CPSC 601.25 Week 2 Response
Papers
In this response I will discuss three papers and consider their commons elements and see how they fit into the larger picture of collaborative work.
Descriptive framework of workspace awareness for real-time groupware
Portholes: Supporting Awareness in a Distributed Work Group
Distance Matters
Working Separate
If the theme of last weeks papers was "work" then this weeks theme might be "working separately". In the last batch of papers some situations in the London Underground and in Air Traffic Control rooms were described, and there was often more then meets the eye. In many cases work practices were rich and complicated and not observable by naive onlookers. The use of physical artifacts and conversational strategies were used in ways that couldn't be easily replicated by computers. But what happens when these work practices are broken, in particular if they are broken by separating workers. How does work break down when users are in different buildings or different continents?
Difficulties
Working separately creates many problems with collaborative work because it disrupts activities that require co-location. In "Distance Matters" the authors described several practices that happen in co-located teams that break down when users try to employ various technologies. The use of a VOIP call for example causes a loss of "rapid feedback" where a person can read the facial expression, gestures and other non-verbal signals of a person and alter their communication if needed. A video call does not run at all times. This eliminates much of the informal conversations that often communicate information that cannot be expressed openly during a meeting. Human interaction is complex, the process of shoehorning it into different communication modes will cause problems.
Technology As The Solution?
It is possible that technology might be able to route around some of these problems. With a broad time scope we can imagine fully immersive, three dimensional systems where local and remote workers would be indistinguishable. But people will always be people and many of the remaining issues are "people problems", problems related to time zone mismatch and especially cultural differences.
For the designer of a practical groupware application, what problems can be solved? The authors of the "Framework for Workspace Awareness" tackle just one of these problems, the problem of supporting basic awareness in the application. They described several of the common factors that a designer needs to consider. These factors are straight forward, identifying who is doing what, and where, these are called identity and authorship. What they are doing, why they are doing it and if they are working with an object, is called action, intention and artifact. Some other situations are described but on the whole the framework is disconnected from the reality of systems. It would have been useful to see such a framework written with several rich examples, so that the abstract concepts were tied to firm reality. Unfortunately it seems that, without some contradictory examples, the limiting reagent to the design of groupware is the limitations imposed by monitors, keyboards, cameras and microphones. That much of the "awareness" in these systems are merely UI elements, and don't really solve the problem they purport to solve.
Impass
When we look at an actual system, albeit an early one, we can see the huge distance between reality and research, the problems and the solutions. In the "Portholes" paper, a network system of webcams, updated on a regular interval was discussed. The only difficulties the researchers raise with the system are technical, a lack of bandwidth, low quality cameras etc. Considering the social context, the psychological impact that "always watching cameras" would have on real people is nowhere in their work. If groupware is to improve it needs to be based on incremental improvements tailored to how real people work, and this is a difficult problem.
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