SEng 609.06
Special Topics in HCI
Saul Greenberg, Instructor

Issues raised by students to discuss in class

Behavioural Papers

Brad says: Grudin seems to assume that when making decisions about single user applications the manager is more often right than not. However, when making decisions about groupware programs the manager is less often right, perhaps rarely right.

Granted it is a good thing to know how people work together but don't managers have a sense of that? Don't good managers have a feel for how to assemble groups, how to make teams work better together, etc.? If so, then why do they fall short when evaluating a software tool meant to aid team work? Grudin comes up with various potential answers but how close does he come to answering this question, or does he even consider this a relevant question?

Kevin says: There seems to be a trade-off between having only head shots vs body shots during communications via video. Head shots provide good eye contact; however, body movements such as hand gestures are lost. The opposite seems to be true for body shots; we get the body movements including deictic references to objects in the room but we lose eye contact. I realize that you lose something in both situations, but what type of feedback is more important to establishing effective communications? better telepresence? The answer will probably be "depends on the situation", but I would like to discuss it in more detail.

My job at CDC involves some designing of interfaces, but I am more involved in the evaluation of interfaces. After reading the two arcticles, it seems somewhat bleak when trying to design and evaluate groupware. This is for two reasons:

applying knowledge about human behaviour into design is difficult, and
evaluating CSCW is considerably difficult given the intricacies of group activities

I was hoping to discuss ways to overcome these two problems. This may be naive of me to expect there is a solution, but I am kind of curious to hear some ideas. One arcticle states that hiring a social scientist would help solve the first problem, but this does not seem like a feasible solution in my situation.

Cam says: One of the things that struck me when reading Informal Communication in Organizations: Form, Function and Technology was how the use and frequency of email impacted the 'liking' of his/her co-workers. For example, many people develop a working relationship with frequent users of email. Could this be likened to being 'on the same floor' if the correspondence is frequent enough? If a person used email frequently to a college a great distance away, could the same sort of 'Co-presence' be acheived as if the person was local? This reason this struck me is that we carry on a correspondance with a few 'customers' in Ottawa and only meet once or twice a year but there is still a feeling of working together and a feeling of proximity.

Dana says: The first issue that I would like to see discussed in class tomorrow is the effectiveness of video technology in supporting remote collaboration, from the Behavioral Foundations point of view. Dix et al. discuss the problmes of eye contact and gaze awareness when using video channels. However, they argue that "experiments have shown that remotely working participants experience a greater sense of social presence if video is used in addition to an audio link". (pg. 172). [because of the fact that the facial expression can be seen]

It seems that video technology falls behind the expectations in supporting informal communication as studied in VideoWindow and Cruiser systems (as seen in the paper by Kraut et al.). Also, I have read some time ago that it have been found that "there would be no significant advantage of video over audio with a shared-workspace problem-solving task" ("The Effect of Group Size and Communication Modes in CSCW Environments" by Masoodian and Apperley).

In this context, it would be interesting to discuss in what types of collaborative tasks (as described by McGrath) does video technology bring any support. Would video bring more value to remote "negotiative" tasks instead? (where the facial expression has a greater importance?)

The second issue I would like to see discussed in class is what has been done since Grudin's paper? He raised the issues of difficulties and problems in designing and evaluating groupware, back in '88. I think it would be interesting to discuss the problems and difficulties brought by the Grudin's and Galagher and Kraut's papers in relation to the behavioral foundation issues presented in the first 4 papers (all wrote after '91).

Qian says: The issues I'd like to discuss is in paper " a typology of tasks ":

In decision making, negotiation is also involved, especially when the group have different preference due to cultural norms, background knowledge. So I think it is hard to draw a clear line between Quadran II, III, even though I agree on distinguishing choose and negotiate task types.
What are the implications of the task classification in Groupware design? How detailed this classification should go to accommodate groupware design?

Roberto says: The article by Dix et al. is very interesting and covers quite a number of topics. If possible I'd like to see the "14.6 Organizational Issues" section covered in next Wednesday's lecture. I found interesting the issues affecting the failure/success of a groupware system based on the impact caused to/by individuals in an organization (e.g., the benefit/contribution ratio, goals and motivations), critical mass, and the (minor) issues related to distributed collaboration and managerial appraisal of employees' physical presence.

