Imagine sitting in your work place lounge having coffee with some colleagues. Now imagine that you and your colleagues are still in the same room, but are separated by a large sheet of glass that does not interfere with your ability to carry on a clear, two-way conversation. Finally, imagine that you have split the room into two parts and moved

The rich person-to-person interaction afforded by shared physical workspaces allows people to maintain up-to-the minute knowledge about others ’ interaction with the workspace. This knowledge is workspace awareness, part of the glue that allows groups to collaborate effectively. In real-time groupware systems that provide a shared virtual workspace, the possibilities for interaction are impoverished when compared with physical workspaces, partly because support for workspace awareness has not generally been a priority in groupware design. In this paper, we present the concept of workspace awareness as one key to supporting the richness evident in face-to-face interaction. We construct a conceptual framework that describes the elements and mechanisms of workspace awareness, and then show several widgets that can be embedded in relaxed-WYSIWIS groupware systems to support the maintenance of workspace awareness.

This paper re-assesses the role of real-time video as a technology to support interpersonal communications at distance. We review three distinct hypotheses about the role of video in the co-ordination of conversational content and process. For each hypothesis, we identify design implications and outstanding research questions derived from current findings. We first evaluate the non-verbal communication hypothesis, namely the prevailing assumption that the role of video is to supplement speech, and embodied in applications such as videoconferencing and videophone. We conclude that previous work has overestimated the importance of video at the expense of audio. This finding has strong implications for the implementation of such systems, and we make recommendations about both synchronisation and bandwidth allocation. Furthermore our own recent studies of workplace interactions point to other communicative functions of video. Current systems have neglected another potentially vital role of...

This article is a substantially expanded version of a report presented at the 1998 ACM CHI conference [Gutwin and Greenberg 1998]. Authors' addresses: C. Gutwin, Department of Computer Science, University of Saskatchewan, 57 Campus Drive, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan S7N 5A9, Canada; email: gutwin@cs.usask.ca; S. Greenberg, Department of Computer Science, University of Calgary, 2500 University Drive NW, Calgary, Alberta T2N 1N4, Canada; email: saul@cpsc.ucalgary.ca. Permission to make digital / hard copy of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that the copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage, the copyright notice, the title of the publication, and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of the ACM, Inc. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and / or a fee

Video media spaces are an excellent crucible for the study of privacy. Their design affords opportunities for misuse, prompts ethical questions, and engenders grave concerns from both users and nonusers. Despite considerable discussion of the privacy problems uncovered in prior work, questions remain as to how to design a privacy-preserving video media space and how to evaluate its effect on privacy. The problem is more deeply rooted than this, however. Privacy is an enormous concept from which a large vocabulary of terms emerges. Disambiguating the meanings of and relationships between these terms facilitates understanding of the link between privacy and design. In this article, we draw from resources in environmental psychology and computersupported cooperative work (CSCW) to build a broadly and deeply rooted vocabulary for privacy. We relate the vocabulary back to the real and hard problem of designing privacy-preserving video media spaces. In doing so, we facilitate analysis of the privacy-design relationship.

Studies of video as a support for collaborative work have provided little hard evidence of its utility for either task performance or fostering telepresence, i.e. the conveyance of a faceto-face like sociat presence for remotely located participants. To date, most research on the value of video has concentrated on “taLking heads ” video in which the video images are of remote participants conferring or performing some task together. In contrast to talking heads video, we studied video-as-data in which video images of the workspace and work objects are the focus of interest, and convey criticat information about the work. The use of video-as-data is intended to enhance task performance, rather than to provide telepresence. We studied the use of video during neurosurgery within the operating room and at remote locations away from the operating room. The workspace shown in the video is the surgical field (brain or spine) that the surgeon is operating on. We discuss our findings on the use of live and recorded video, and suggest extensions to video-as-data including its integration with computerized timebased information sources to educate and co-ordinate complex actions among distributed workgroups.

Communication theories and technology have tended to focus on extended, formal meetings and have neglected a prevalent and vital form of workplace communication—namely, lightweight communication. Unlike formal, extended meetings, lightweight interaction is brief, informal, unplanned, and intermittent. We analyze naturalistic data from a study of workplace communication and derive five design criteria for lightweight interaction systems. These criteria require that systems for lightweight interaction support conversational tracking, rapid connection, the ability to leave a message, context management, and shared real-time objects. Using these criteria, we evaluate existing interpersonal communications technologies. We then describe an implementation of a system (TeleNotes) that is designed to support lightweight interaction by meeting these criteria. The interface metaphor allows communications to be based around desktop objects, resembling “sticky notes. ” These objects are also organized into “desktop piles ” to support conversational threads and provide mechanisms for initiating real-time audio, video, and application sharing. We conducted informal user testing of several system prototypes. Based on our findings, outstanding issues concerning theory and systems design for communication systems are outlined—in particular, with regard to the issue of managing conversations over time.

We studied the use of a collaborative multimedia system for coordinating teamwork among members of a neurosurgical team. We analyze the use of video within the operating room and the use of broadcast audio and video to other locations in the hospital to enable remote neurophysiological monitoring. We describe how the multimedia system was used in a real world work context, including its benefits and problems. We argue that video can be useful as more than just pictures of people talking to one another; video can be a rich tool to enable analysis and problem solving. We discuss privacy problems inherent in collaborative multimedia technology and describe how they played out in the hospital during the course of our study.

Although talking is an integral part of collaboration, there has been little computer support for acqmrmg and accessing the contents of conversations. Our approach has focused on ubzquztous a udLo, or the unobtrusive capture of speech interactions in everyday work environments. Speech recognition technology cannot yet transcribe fluent conversational speech, so the words them-selves are not available for organizing the captured interactions. Instead, the structure of an interaction M derived from acoustical information inherent in the stored speech and augmented by user interaction during or after capture. This article describes apphcations for capturing and structuring audio from office discussions and telephone calls, and mechanisms for later retrieval of these stored interactions. An Important aspect of retrieval is choosing an appropriate visual representation, and this article describes the evolution of a family of representations across a range of applications. Finally, this work is placed within the broader context of desktop audio, mobde audio applications, and social implications.

. Despite the increasing availability of groupware, most systems are awkward and not widely used. While there are many reasons for this, a significant problem is that groupware is difficult to evaluate. In particular, there are no discount usability evaluation methodologies that can discover problems specific to teamwork. In this paper, we describe how we adapted Nielsen's heuristic evaluation methodology, designed originally for single user applications, to help inspectors rapidly, cheaply effectively identify usability problems within groupware systems. Specifically, we take the `mechanics of collaboration' framework and restate it as heuristics for the purposes of discovering problems in shared visual work surfaces for distance-separated groups. 1.