Distributed organizations, with distributed cooperative work, are a fact of life. How can new technologies help? Distributed video is an appealing choice, carrying more contextual information than voice alone and, arguably, better at conveying subtle cues, such as the emotional states. Although new commercial systems are being introduced, they focus primarily on providing new technology. Most are based on relatively simple extensions of two existing models of communication: formal meetings become videoconferences and telephones become videophones. However, research in computer-supported cooperative work has tried to emphasize the user, with models based on Shared Workspaces (to support shared work on a common task), Coordinated Communication (to support structured communication to serve a specified purpose), and Informal Interaction (to support informal, unplanned and unstructured interactions). Although mediaspaces can incorporate all three, they emphasize informal communication, providing people working together at a distance with interactions that they take for granted when they are co-located. This chapter describes some of the pioneering work in media spaces, with more detailed descriptions of our own work at Rank Xerox EuroPARC (RAVE for our own use in the laboratory and WAVE, to support engineers working collaboratively between facilities in England and the Netherlands), concluding with a discussion of the technical, user interface and social issues involved in designing media spaces.

The Community Bar is groupware supporting informal awareness and casual interaction for small social worlds: a group of people with a common purpose. Its conceptual design is primarily based on a comprehensive sociological theory called the Locales Framework, with extra details supplied by the Focus/Nimbus model of awareness. Design nuances are strongly influenced by observations and feedback supplied by a community who had been using both the Community Bar and its Notification Collage predecessor for a total of five years. As a consequence, Community Bar’s design supports how communities of ad-hoc and long-standing groups are built and sustained within multiple locales: places that offer a group the site and means for maintaining awareness of one another and for rapidly moving into interaction. This includes a person’s lightweight management of his or her membership in multiple locales, as well as ones varying engagement with the people and artefacts within them.

Three public spaces frequently used by members of a single organization who are distributed across different floors of two buildings were linked by constantly-running video and audio connections. We discuss the design of the system, includingissues in providinglow-latency full-duplex audiovideo connectivity, ways to increase possibilities for interaction while addressingprivacy concerns, and the introduction of the system to the community. We report on responses to the system and lessons learned, including unexpected issues, such as creative decorations of the spaces and assertions by a vocal minority of employees about the private nature of “public space.”

similarities may be useful for some purposes (see Frost & King, 2001 [chapter 1]), but abstractions may present problems in actually accomplishing collaborative work. Second, the natural tendency to establish local territories may interfere with co-workers' identification with the larger collective, such as the distributed project group. Ambiguity of membership reduces group identity (Brown & Wade, 1987; see also Armstrong and Cole, 2001 [chapter 7]). Effects of Spontaneous Communication Distances between offices and work locations possibly have their highest impact on group functioning through their effect on informal, spontaneous communication opportunities (Brockner & Swap, 1976; Ebbesen, Kjos, & Konecni, 1976, Hays, 1985; Kraut & Streeter, 1995; Newcomb, 1981). That is, people who work in proximate offices run into one another at the water cooler, coffee machine, and copier. They see one another come and go to meetings. They meet in the lunch room. These casual encounters increase ...

There is much positive research on computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) environments in asynchronous distributed learning groups (DLGs). There is also research that shows that contemporary CSCL environments do not completely fulfil expectations on supporting interactive group learning, shared understanding, social construction of knowledge, and acquisition of competencies. There appear to be two major pitfalls impeding achievement of the desired social interaction in CSCL environments: taking social interaction in groups for granted and the lack of attention paid to the social psychological dimension of social interaction outside of the task context. Current solutions offered to avoid the pitfalls placed responsibility on instructors and teachers to encourage collaborative learning and social interaction. To both free educators from this burden and be more cost effective, we propose an intelligent CSCL environment. The environment is based upon a theoretical framework that suggests embedding certain properties in the environment to act as social contextual facilitators- social affordances- to initiate and sustain learner’s social interactions. Finally, a group awareness widget (GAW)- a software tool providing the learner group awareness about the others in the task and in the non-task context- is introduced as an embodiment of this theoretical framework.

Despite the availability of awareness servers and casual interaction systems, distributed groups still cannot maintain artifact awareness – the easy awareness of the documents, objects, and tools that other people are using – that is a natural part of co-located work environments. To address this deficiency, we designed an awareness tool that uses screen sharing to provide information about other people’s artifacts. People see others’ screens in miniature at the edge of their display, can selectively raise a larger view of that screen to get more detail, and can engage in remote pointing if desired. Initial experiences show that people use our tool for several purposes: to maintain awareness of what others are doing, to project a certain image of themselves, to monitor progress and coordinate joint tasks, to help determine when another person can be interrupted, and to engage in serendipitous conversation and collaboration. People have also been able to balance awareness with privacy, by using the privacy protection strategies built into our system: restricting what parts of the screen others can see, specifying update frequency, hiding image detail, and getting feedback of when screenshots are taken.

Many systems have used video to support formal distributed meetings. Recent research, however, indicates that most workplace interactions are not group meetings. Instead they occur spontaneously for short periods of time, frequently between two people who discuss topics that build on prior discussions. In this paper, we characterise these informal interactions, describe their value, enumerate the functions they accomplish. We consider ways to design video-based systems to support such informal interactions among different types of distributed groups. We discuss some existing applications that support various aspects of informal communication and consider ways to build on those ideas to build systems designed specifically for opportunistic and spontaneous encounters.

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The aim of the VISION project was to determine the value added to an office system by incorporating audio and video. The performance, feelings and perceptions of work groups were measured while they carried out cooperative tasks in a controlled environment using an experimental video communication system. The results showed no significant differences in the quality of the output, or the time taken to complete the tasks, under three conditions: data sharing; data sharing plus audio; data sharing plus audio and video. The results suggest that high bandwidth communication is particularly effective for social, informal, communication. When AT&T introduced the PicturePhone at the 1964 World's Fair the product was met with popular acclaim. Attendees at the fair stood in long lines to try it out. AT&T claimed that the PicturePhone was going to change the face of telecommunications. Commercially, however, the PicturePhone was unsuccessful. It became the proverbial solution looking for a problem. Indeed, when introducing new

this paper takes both a look back and a look forward to describe research directions for this important multimedia application area.