I found the article by J. Grudin quite interesting. Even though this same topic was covered by Dix, et al, this article made (understandably) a better analysis. Grudin's article describes problems affecting the design and evaluation of organizational interfaces. If possible I'd like these problems (i.e., people who do the work is not benefited, decision-makers' self-centering, and obstacles to evaluation) to be discussed in Wednesday's lecture (if too broad, I'd prefer the "people who do the work is not benefited" or the "obstacles to evaluation" problems).

Donald says: Issue #1. So? Your Point? This is basically an echoing/elaboration of the discussion in Galegher and Kraut, particularly page 6. There is a constellation of related concerns here, as far as I can tell. One thread is the question of what, if any, prescriptive or predictive data is on offer. I suggest Clark's chapter is a good example of stuff that is only useful post-hoc and Tang's article claims about design issues are hardly useful. Another issue is specific a study has to be useful, or to put it another way, how general a study can be before it becomes useless. As a parting shot, I'll suggest there is no evidence that starting with theory producing systems any better that intuition-directed evolutionary wandering around, and in fact the is evidence to the contrary (Coordinator).

Issue #2. the bbt approach Inspired by "Beyond Being There", the notion is that what is interesting is not what we do, but what we don't do. Good technology in not imitative, but augments the existing situation. Those in behavioural studies generally are much more interested in the existing condition, rather than this particular orientation.

Case studies of desktop conferencing papers

Krista says: My issues for clearboard are:

The clearboard system appears to solve al ot of the problems associated with other CSCW systems such as eye contact, eye gaze, being able to send and receive non-verbal communication, etc. Why has this type of a system not as well known as the other, more traditional, ones have? (When I say traditional I mean the ones with a video camera mounted on the side or top of a screen).
I find the idea of the large wall-sized clearboard with multiple inputs very intriguing. I seems to me that if it worked it would be a very good system for the same reasons as listed above (eye contact, eye gaze, being able to send and receive non-verbal communication, etc). Do you foresee the same types of problems as were experienced by the coffee meeting room (I don't remember what it is called and I don't have last weeks readings)?

Cameron says:

On the Cognoter application: This application seemed to be prescriptive reproduction of the Brain Storming model for meetings. I thought that it did not allow enough freedom to be effective for side issues or discussion/decisions that occur at these kind of meetings natually. (At least in my experience) I would be interested in knowing where they have gone from here. Has the product or research become more prescriptive or have they opted for a more permissive slant.
Clearboard: The problems of having the Clearboard metephor applied to multiple sites or people was discussed at the end of the paper briefly. I would like to pursue that with perhaps some discussion on whether other products (TeamWorks?) has considered whether they could incorporate a clearboard like concept in their application. i.e. in the Radar images, there is a picture of the participant but could there be a video feed to watch someone draw?

Roberto says:

As explained in Stefik, et al. and Stefik, et al (the first 2 readings) Cognoter has 3 phases: brainstorming, organizing & evaluation. It would be interesting to address circumstances when this approach is not suitable to presentation preparation.
On page. 355 of the first Cognoter reading, under the "Programming Issues and Topics" section, it's mentioned that methods are categorized into 3 sets: user input, semantic actions and display actions. I was wondering how exactly these methods are related (if related) to the controller/model/view structure.
Ishii, et al. mentioned that virtual reality is the only way (to their knowledge) that the shared workspace metaphor can be fulfilled (pg 102). However, a definition of virtual reality is not further explained, leading me to wonder what will it be their interpretation of it.
An issue that (although minimal) I haven't seen mentioned in the class readings is whether the use of a keyboard hinder participants in a session from recognizing authorship; on the one hand, handwritten text provides clear clues of whom wrote a word/phrase based on the writing styles particular to each person (who cannot recognize its own hand writing?); however, such clues patterns not immediately derived from computer text. Mapping techniques --such as an identifiable color/font/etc per participant-- could be applied to make identifications easier (I'm not sure whether this is a suitable solution).
Cognoter is explained (Tatar, et al) to use the parcel-post model while the conversation model is desirable. how such conversion can be made?

