L.G. Terveen
AT&T Bell Laboratories, 600 Mountain Avenue, Murray Hill, NJ 07974, USA
Synopsis
Collaborative manipulation is an approach to the design of cooperative systems that builds on insights from social science. Collaborative manipulation organizes person-computer cooperation around manipulation of objects in a shared workspace. This approach is embodied in a knowledge editing tool, the HITS Knowledge Editor, or HKE. In HKE, users design knowledge structures in the shared workspace; by inspecting the partial designs, the system is able to offer several types of assistance.
The collaborative manipulation approach has been evaluated in a study that compared subjects' performance on HKE and another knowledge editing tool based on a different approach. The studies showed that (1) expertise about knowledge editing embodied in HKE facilitated the performance of novice users, and (2) providing a workspace and organizing the interaction around manipulation of objects in the workspace eased the interaction for all users.
Key Words
Collaborative manipulation, intelligent assistance, workspace, critics, situated action, human-computer interaction