provide epistemic conditions for correlated equilibrium and Nash equilibrium.

This thesis portrays a research study undertaken to explore the unknown concept of electronic interprofessional documentation. Academic literature largely centers on multidisciplinary electronic documentation yet clinicians provide care using an integrated interprofessional model. Current design of electronic health records (EHRs) continue to propagate a deluge of data resulting from disparate siloed documentation. End users report challenges with finding data. Additionally, care planning and decision making are delayed. To bridge the gap between electronic design and interprofessional delivery of care, more understanding of shared documentation is required. The provenance of the design of this study is based on the concept of common ground and the framework for complex diverse data. Common ground is a shared communication space within a team with a shared purpose (Cioffi, Wilkes, Cummings, Warne, & Harrison, 2010). The framework for complex diverse data posits that data must be linked to other interconnected data; linked data enables connection of diverse pieces and insight-sharing within a team. A descriptive qualitative study was designed to answer the research question: What are the common data elements between disciplines? A case scenario of a patient with a fractured hip was created; participants generated clinical notes based on the video and patient record. The clinical notes were coded and results indicated numerous diverse common data elements. These were analyzed and major findings such as categories appropriate for use by all disciplines on admission and design implications for care planning throughout an acute care stay were identified. Further, as disciplines and care team members do have different documentation patterns, it is suggested attendance to differences in the entry of data yet maintaining a common ground in the display of patient information is vital. Finally suggestions such as duplicate checking for documentation through a common care plan that tracks assessments and completed interventions alongside planned interventions are made. Creation of a standardized interprofessional terminology is key in building the road leading to interprofessional electronic documentation. / Graduate

<p>I rapporten undersöks problemställningen ”<strong>Hur kan teorin om Gemensam grund och specifikt ”gemensamt avslut” bidra till en ökad förståelse för betydelsen av social interaktion i flexibel undervisning via datorförmedlad kommunikation?” </strong>i en fallstudie med fokus på videokonferenssystem vilka används i lärandemiljöer. Resultaten som framkom tydliggjorde att då ett sociotekniskt glapp uppstår tvingas studenterna att skapa alternativa strategier för att kunna uppnå just det här gemensamma avslutet. Därmed uppvisar också resultaten att drivkraften att uppnå gemensamt avslut inte endast är stark vid kommunikation som sker ansikte mot ansikte utan även vid datorförmedlad kommunikation. Fallstudiens resultat kan därmed ses som ett bidrag till grundforskningen i det att betydelsen av att uppnå gemensamt avslut vid datorförmedlad kommunikation uppvisas, vilket också förstärker betydelsen av Clarks (1996) teori om gemensam grund. Vidare har resultaten från fallstudien också använts för tillämpad forskning då designkonsekvenser tagits fram vilka beskriver hur videokonferenssystem i lärandemiljöer bör utformas för att studenter lättare ska kunna uppnå gemensamt avslut via systemen. Med hjälp av dessa designkonsekvenser kan det sociotekniska glappet reduceras och därigenom skapa ett framgångsrikt lärande för studenter vilka studerar via flexibelt lärande.</p>

<p>In the use of medication and pharmaceutical products, non‐compliance is a major problem. One thing we can do something about is making sure consumers have the information they need. This thesis investigates how remote communication technology can be used to improve the availability for expressive advice‐giving services. Special attention is given to the balancing of expressiveness and availability. A solution is presented that uses 3D visualisation in combination with audio and video communication to convey advice on complex pharmaceutical products. The solution is tested and evaluated in two user studies. The first study is broad and explorative, the second more focused and evaluative. The solution was well received by participating subjects. They welcomed the sense of personal contact that seeing the communicating party over video link produced and appreciated the expressive power and pedagogical value of the 3D materials. Herbert Clark’s theory of use of language is suggested as a framework for the analysis of the dynamics of the relationship between</p><p>consumer and advisor.</p> / Report code: LiU-Tek-Lic-2008:31.