Qian says: These are my issues for next class:

According to the development of tele-conference meeting, can a groupware embed or work together with a tele-video conference system, so that participant can share their presence while sharing work surface? is it feasible? What is the bottle neck for this technology incorperation?
While the work surface is scrollable, some participants' work might be invisible if their work is not on the same page (or protion) of the work surface. Thus, chances are their most recent work are not viewed by the whole group, how is the issues addressed in design?
In group drawing design, how the system assign the ownership of the objects? Are there any balance algorithms to evenly distribute the responsibilities, so as to balance the communication load evenly among participants?

Dana says:

It seems to me that Cognoter has been invested with a number of features that confused the users and made them work more than necessary, rather than facilitating their collaboration. I would like to see discussed the issue of having the 'private editing' feature in Cognoter; the advantages and the disadvantages of having a more structured and less colloquial conversation.
Reading the paper about 'the talking through and drawing on' metaphor, the following argument seemed a bit too strong to me: "we think that providing gaze awareness will be an important goal of the next generation of shared drawing tools [which I agree with]. It cannot be easily obtained in conventional meeting environments; only (?!) CSCW technology can provide it..."

Dong says:

In Cognoter, when drawing or sketching, only local pointer is provided. Group telepointing is only used for gesturing. This may let participants lose track of where others are working on. Is this a good strategy to reduce the confusion caused by multiple pointers on screen? How can we get around with this issue.
Is it too disruptive to bring the global window to full size to bring everyone to group discussion, especially when subgroups are in the middle of disscussion of other issues?
In Cognoter, when drawing or sketching, only local pointer is provided. Group telepointing is only used for gesturing. This may let participants lose track of where others are working on. Is this a good strategy to reduce the confusion caused by multiple pointers on screen? How can we get around with this issue.
Is it too disruptive to bring the global window to full size to bring everyone to group discussion, especially when subgroups are in the middle of disscussion of other issues?

Cox says:

Generality vs. Specificity. In the Colab work, we see tools designed for fairly specific purposes/processes (esp. Cognoter). In the opposing camp, we have Group*, Clearboard, and Boardnoter, also more recent efforts such as Microsoft's Net Meeting. Which of these is more likely to be successful? effective? Which is easier to evaluate? Note that there are many possible interpretations for "easier" in the preceeding sentence.
Meeting Taxonomy. Is there a taxonomy of meetings similar to McGrath's taxonomy of tasks? I ask because the sorts of meetings that are described in the colab papers a quite unlike anything I've attended that has been described as a meeting.

Informal Communication and Media Spaces

Brad says:

The main thing I seem to be seeing in these papers is that awareness, or supporting awareness, is a good thing and that such support is a difficult thing to achieve. Although Kraut, et.al show that awareness and opportunistic meetings are the glue that holds groups together, it seems we are attempting to model an existing paradigm with only moderate success. Perhaps the paradigm needs to be changed. That is, rather than try to model something that is inherently difficult to model, create a new model that is more likely to be successful given the constraints of computer mediated communication.
In the Hudson & Smith paper some interesting ways to support both awareness and privacy issues were presented. Saul's paper provides a similar but less resource intensive way to accomplish the same thing. It would be interesting to know the frequency with which these were used ... an hourly rate paired with time of day i.e. were they used a bunch when people first come in in the morning, after lunch, etc. or is there a fairly consistent rate throughout the day? Would this give us a clue as to better ways to structure awareness or presence types of widgets?

Cam says: One of the things that struck me when reading the articles regarding media spaces was that it would be interesting to have a combinational approach that might apply the best of the group of tools/techniques described and perhaps lighten the processing load for the ensuing video technology. For example, a function/description list could read something like:

Combine lightweight keyboard and video indicators to determine presense.i.e. why bother doing the video analysis when the computer knows you're typing at the keyboard.
Try using a client/server arch. to do the video analysis at the client and just send modal information to the central server (I'm here, I was here recently, I'm not here). You could have icon display instead of video or shadow video.
Allow a 'Hide' function to avoid ambushing and ensure some privacy. I.e. if you 'glance' in my office and I'm hiding, then you see a standard picture(no live video) of a blank office.
Post-it notes
The lack of live video for 'glance' or 'watch' techniques should not impact the awarness of the other person or that persons present situation,(busy, typing, reading), while at the same time it does not preclude the initiation of a live video conversations such as Montage.
Others?

