“I Had to Actively Inject Myself’: When Small Breakdowns Accumulate

Abstract

Telepresence robots enable remote and embodied teamwork. However, most studies focus on dyads. We compare a remote operator collaborating with either one or three co-located partners (1–1 vs. 1–3) in a treasure-hunt-style mock gallery with tasks that vary in coupling (forced vs. visually distributed). Across eight 1–1 and eight 1–3 sessions, we coded episodes for operator bids, uptake, repair triggers (audio/visibility/reference), and repair outcomes, and triangulated with post-activity interviews. We report three findings: (1) when work is locally doable, the operator becomes socially “optional,” especially in 1–3; (2) teams use similar repair strategies, but repairs reach closure less often in 1–3; and (3) unrepaired mishearing and visibility problems quickly cascade into subsequent ignores. We outline implications for re-coupling distributed work, reducing visual/audio grounding costs, and supporting operator entry into multi-party talk.

Citation

Muntasir Mubin Nashit, Tashfia Fatema, Heet Shailesh Patel, Eike Schneiders, and Houda Elmimouni. 2026. "I Had to Actively Inject Myself': When Small Breakdowns Accumulate. In Proceedings of the Extended Abstracts of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '26). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 784, 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1145/3772363.3799382