Fitzpatrick, Geraldine, Kaplan, Simon M., Mansfield, Tim, Arnold, David and Segall, Bill (2002) Supporting Public Availability and Accessibility with Elvin: Experiences and Reflections. Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 11 (3-4). pp. 447-474. ISSN 0925-9724

Preview

PDF Download (301kB) | Preview

Abstract

We provide a retrospective account of how a generic event notification service called Elvin and a suite of simple client applications: CoffeeBiff, Tickertape and Tickerchat, came to be used within our organisation to support awareness and interaction. After overviewing Elvin and its clients, we outline various experiences from data collated across two studies where Elvin and its clients have been used to augment the workaday world to support interaction, to make digital actions visible, to make physical actions available beyond the location of action, and to support content and socially based information filtering. We suggest there are both functional and technical reasons for why Elvin works for enabling awareness and interaction. Functionally, it provides a way to produce, gather and redistribute information from everyday activities (via Elvin) and to give that information a perceptible form (via the various clients) that can be publicly available and accessible as a resource for awareness. The integration of lightweight chat facilities with these information sources enables awareness to easily flow into interaction, starting to re-connect bodies to actions, and starting to approximate the easy flow of interaction that happens when we are co-located. Technically, the conceptual simplicity of the Elvin notification, the wide availability of its APIs, and the generic functionality of its clients, especially Tickertape, have made the use of the service appealing to developers and users for a wide range of uses.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	Publisher's version available at official url
Keywords:	Awareness, chat tools, Elvin, event notification service, tickertape.
Schools and Departments:	School of Engineering and Informatics > Informatics
Subjects:	Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA0075 Electronic computers. Computer science
Depositing User:	Chris Keene
Date Deposited:	15 Feb 2008
Last Modified:	09 Mar 2017 06:28
URI:	http://srodev.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/1357
Google Scholar:	94 Citations

View download statistics for this item

📧 Request an update