Kevin says: My issues for tomorrow's class are the following:

With respect to the article on Portholes: The articles states all the advantages to portholes in providing awareness for remote colleagues. But what about some of the disadvantages? Do Portholes intrude on people's privacy? Personally, I think it would be kind of eerie having a camera constantly focusing in on me at work. Portholes also facilitate informal conversations, but will it raise the level of 'chit-chat' and unproductive work? In other words, I would like to discuss the dual trade-offs (as outlined in Hudson and Smith's paper) with respect to Portholes since the article seems to have neglected mentioning any disadvantges.
I would like to discuss the introduction of such systems as Montage into our society. Are these systems supposed to replace face-to-face interactions? Or should they be used in conjunction with real life encounters?

Roberto says: It seems to me that there are some physical and social constraints that are not mimicked by glance systems. For example, in real life, a person will normally walk through a hallway having a source (e.g., her office) and a destination (e.g., the coffee room). While going through, she glances at offices and she may engage on informal interactions with colleagues. What it's (perhaps) relevant on this issue is that people been glanced upon may perceive the glance as a secondary intention of the glancing person's goal (go to the coffee room), and their glancing interaction as a uncompromising act resulting from her physical constraints (walking through the hallway) while achieving her goal. It strikes me that the casualness of glancing is not addressed by the glancing systems reviewed. On the one hand, systems are explicitly ordered to glance at specific people; the problem is that those people who are been glanced know that they are explicitly glanced (their name was given to the system). On the other hand, systems can be asked to glanced randomly; this is awkward in real life since people do not just wander around glancing at offices (well, those cases usually end by someone calling security!); as a result, people will (probably) tend to think that someone is electronically glancing to start interaction and not just because she wants to observe what's happening around (there might be further comments related to this issue; for example, a person may be quickly tagged as a cruiser if she engaged on frequent and meaningless electronic random glances than if she just wanders the same number of times through the hallway....).

Dana says:

I would like to see discussed the nature of socialization in general and in the case of SCL in particular, as discussed in the first paper, by Olson and Bly. It seems to me that learning and acting out roles in a group is a process by which the group becomes more than a mere aggregates on people. There are roles and organizational responsibilities that often guide the work of a group. What are the chances to achieve the socialization process in a distributed collaborative space? Is the adhocracy, as described in this paper, the best way to go? Learning about people's roles in the organization is not only to know how to act but also, I guess, to understand people's perceptions, expectations and attitudes, based on their roles. Olson and Bly argue that electronic media present a new set of roles and meanings that "undermine the traditional relationship between physical setting and social situation". How these new set of roles is different from the "traditional" ones? And I would really like to see this issue discussed in relation to the last paper, by Harper, where understanding the systems of meaning is associated to the acceptability of new technology. In Requirements Engineering there is a continuous debate on how organizational roles, perceptions and meanings associated to these roles, relate to the acceptability of the system being developed. I think that the paper by Harper makes it clear that this issue is a valid one in designing groupware too. Isn't RE just preceding the design process?
It refers to the figure illustrating the similarity of communication media, in the "Evaluating Video as a Technology for Informal Communication", pag. 43. It seems to be a nice result. However, how valid is this result when it was based only on 'asking participants to rate the appropriateness of nine different media...'? It would be nice to discuss the position of these media on the two dimensions. How this 'appropriateness' has been defined when the study has been introduced to the participants? What does the 'degree of interactivity' mean?

Qian says: About the distributed "awareness' system, 1) what kind of positive impact the 'awareness' system has brought to working environment? 2) Thinking of cost-effeciency, which one is better? a real-time communication system(videoWindow system, Montage, desktop conference) or an 'awareness' system? 3) As the 'awareness system' is a full-day system, which put everyone involved under camera all day, are there any negative effects? In another word, will anyone feel uncomfortable about it?

About informal communication system, 1) Some informal communication system(like VideoWindow System) can't support private conversation. For example, in actual meeting, two people want to exchange their thinking privately, but it seems hard to do through the videoWindow system. 2) In Fish's paper, they compared the similarity of communication media. In terms of interactivity dimension, cruiser seems very similiar to telephone, and in terms of the amount of information exchanged dimension, cresier seems very similiar to Email system, so, why do we need cruiser system? The main use of crusier is to make a quick glance and make a schedule for face-to-face meeting. What is the strength of cruiser?

