What is awareness?
April 5, 2009
I want to start from a more fundamental definition of awareness before moving into CSCW specific awareness.
What is awareness?
We care about awareness as people performing tasks because awareness of our changing environment is what enables us to complete our task: it allows us to update our plans and more efficiently and effectively interact with our environment. We care about awareness as IS researchers because it is our job to design systems that afford people the kind of awareness information and mechanisms that they need in order to better perform their tasks.
Many of the papers on awareness support in wikis that I’ve read cite Dourish and Bellotti, who define awareness as follows:
“an understanding of the activities of others which provides a context for your own activity. This context is used to ensure that individual contributions are relevant to the group’s activity as a whole, and to evaluate individual actions with respect to group goals and progress” (Dourish and Bellotti 1992, p. 107).
This is really a definition of workspace awareness in the context of cooperative work. I want to start from a more fundamental definition before moving onto this more specific one.
General awareness
Gutwin and Greenberg offer a more general definition of awareness: “knowledge created through the interaction of an agent and its environment — in simple terms “knowing what is going on”” (Gutwin and Greenberg 2002, p. 8). They go on to say that prior research on awareness has four common themes running through it (Gutwin and Greenberg 2002, p. 8):
- Awareness is knowledge about the state of the environment. This knowledge applies within specific spacial and temporal boundaries.
- Since environments change over time, people must continually maintain this knowledge and keep it up to date.
- People maintain and update their awareness of the environment by interacting with it and exploring it.
- Awareness is not the primary goal, but is a secondary goal that supports another task.
So note that with Gutwin and Greenberg’s starting place, a person can be alone working on a task and still need to maintain awareness of the environment in which they perform the task. In CSCW, we’re always talking about awareness in a group context and thus including awareness of other group members and their activities, but we still need to think about awareness even contexts where people are working alone. This is why Dourish and Bellotti’s definition is more specific that Gutwin and Greenberg’s: in a collaborative situation, one must maintain awareness of other people and their actions in addition to all the awareness associated with our own interactions with the shared environment.
Situation awareness and awareness as process
Gutwin and Greenberg then go on to say that while the four characteristics of awareness I mention above are characteristic of all awareness (including everyday awareness which allows us to walk across a room without bumping into things), there are more specific situations in which maintaining awareness is more difficult. In addition to this general awareness research, there was work on situation awareness which differs from the general awareness problem in that the environment the person works in is highly variable, complex, has high information load and includes a large element of risk (Gutwin and Greenberg 2002, p. 9) and define it as “up-to-the-minute cognizance of how to operate or maintain a system” (Gutwin and Greenberg 2002, p. 9).
One can see awareness as a process: gather information from the environment and select that information most relevant to the task at hand; comprehend this information in light of the current state of the environment, and then integrate this information with our existing knowledge of the environment; anticipate changes in the environment and be able to predict how incoming information will change (Gutwin and Greenberg 2002, p. 9).
Workspace awareness
We care about situation awareness research because situation awareness has many similarities with workspace awareness (“We view workspace awareness as a specialization of situation awareness, one that is tied to the specific setting of the shared workspace” (Gutwin and Greenberg 2002, p. 9)) and thus can inform our work in designing CSCW software and groupware. Workspace awareness and situation awareness are similar in that workspace awareness is secondary to the primary task (the collaboration), collaborations are dynamic environments, and awareness information is updated from perceptions of the environment. Workspace awareness differs from situation awareness in that we have to maintain awareness of other people and their actions in addition to all the awareness associated with our own interactions with the shared environment that I mentioned above, and in that typically we don’t see high information load — most people in collaborative situations easily maintain awareness, at least in face-to-face situations.
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.
- C. Gutwin and S. Greenberg, “A descriptive framework of workspace awareness for real-time groupware,” Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), vol. 11, pp. 411-446, 2002.
