visible artifacts

By: Chris Malek

Apr 06 2009

Category: Articles

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Gutwin and Greenberg have a wonderful model of the information involved in maintaining workspace awareness: what information is involved, how people gather that information, and what people do with it once they’ve gathered it.

Awareness information

Dourish and Bellotti (Dourish and Bellotti 1992) say that workspace awareness information informs two kinds of awareness: the awareness of the character of another’s actions, and the awareness of the content of another’s actions.  Character refers to the kind of actions a person might perform in the context of the collaborative work: are they an editor, a reviewer, an author; what sections of the document are they responsible for; what part are they working on?   Character in this way is like the role that a person plays in the collaboration, although we should be careful when using the word “role”, since character and role are fluid, and can change as the collaboration progresses.   A person can use their awareness of the character of another’s actions in order to structure work and avoid duplication of effort.   The content refers to the work that a person has actually done: comments and annotations made; artifacts changed.  A person can use awareness of the content of another’s work to enable “fine-grained shared working and synergistic group behavior” (Dourish and Belotti 1992, p. 112).

Gutwin and Greenberg categorize workspace awareness information into information about things which are currently happening, and information about things which have already happened and say that such information can answer “who, what, when, where and how” type questions.   Information about the future is generally not available to designers because “past and present information can be determined from raw perceptual information, whereas belief about the future involves inference, extrapolation and prediction” (Gutwin and Greenberg, p. 14). Awareness of character is informed by both information from the past and present, while awareness of content is informed by information from the past.

Information about the present can answer questions about “who, what and where?”: who is in the workspace, or who is performing a certain action in the workspace; what is that person doing, what goal does that action support, and what object are they acting upon; and where in the workspace are they working or looking, and what in the workspace can they see or touch (Gutwin and Greenberg, p. 15)?

Information about the past generally answers questions relating to “how did the workspace come to be in the current state?”: how did that operation happen, how did this particular artifact in the workspace come to be in this state; when did that event happen; who was in the workspace, and when; where has a particular person been in the workspace; and what has that person been doing (Gutwin and Greenberg, p. 15)?

At least three factors determine what kind of information a designer should consider offering via the system to its users: the goal of the group and the tasks they must perform to achieve that goal;  the degree of interaction between participants in the workspace necessary to complete tasks; and the dynamism of the workspace — some information may be relatively static, while other information may change often (Gutwin and Greenberg, p. 15).

How people gather awareness information

In face-to-face interaction this information is all gathered via natural and familiar mechanisms and affordances, and the designer of groupware should strive to offer awareness information in similarly familiar and easily accessible and comprehendible ways.

In face-to face interaction, people gather awareness information by watching the bodies of other participants, by observing and interacting with artifacts in the workspace, and via conversation and gestures.

Seeing other people active in the workspace (called consequential communication (Gutwin and Greenberg, p. 17) is a common and essential mechanism that people use to maintain workspace awareness.  This kind of bodily communication differs from gesture and direct communication in that the actor is not acting in order to communicate; the information communicated by such actions is a side effect.   Motion is particularly important to consequential communication, since our eyes are drawn to motion.

When artifacts in the workspace are manipulated, they give off information.  This is called feedthrough (Gutwin and Greenberg, p. 18).  By seeing or hearing an artifact changing, it is often possible to determine what is being done to it — we can infer intention, location, goals, etc. from changes to the artifact.   When feedthrough is coupled with consequential communication — when we can see both the actor and the artifact that the actor is manipulating — this is especially powerful, but there are many cases in which feedthrough is our only source of information about what happened in the workspace.

Verbal and gestural conversation (Gutwin and Greenberg, p. 19) is an obvious avenue for gathering information about the workspace environment: one actor either verbally broadcasts what they are doing or what they intend to do, or one actor asks another for that same information.  Another important source of information is the overheard conversation — although an actor may not be involved in a conversational exchange between two others, nonetheless they gather important information about activity in the workspace.  Verbal shadowing — speaking aloud what one is doing — is also a vehicle for workspace information.

How people use awareness information

Gutwin and Greenberg describe five types of collaborative activity that are aided by workspace awareness (Gutwin and Greenberg, pp. 20-28).

• Management of coupling. Coupling is the degree to which people need to work together in order to accomplish their tasks; the higher the coupling, the more they need to work together.  Awareness information can assist people in noticing when tighter coupling might be appropriate because people can better determine when one of their colleagues is available.
• Simplification of communication. People can use the workspace and the artifacts in it to simplify their conversations, making collaboration more efficient.
• Coordination of action. Awareness information can help people to plan and execute low-level actions in the workspace to better mesh with what others are doing.
• Anticipation. Awareness information can help people to better predict other’s activities and actions both small time scales (what are you going to do with those scissors?) and large (what kind of tasks do you normally do, and what artifacts do you typically work on?  what is your area of expertise).
• Assistance. Awareness information helps people to better determine what assistance might be required by their peers, and what is appropriate.

References

1. 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.
2. 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.