Dong says:

Most of the papers for the class is make the computer supported tools help keep awareness of others in the community and in the same time protect privacy of individuals. To make such tools of most value to support informal communication, they should not put much burden on either the initiator or the participants. They should be designed as "lightweight". Tools like peepholes are a lightweight which can give information on if someone is "there" or not. But the infomation it gives is not enough to determine if someone is available or not. One needs still other means to find out more information. On the other hand, tools like Montage, Cruiser give one more infomation because they used video, audio feedbacks. However the burden put on either side is much heavier than peepholes approach in terms of more participant's attention, machine resources, etc. They also has the potential of invading individual privacy. So is there any other kind of method that can achieve the advantage of both approaches while avoiding their shortcomings?
To what extent should the individual privacy be protected? In a working environment, everyone can go along the corridor and look into other's office and this is not considered to invade other's privacy. Then when using a computer system, how it should be designed so that it is thought as not invading other's privacy?

Donald says: My main issue involves the notion of productivity, and how it is, at least in some way, antithetical to informal communication.

So my first issue is that computers do not make go devices for informal communication in a "symbolic" sense. I am most open to, and interested in, informal communication when I'm being "un- productive" (in the stereotypical narrow view of management). The computer, on the other hand, in a tool for productivity. In reflecting on my own experience, I'm most receptive to informal communication at precisely the same times as I'm least interested in being at my workstation. At least half the point of getting up and wandering around or going for coffee is to get away from the damn thing. So we have these computer tools that seek to make us more productive by eliminating the unproductive activity, but we don't really want it eliminated.

It seems that groupware is almost always used by and evaluated on computer geeks or technology company employees. How would different user groups effect the performance and acceptance of groupware. In particular, technologists tend to be abstract thinkers, but not necessarily particularly skilled in using language. What would groupware for poets be like? Philosophers? Linguists? Literary critics? Dadaists?

I'm intrigued by the notion of turning a hallway into a media space, rather than a room. Especially if we took a sort of "tangible bits" type approach. Have real (local, physical) offices for remote collaborators that would be "connected" to their actual (remote, physical) offices. The most obvious bit of interaction would be to slave the doors, but I think it could be extended quite nicely so that we could use our "natural" social processes skills, and mechanisms. On a slightly related note, I like the idea from Sun's Starfire of having cameras in the hallway, looking into the office.

On a related note, I think that having the media space system use a separate monitor from the workstation, and having cameras that do not point at the user's face are really good ideas. This is tied into the notions of reciprocity and disturbance. If I'm in the office with the door open, depending on the layout, people can walk by and see what I'm up to, but I'm not necessarily aware of their doing so. I can be if I choose to be, but it isn't required. Many of the systems are implemented such that I am forced to be aware of people "looking in" on me. That is burdensome.

Returning to the idea of productivity, I think one of the reasons that people don't like awareness technologies is that they lower the cost of snooping. It isn't like the information isn't already available and easy to get in normal not mediated situations. But people are prevented from gathering the information because it is too costly (unproductive - I keep having to walk by jane's office to see what she is doing). With the awareness technologies, it no longer costs me much to gather this information. Also, I can do so surreptitiously. If I want to spy in the real world, it is likely that people other than myself and the person I'm spying on will notice, and I will be subject to social sanction.

Finally, it seems to me that the ideal we really want is to have our own agents/proxies/butlers who take care of the busybodies and make sure we meet the interesting people. The underlying issue is what the "best" way to present awareness information - realistically like in the media spaces or more abstractly like in peepholes or some of the hudson & smith techniques.

Krista says:

I found the article on active badges very interesting. It seemed, however, that the issues centered around long standing feuding between the labs more than the badges themselves. It is likely that this may not be the case in most settings. I would like to discuss what people think may be problems associated with typical active badge implementations. For example, what happens when one group (the workers) don't want to wear it and have feelings as strong as the lab opposed to them in the article but have no choice because those implementing them are administrators or otherwise in a position of power? Another example, the issue of employees seeing it as surveillance. What about the option of being able to "turn off" the badge if you do not want to be disturbed (or tracked) similar to the "do not disturb" function in the Montage type systems?
It appears that their is more resistance to the badges than to the other systems. Why do you think that this is? The issues that pop into my mind center around privacy and surveillance. Is it, however, really more intrusive on privacy to have others know where you are than letting others have the ability to "spy" into your office?

