3. MOVERS-WORLD

In the remainder of this paper, we will investigate properties of conventions that develop from the practice of a new community of individuals engaged in a joint activity. The domain of study is MOVERS-WORLD (See Figure 1); the task is to move furniture and boxes from a house onto a truck. Although there are cultural and historic conditions on the practice of the participants in the MOVERS-WORLD domain, many of the regularities in coordination of behavior depend on specific characteristics of the participants in the joint activity and in the features of objects and artifacts about which they reason. In domains where new community of actors begins to emerge (like MOVERS-WORLD), neither the coordination of behavior nor the conventions that develop from practice can be entirely determined by the cultural history of prior related activities.

  

Figure 1: Sample MOVERS-WORLD problem.

MOVERS-WORLD has two types of actors: hand-truck operators (such as HTO1 in Figure 1) and lifters (L1 and L2). MOVERS-WORLD contains three types of objects: boxes, hand-trucks, and a single moving truck. Boxes come in four sizes: extra-large (XLBOX), large (LBOX), medium (MBOX) and small (SBOX). Large and extra-large boxes require two lifters to lift, and extra-large boxes are too unwieldy to be carried. Hand-trucks can carry either one extra-large box or any combination of two smaller-sized boxes. Hand-truck operators are not capable of handling boxes directly so loading and unloading a hand-truck requires the cooperation of at least one lifter.

Some important features of the model we present are:

1.

Regularities in the coordination of behavior develop with practice.

2.

Communication is central to cooperation and coordination.

3.

Participants reason separately about their joint activity.