Awareness and Coordination in Shared Workspace

Dourish, P. and Bellotti, V. (1992). Awareness and Coordination in Shared Workspaces. Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work CSCW’92 (Toronto, Ontario), 107-114. New York: ACM.

Awareness is 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.

Awareness information can be explicitly generated, directed and separate from the shared work object or passively collected and distributed, and presented in the same shared work space as the object of collaboration.

Dourish and Bellotti suggest that awareness information provided and exploited passively through the shared workspace, allows users to move smoothly between close and loose collaboration.

Most awareness systems embody an assumption that a simple awareness of other’s activity needs to be augmented with other explicit, or restrictive mechanisms for ensuring an easy collaboration. However there are 3 potential problems:

• The price of heightened awareness for the group is clearly restriction in the potential activities of individuals
• Individuals will receive what the initiator of the information deems to be appropriate. However appropriateness can only be determined in the context of the other individuals’ activities
• Delivery is controlled more by the sender than by the recipient

Relation to my thesis: I am interested in explicitly generated and passively collected information about uncertainty and uncertainty-awareness in collaborative environments in general.