Awareness Papers

Donald says: I think that awareness in asynchronous environments is more interesting, more useful, and harder to do. I'm disappointed that our readings did not cover it in more detail. I also thought that Dourish & Bellotti's comparisons between various systems wasn't particularly fair, and what they meant by "passive awareness mechanisms" was not particularly clear.

I wonder how many tasks that people really do are of the "truely" cooperative sort described in the Hutchins chapter. As acknowledged in Gutwin's stuff (ch. 2, I think), people generally try to avoid this sort of stuff.

I found the group task circumplex in Gutwin's chapter 2 to be overly simplistic. Any real world activity is comprised of instances or episodes from many of the octants in a not too distinct fashion. I don't believe that designers can pretend like they can address only a subset of the activities in their systems.

I'm not sure exactly what the boundaries of Gutwin's workspaces are. I think I have an okay intuition when it comes to those of the computational variety, but in reference to the physical world I feel unsure.

On a related note, what would qualify as an unshared workspace? Is this notition of shared/unshared valid only because of our alienating technology?

Dong says: Awareness is a very important issue in the designing of groupware system, especially in synchronous systems. Gutwin discussed awareness pretty thoroughly in his paper and gave several means to support awareness for CSCW. However, CSCW for different purposes will need different kind of such support. For collaborating authoring system, maybe "group scrollbar", "outline" will provide enough awareness for the group. While for other kind of tasks, other techniques maybe more appropriate. My issue is: is there any classification of CSCW, and to what extent awareness should be support, and what kind of "widget" is best suited for that kind of systems?

Roberto says: I enjoyed reading Hutchins paper, mainly when he states that computers should play a role on exploiting the cognitive resources of people instead of perform just as information-processing machines (pg 206). Another interesting point in this paper is on regards of knowledge distribution and redundancy of function as approaches to enhance the robustness of a system; this theory is somewhat contrary to the well-defined roles and boundaries implemented by current (e.g.,. OO) systems. Although these previous issues may be best suited for a AI discussion, I thought on mention them (since I found them appealing). In other topic, I agree with an issue raised by Donald re: asynchronous awareness, specifically, on the accounting of past events affecting the state of the workspace; for example, how does a newly arrived participant know the series of events/decisions that lead to the current state of an artifact? (hard to tell!) This issue was previously raised by the Portland Experience paper (from last week), but (perhaps because of the nature of that project) it was suggested the use of video tapes and disks to record group sessions which could be later reviewed (well, not the best solution, I guess!) Another interesting issue is on action indicators and animations, as described by Carl (Ch. 5 pg 91); who explains how certain instantaneous actions (e.g., delete) could be animated for other participants to clearly perceive changes in the workspace. It may be worth commenting that these techniques are specially useful if participants can interrupt the animation as a way to stop the action to be accomplished (an equivalent to a real world situation would be, for example: "hey, don't delete that node, I'm still using it!").

Krista says: How detailed does the awareness have to be? That is, how fine grained should it be? You did not mention any results from the 'chunk' condition in your paper. I am wondering where those results fit in. Were they significantly different from the overview or the radar conditions? If they did not differ significantly from the radar view, is it necessary to have the real-time feedback or is a slight lag acceptable? This is a similar issue to one we talked about during shared editors and other shared workspaces of should you be able to see what the other person is typing as they do it, or is it acceptable to see the whole chunk at the end. Do you think that the detail needed will vary greatly based on the collaborative task being performed or should all tasks have this type of awareness provided at the same level? Assume for a moment that you could not provide all aspects of the radar view. What would you classify as the most vital parts to retain to optimize the awareness in the group (including all types of awareness; conversational, workspace, situational)?

