Collab-Or-Ate

I have an article in the latest volume of the HCI Journal, which is a special issue on awareness systems. My article is called “The Impact of Increased Awareness While Face-to-Face” and my co-authors are Katherine J. Hollenbach, Anna Pandolfo, and Walter Bender. Of course, I highly recommend reading it!

The issue’s introduction, written by the editors Markopoulos, de Ruyter, and Mackay, has a nice summary of the recent work done on awareness systems, which the individual articles respresent. Of most interest to me is the historical perspective. The editors make the point that:

Current awareness systems have been deeply influenced by the media spaces of the late
1980s, which supported sustained audio/video links among remote co-workers and emphasized
the importance of awareness for maintaining social coherence (see Bly, Harrison, and Irwin,
1993, for an excellent review of this literature). At the time, Computer-Supported Cooperative
Work systems were usually measured in terms of productivity. These benefits of social
awareness proved difficult to quantify (Gross and Stary, 2005). As a result, awareness systems
were sometimes criticized as having marginal benefit (Schmidt, 2002) and were largely ignored
for a decade.

I think the entire field of CSCW suffered a bit from this phenomenon. If the tool didn’t make meetings faster or didn’t demonstrate quantitative gains in decision-making, then the tool was considered useless or even harmful. Now, as social scientists have become more involved in the fields of CSCW and HCI, there is a much more holistic view on the benefits that interaction design and information visualization can bring to our human-human interactions. Additionally, the cost of technology has gone down so much that tools for collaboration and communication can be built for and designed for consumers, rather than just the executives in the boardrooms.

The editors summarize this nicely as:

The research culture has changed as well – valuing systems that move beyond simple
collaboration – making it easier to justify systems in terms of their support for maintaining
informal social relationships, both in the home and in the office. For example, Putman (2000)
defines the creation of social capital as an important feature of social organization and argues that
systems should support social relations, including the norms, networks, and trust that facilitate
cooperation and co-ordination for mutual benefit. We adopt a correspondingly broad
interpretation of awareness and a more inclusive consideration of potential benefits.

So I highly recommend checking out the articles in the Special Issue! Here’s a rundown of the articles in the issue:

• Incorporating Human and Machine Interpretation of Unavailability and Rhythm Awareness into the Design of Collaborative Applications
  James “Bo” Begole and John C. Tang
• The Impact of Increased Awareness While Face-to-Face
  Joan Morris DiMicco, Katherine J. Hollenbach, Anna Pandolfo, and Walter Bender
• Interpreting and Acting Upon Mobile Awareness Cues
  Antti Oulasvirta, Renaud Petit, Mika Raento, and Sauli Tiitta
• Announcing Activity: Design and Evaluation of an Intentionally-Enriched Awareness Service
  Markus Rittenbruch, Stephen Viller, and Tim Mansfield
• Exploring Awareness-Related Messaging Through Two Situated Display-Based Systems
  Keith Cheverst, Alan Dix, Daniel Fitton, Mark Rouncefield, and Connor Graham
• Defining, Designing, and Evaluating Peripheral Displays: An Analysis Using Activity Theory
  Tara Matthews, Tye Rattenbury, and Scott Carter

Friday inspiration:

John Maeda Goes Meta on Design:

Wired News:You’ve ranted in the past about bad design, so I’m wondering if you can give an example of what you consider to be a really bad design.

John Maeda: I don’t rant anymore. I’m a really happy positive guy now. (Laughs) So I think I’d prefer to give you my idea of what I consider really good design.

With regard to what is designed really well, I think people are the best-designed objects in the world. Seriously. People can handle all kinds of shit all day long, and they’re still alive at the end of the day. They’re so robust. They can adapt to any situation. And they also know when to stop. They’ll say, “Hey, I’ve had enough.” And they’ll go out for a smoke or a drink.

Nature is designed pretty darn good, as well.