Many collaborative and communicative environments use notions of “space ” and spatial organisation to facilitate and structure interaction. We argue that a focus on spatial models is misplaced. Drawing on understandings from architecture and urban design, as well as from our own research findings, we highlight the critical distinction between “space ” and “place”. While designers use spatial models to support interaction, we show how it is actually a notion of “place ” which frames interactive behaviour. This leads us to re-evaluate spatial systems, and discuss how “place”, rather than “space”, can support CSCW design.

Although privacy is broadly recognized as a dominant concern for the development of novel interactive technologies, our ability to reason analytically about privacy in real settings is limited. A lack of conceptual interpretive frameworks makes it difficult to unpack interrelated privacy issues in settings where information technology is also present. Building on theory developed by social psychologist Irwin Altman, we outline a model of privacy as a dynamic, dialectic process. We discuss three tensions that govern interpersonal privacy management in everyday life, and use these to explore select technology case studies drawn from the research literature. These suggest new ways for thinking about privacy in sociotechnical environments as a practical matter.

This paper describes the design of groupware for virtual organizations that share certain characteristics. First the concept of virtual organizations is introduced. Then our application partner, the "virtual" service company Sigma, and our empirical work at Sigma are described. The identified problems are categorized and discussed.

In recent years, we have witnessed an enormous growth in networks and related technologies. Course materials are increasingly published on web servers, and students are encouraged to access these at leisure. Distance learning via the WWW shifted the education paradigm from teacher-centered instruction to user-centered collaborative learning. Systems that allow users to learn collaboratively are increasingly interesting to scientific communities and learning organizations. We initially designed and prototyped a collaborative system to support collaborative learning over the Internet. A usability study of the first prototype revealed the importance of awareness information. Our review of three wellknown collaborative systems finds that such systems today also lack support for awareness information, especially workspace awareness. We then consider various types of awareness in collaborative learning situations and set out the design requirements of our system. From these requirements, we have designed and prototyped several awareness widgets for a typical collaborative tool: the shared electronic whiteboard. These widgets help learners maintain awareness of other learners' interactions with the shared workspace.

The tension between privacy and awareness has been a persistent difficulty in distributed environments that support opportunistic and informal interaction. For example, many awareness systems that display ‘always-on ’ video links or PC screen contents have been perceived as too invasive, even though functional real-world analogues, like open-plan offices, may provide even less privacy than their online counterparts. In this paper we explore the notion of privacy in open-plan real-world environments, in order to learn more about how it might be supported in distributed systems. From interviews and observations in four open-plan offices, we found that attention plays an important role in the management of both confidentiality and solitude. The public nature of paying attention allows people to build understandings of what objects in a space are legitimate targets for attention and allows people to advertise their interest in interaction. Our results add to what is known about how privacy works in real-world spaces, and suggest valuable design ideas that can help improve support for natural privacy control and interaction in distributed awareness systems.

Preserving and fostering knowledge is the vital interest of a network-like virtual organization. The decentralized and geographically distributed organizational structure inhibits knowledge flow. The particular conditions of knowledge management in virtual organizations are discussed by the example of an empirical study we carried out in a service company. We analyze how technical and organizational aspects influence knowledge sharing and transfer. Particular emphasis is placed on supporting knowledge transfer. It is shown how an existing knowledge sharing tradition had to be extended and which drawback it had concerning technology use. To improve knowledge flow within the organization a web-based knowledge base was introduced. This initiated a process of externalizing tacit knowledge and is meant to introduce new ways of knowledge transfer to the organizational culture. In fluid virtual organizations sustained knowledge management means to establish an organizational memory that is fl...

In the Human-Computer Interaction, Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and ubiquitous computing literature, making people’s presence and activities visible as a design approach has been extensively explored to enhance computer mediated interactions and collaborations. This process has developed under the rubrics of “awareness”, “social translucence”, “social activity indicators”, “social navigation”, etc. Although the name and details vary, the central ideas are similar. By making social presence and activities more visible or perceivable, they provide social context for members to make sense of situations and guide their activities more informatively and The final publication is available at www.springerlink.com 1 appropriately. In this work, we introduce a class of visualizations called social context displays, which use and share graphical representations to depict people’s presence and activity information with an explicit focus on groups. The aim of this work is to examine social context displays in use and contribute new abstractions for understanding how making social information more visible works in general. Through our first hand experience with user-centered design and empirical investigations of two social context displays in real settings, we uncovered not only how they