Dana says:

I am amazed at how we discover the richness of the face-to-face setting when it comes to awareness of others or others' work in the shared workspace. And how difficult it is to convey this awareness in the virtual workspace. The issue I would like to see discussed is "how much do we actually let others see from our actions when designing groupware systems?" This issue is addressed in terms of action and process feedthrough in Carl's 5.1.2 section. I mean, how do we know how much information the others should receive so that awareness is maintained, but their work is not disturbed by this display of 'awareness information'. If I think of the example in figure 27, "A remotely visible popup menu", and I make the connection with the face-to-face setting, I can say two things: (1) I probably do not use a popup menu when I want to start a link between node 1 and node2: I just draw it; and (2) I do not interfere with another person who might be manipulating node 2 at the same time. While, with computational workspaces, when direct manipulation is not always possible, displaying the popup menu on the other's screen might hinder his/her current actions on node 2. So, again, the issue is: how do we know how to display and how much of situated awareness information so that it is useful and not disruptive at the same time?
I really liked the perception-action cycle and tried to understand it in our day-to-day actions in the workspace. First, I have a question: can I think of it as an iterative cycle where each iteration incrementally enlarges my awareness of the environment? Or this 'gaining of awareness' is not an incremental process? Related to this, I would like to see discussed Carl's conceptual framework as it applies to the radar view. It happens that I participated in one of the studies he did with the radar view. I became aware and maintained awareness through monitoring the radar view and the full screen by continously switching my focus between these views. I would like to see this discussed in the light of the conceptual framework. It seems to me that I do this (switching between the views) in face-to-face situations all the time; however, there is no radar view around... but I still switch between the part I am working on and the surrounding workspace... So this radar view was definitely helpful for me in that study.
This is about the first paper, by Dourish and Belloti. The ShrEdit system solves some awareness problems as compared with the other systems in the paper. However, at what cost designer [D2] answered the question "what are you doing?" I guess this is a bit disruptive with the designer's actions, when he has to answer such a question, while he/she was concentrating on doing it actually.... Is speech a reasonable way to solve the 'up-to-the-moment' awareness problems of a shared editor collaboration?

Cameron says: In Chapter 3, Workspace Awareness, there is a discussion describing "...four characteristics of WA that set it apart from existing studies of SA" (SA - Situational Awarness). I don't agree with some of the statements. The first statement that "...workspace awareness involves knowledge of another person, rather than knowledge of a mechanistic system" seems to be in conflict with the examples and with point four "...workspace awareness is not just about the person, and not just about the workspace, but about the interaction between the two". The examples being used involve the piloting of a airplane. They involve a situational awareness of a mechanical workspace through collaboration with a group whose primary group function is to safely control the plane. This goes against the statement "The underlying rason for maintaining workspace awareness, therefore, is not better control, but better collaboration."

Being a pilot, the examples of workspace vs. situational awareness, hit close to home and I would like to discuss in more detail how workspace awarenss is different (or not) from situational awareness. Can you be aware of the situation but not the workspace, of visa versa?

Space/Place Papers

Danah says:

How can we actually recognize locales? What are the features of a room that makes it be a locale and what are the features of a room that makes it not be a locale?
What is actually the difference between a place and a locale? They both share the 'social meaning' feature. However, what it that makes them different, if there is any difference?
What makes a space-based system that is used by a group of people be not a place for their interaction? Can we have 'individual locales'? Where is the social world in that locale then?

Dong says:

The space and place concepts are quite interesting. What makes a space different from a place, is it true that when social protocols are added into space, space changes to place? In real world, it is sometimes very simple to change a space into some kind of places: bringing in some kind facilities, tools, etc. and the space is changed into a meeting room, a living room, or something else. However, sometimes, even in real world, when you build something, you have the idea what you'll use it for, and it is built to a place. In virtual world, how should we build space/place? Should we build the space in general (suited for any purpose, to be adapted by its residence), or we can build special purposed places? There are all this kind of tradeoffs, which one is the best?

Qian says:

"Place" concepte is new for me. In the previous readings, many papers use "space". How to understand "space" and "place"? In paper, they said space is opportunity; place is the understood reality, to my understand, space and place seem like "class" and "object", is that right?

Many papers and book discuss "workspace" and "interpersonal space", both shared workspace and interpersonal space are present in ordinary face-to-face meetings, and may be essential for remote real-time collaboration. Some researchers try to improve the design to realize a seamless environment between the shared workspace and interpersonal space. Can we say that actually the reseachers try to understand "workplace" and "interpersonal place", and then try to design good groupware. I'd like to see more discussion about this.

