Lecture 3: Shared Workspace and Design Coordination

 Dr. Xiangyu WANG

The concept of Shared Workspace

• A space for working is a prerequisite for work (both individual and cooperative)

• Computer Supported Cooperative Work aims at providing virtual spaces where people can work together independently from their location.

A shared workspace: examples

• A shared workspace should also support different aspects

of sharing information.

A shared workspace: examples

What is Awareness?

• Previous researchers have defined awareness as knowledge created through interaction between an agent and its environment – in simple terms, “knowing what is going on” (Endsley, 1995).

Characteristics of Awareness

• Awareness is knowledge about the state of an environment bounded in time and space.

• Environments change over time, so awareness is knowledge that must be maintained and kept up to date.

• People interact with and explore the environment, and awareness is maintained through information gathered from the environment.

• Awareness is a secondary goal in the task – that is, the overall goal is not simply to maintain awareness but to complete some task in the environment.

Situational Awareness

• Situation awareness is the up-to-the-minute knowledge required to maintain a dynamic system or operate in a dynamic situation (Gilson, 1995).

Situational Awareness

• Endsley (1995) focuses more on the process, proposing a three stage definition:– Level 1: perception of relevant elements of the environment. An

actor must first be able to gather perceptual information from the environment, and be able to selectively attend to those elements that are most relevant for the task at hand.

– Level 2: comprehension of those elements. An actor must be able to integrate the incoming perceptual information with existing knowledge, and make sense of the information in light of the current situation.

– Level 3: prediction of the states of those elements in the near future. To perform well in a situation, an actor must also be able to anticipate changes to the environment and be able to predict how incoming information will change.

Workspace awareness

• Specialization of situation awareness, one that is tied to the specific setting of the shared workspace.

• Up-to-the-moment understanding of another person’s interaction with a shared workspace.

• Workspace awareness includes the understanding of who is in the workspace, where they are working, what they are doing, and what they intend to do next.

The Importance of Awareness

• Workspace awareness:– Reduces the effort needed to coordinate tasks

and resources,– Provides a context in which to interpret other's

utterances and actions,– Allows anticipation of others' actions.

Example

Workspace Awareness

• Workspace awareness is a specialized situational awareness.

Two case studies

• BSCW: Web-based asynchronous shared workspace application.

• TeamWave: synchronous shared workspace application.

Shared spaces for workingtogether

• Examples 1: BSCW (Basic Support for Cooperative Work, http://bscw.fit.fraunhofer.de/) – A system for supporting:

• Shared workspaces: supports reading and writing data in a group context

• Awareness: supports awareness of who is doing, what and how.

BSCW and user awareness

• The awareness event service:– Provides users with information on the

activities of others with respect to the objects in a workspace

– Provides different types of events (‘new’,’read’, ‘touch’, e-mail notifications)

TeamWave

• A groupware system that provides team rooms for groups whose members can work both co-located and at distance.

Collaboration in TeamWave

• Workspace Awareness: Information about the happenings in the rooms.

• Telepointers: each user has a telepointer that provides awareness on his/her actions.

• Chat tool: For communication among the users.

Tools available in TeamWave

• Standard:– chat tool,– shared whiteboard.– special tools satisfying basic group needs,

e.g.: concept map, voting tool, file transfer, external URL reference, …

A general Workspace Awareness (WA) framework

• To help conceptualize awareness research so far.

• To help groupware developers in finding out how they can best provide awareness support in their tools.

• Increase our “awareness” about AWARENESS.

(GUTWIN & GREENBERG 2002)

WA framework

• Framework:– Part 1: What information makes up WA? (a

class exercise)– Part 2: How is WA information gathered?– Part 3: How is WA information used in

collaboration?

Framework part 1: Information

• Information about who, what, where, when, and how.

• Divided into present and past information:– What is happening in a shared workspace

right now?– What has happened in the shared workspace

when I was away?

Information about the present

Information about the present

Framework part 2: Gatheringinformation

• Three main sources for awareness information:– Bodies -> consequential communication– Artifacts -> feedthrough– Conversations and gestures -> intentional

communication

Bodies andconsequential communication

• Information available to people as a result of being embodied in the same space.– Information from observing others’ hands,

heads, eyes, bodies, etc.

• Mainly visually perceived but may also be based on sound.

• Information that is out there to be ”picked up”. Not intentional information.

Artifacts and feedthrough

• Artifacts in the shared workspace provide essencial awareness information:– Physical objects with shapes, color, spatial

relations to other objects.– Contain visual symbols like words, pictures,

etc.

• By seeing or hearing the ways that an artifact changes, it is often possible to determine “what is being done to it”.

Conversations and Gestures

• They are intentional communication• Verbal communication:

– Talking to each other about awareness elements.– Overhearing others talking to each other, e.g., voice

loops – audio channels– Picking up others’ verbal shadowing - the running

commentary that people commonly produce alongside their actions.

• Gestures:– Can be used to carry out intentional communication,

e.g. pointing at things.

Framework part 3: Using WA

• WA information is used for:

Awareness techniques

• GUTWIN & GREENBERG (2002) concentrated on real-time aspects of workspace awareness – elements that answer the who, what, and where questions.

Awareness techniques – What (2)

Where