The face-to-face gold standard
April 4, 2009
Face-to-face interaction is always the gold standard of cooperative work.
The face-to-face gold standard
Awareness support research in computer supported cooperative work is aimed at, ultimately, trying to replicate in software the same kind of awareness mechanisms which come so naturally and easily when collaborating face-to-face: “whereas face-to-face interaction has inherent mechanisms and affordances for maintaining awareness [...] any support for building or maintaining workspace awareness must be explicitly chosen and built into the groupware system” (Greeberg et. al. 1996, p. 4). Face-to-face interaction is always the gold standard of cooperative work.
When I talk about awareness I’m talking about awareness in the context of computer supported cooperative work (CSCW): systems which support groups of people in achieving goals. This could mean either allowing groups to do things they could not do before, or could alternatively mean allowing groups to do things they could already do, but in a different or more effective way. Much of the work in awareness support seems to be around cooperative writing, which is an instance of the latter aspect of CSCW, since people can write col-laboratively with or without a computer system.
For the face-to-face group context, Greenberg et. al. (Greenberg et. al. 1996) group cooperative activities into tightly coupled and loosely coupled work. Tightly coupled work has the following characteristics: “participants interact closely, awareness is maintained through speech, through observation of oth-ers’ actions in the workspace (Segal 1994), through gestural communication (Tang 1991), through deictic references (Tatar, Foster and Bobrow 1991), and through observation of the direction of another’s gaze (Ishii and Kobayashi 1992)” (Greenberg et. al. 1996, p. 3) In loosely coupled work, participants still cooperate, but on separate but related goals. This kind of work demands less highly intensive coordination and has the following qualities: “awareness is maintained by peripheral vision, by quick glances at others’ areas, and by brief utterances that inform others of activities and intentions (Gutwin and Green-berg 1995a; Heath and Luff 1991)” (Greenberg et. al. 1996, p. 3). There is also mixed focus work which combines the tightly coupled and loosely coupled modes as needed.
When using CSCW, the collaboration environment is drastically changed. Visibility is greatly reduced: in face-to-face interaction, participants can typically see the whole workspace and all the people involved in it, but in CSCW collabo-ration, there is only a small window on the collaborative environment. Be-cause participants interact with the workspace through this small window, many of the mechanisms available to people in a face-to-face setting to facili-tate the collaboration are not available (peripheral vision, glancing, overhearing conversations among other participants, body language, tracking of eye-gaze, etc.) and moreover have proved difficult to duplicate. These two problems — decreased workspace visibility and the impossibility or inappropriateness of the usual facilitation mechanisms — is one of the main problems studied in CSCW research in general, and awareness support in CSCW in particular.
What about wikis? Is wiki work the same as collaborative writing? Yes, but it seems to be a different or greater task than cooperating on a single document, probably because of the instant publishing of wiki pages (no drafts) and the in-formation architecture work around architecting the website. Maybe it’s just the fact that (in most cases) the wiki is always live, never completed, and always changing that makes awareness needs in wikis different than that in shared single document creation.
References
- P. Dourish and V. Bellotti, “Awareness and coordination in shared workspaces,” in CSCW ‘92: Proceedings of the 1992 ACM conference on Computer-supported cooperative work, 1992, pp. 107-114.
- S. Greenberg, C. Gutwin, and A. Cockburn, “Awareness through fisheye views in relaxed-WYSIWIS groupware,” in GI ‘96: Proceedings of the conference on Graphics interface ‘96, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 1996, pp. 28-38.