Donald says:

On borrowing from other fields: In the Australian papers, they base their work on that of some sociologist. Does said sociologist approve of what they are doing? What do other sociologists think of this persons work? Is it mainstream, accepted stuff or fringe rantings? Should that matter an argument from authority using an authority we are in no position to dispute?

Can metaphors have functionality?

Roberto says:

It was interesting to read about individual work been a sub-set of collaborative work, as explained by Greenberg & Roseman; mainly because I previously thought on collaborative work as an evolution/extension of the work done by individuals. The room-based metaphor fits right in such analysis. I'd dare to comment that current personal computer systems could be seen as private non-virtual rooms for individual work (e.g., a home computer, a UNIX account). It'd be interesting to see in the future that these currently non-related spaces could be encompassed into 'rooms' environments, where owners could seamlessly accomplish their work and interact with people regardless of the OS/time/space dimensions (interesting topic for portability advocates). However, the issue is not if this type of systems will be ever developed (I'm sure they will) but whether what approach will succeed on doing it: in the one hand, there are fully-featured one-user productivity apps with no groupware abilities (e.g., MS Office); in the other hand, there are arising groupware-enabled systems (e.g., TeamWave) which don't include powerful apps yet. It'll be interesting to see how this will evolve. Another issue to comment on is related to the paper authored by Fitzpatrick et al, where software administrators were studied. It was interesting to read about the complexities related to the management of software, which is seen as a virtual place with more variables that the one concerned with hardware (physical space).

Kevin says:

This whole idea of places and locales as opposed to spaces is very interesting. However, I have difficulty trying to apply this knowledge of behaviour framing to designing of tools to support collaborative interactions. The authors state that we cannot design systems to be places themselves, but must provide tools for people to make places. Do we design systems with the concepts of spaces, with the intention that they will involve into places? Was TeamWave constructed with the goal of supporting the framework of locales or was this a result upon "completing" ( I am not too sure how close TeamWave is to completion) the system? How do individuals construct personalized views of locales in TeamWave?

Dourish and Harrison also use the terms "emergence of place-centric and characterisitcs" and "enculturation" when participants are using certain systems for extended periods of time. Should participants be expected to change their behaviour to accomodate these systems when using them?

Cameron says:

The concept of spaces and places is an interesting and a confusing one where "Space is opportunity and place is the understood reality". The reason it seem confusing to me is that space can be used to give different affordances to it's understood reality or "place". This is the same in the virtual world where names such as "rooms' or 'foyer' give affordances to spaces with specific function in a culture. These 'rooms' then offer culturally expected affordances such as doors to further strengthen the feeling of behavioural appropriatness to the virtual 'space'. The issue that I would like to discuss in more detail is how one would make 'virtual affordances'. For example the 'space' around a 'well' may have different affordances depending on culture. In North America it would be a place to get water or perhaps a 'knowledge well' would be a place to get knowledge while in an East Indian culture it may be closer to a 'chat room' where you gather to socialize and getting water is a secondary function.

Brad says:

Places in Space. The suggestion is that 'place' may come out of how a communication tool is used over time. Certainly discussion groups tend to take on a character of their own after much use. While Harrison and Dourish say 'place' should not be programmed in, doesn't it make sense to do just that? That is, we create our own places in our offices and homes by use of furniture, layout, etc. as well as by continued use. Shouldn't groupware provide some furniture to decorate or provide unique and customizable environments so we can create our own 'place'?

Teamrooms seems to provide the ability to customize environments (rooms) by adding graphics, applets, and so on. Each room can be quite a different 'place'. For example, early iterations I saw quite often had links to Dilbert or some other cartoon prominent within a room. Is this an example of 'bending it to fit our needs' ie. ostensibly the graphics are there to support sharing visual information such as pictures but appeared to be used to personalize rooms.

After evaluating a bunch of group multimedia projects recently I noticed that people had a tendency to create visual environments that reflected the content i.e. a halloween theme was used to 'place' the audience in a proper frame of reference while learning the material about witches, etc.. These environments were meant to structure the interaction with the material. Perhaps the sense of 'place' Harrison and Dourish are talking about is too narrow and should include some things that will make it easier for groups to create places of their own.

Last updated December 1997, by Saul Greenberg