Despite technical advances over the past few years in the area of systems support for cooperative work there is still relatively little understanding of the organisation of collaborative activity in real world, technologically supported, work environments. Indeed, it has been suggested that the failure of various technological applications may derive from their relative insensitivity to ordinary work practice and situated conduct. In this paper we discuss the possibility of utilising recent developments within sociology, in particular the naturalistic analysis of organisational conduct and social interaction, as a basis for the design and development of tools and technologies to support collaborative work. Focussing on the Line Control Rooms in London Underground, a complex multimedia environment in transition, we begin to explicate the tacit work practices and procedures whereby personnel systematically communicate information to each other and coordinate a disparate collection of tasks and activities. The design implications of these empirical observations, both for Line Control Room and technologies to support cooperative work, are briefly discussed.

We analyze a large-scale custom software effort, the Worm Community system (WCS), a collaborative system designed for a geographically dispersed community of geneticists. There were complex challenges in creating this infrastructural tool, ranging from simple lack of resources to complex organizational and intellectual communication failures and tradeoffs. Despite high user satisfaction with the system and interface, and extensive user needs assessment, feedback and analysis, many users experienced difficulties in signing on and use. The study was conducted during a time of unprecedented growth in the Internet and its utilities (1991-1994), and many respondents turned to the World Wide Web for their information exchange. Using Bateson’s model of levels of learning, we analyze the levels of infrastructural complexity involved in system access and designeruser communication. We analyze the connection between systems development aimed at supporting specific forms of collaborative knowledge work, local organizational transformation, and large-scale infrastructural change.

Despite technical advances in CSCW over the past few years we still have relatively little understanding of the organisation of collaborative activity in real world. technologically supported, work environments. Indeed, it has been suggested that the failure of various technological applications may derive from its relative insensitivity to ordinary work practice and situated conduct. In this paper we discuss the possibility of utilising recent developments within social science, and in particular the naturalistic analysis of organisational conduct and interpersonal communication, as a basis for the design and development of tools and technologies to support collaborative work. Focussing on the Line Control Rooms on London Underground, a complex multimedia environment in transition, we begin to explicate the informal work practices and procedures whereby personnel systematically communicate information and coordinate a disparate collection of tasks and activities. These empirical investigations form the foundation to the design of new tools to support collaborative work in Line Control Rooms; technologies which will be sensitive to the ordinary conduct and practical skills of organisational personnel in the London Underground.

www.cs.usask.ca/faculty/gutwin Collaboration in current real-time groupware systems is often an awkward and clumsy process. We hypothesize that better support for workspace awareness can improve the usability of these shared computational workspaces. We conducted an experiment that compared people’s performance on two versions of a groupware interface. The interfaces used workspace miniatures to provide different levels of support for workspace awareness. The basic miniature showed information only about the local user, and the enhanced miniature showed the location and activity of others in the workspace as well. In two of three task types tested, completion times were lower with increased awareness support, and in one task type, communication was more efficient. Participants also greatly preferred the awareness-enhanced system. The study provides empirical evidence of, and underlying reasons for, the value of supporting workspace awareness in groupware.

This paper examines the theoretical and practical problems that arise from attempts to develop formal characterisations and explanations of many work activities; in particular, collaborative activities. We argue that even seemingly discrete individual activities occur in, and frequently draw upon a complex network of factors: individual, social and organisational. Similarly, organisational and social constraints and practices impact upon individual, cognitive processes and the realisation of these in specific tasks. Any adequate characterisation of work activities therefore requires the analysis and synthesis of information from these, traditionally separate sources. We argue that existing frameworks, emanating separately from the respective disciplines (cognitive, social and organisational) do not present an adequate means of studying the dynamics of collaborative activity in situ. An alternative framework, advocated in this paper, is distributed cognition. Its theoretical basis is outlined together with examples of applied studies of computer-mediated work activities in different organisational settings. 1.

A requirements specification defines the requirements for the future system at a conceptual level (i.e. class or type level). In contrast, a scenario represents a concrete example of current or future system usage. In early RE phases, scenarios are used to support the definition of high level requirements (goals) to be achieved by the new system. In many cases, those goals can to a large degree be elicited by observing, documenting and analysing scenarios about current system usage, i.e. the new system must often fulfil many of the functional and non-functional goals of the existing system. To support the elicitation and validation of the goals achieved by the existing system and to illustrate problems of the old system we propose to capture current system usage using rich media (e.g. video, speech, pictures etc.) and to interrelate those observations with the goal definitions. Thus, we particularly aim at making the abstraction process which leads to the definition of the conceptual models more transparent and traceable. More precisely, we relate the parts of the observations which have caused the definition of a goal or against which a goal was validated with the corresponding goal. These interrelations provide the basis for

esew research has had problems in selecting the basic structural and functional unit for the analysis of work. For convenient location of the computer support, some meaningful intermediate whole should be defined between the individual and the organization. The concepts of 'team ' and 'group ' are intuitively understandable, but somewhat weak for serious analysis. This paper suggests that the concept of 'activity ' from Activity Theory could fill the gap, and compares the properties of the activity concept with the needs of esew research. A classification of work support types based on the concept of activity, is produced in order to demonstrate its potential usefulness. 1.

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.

Abstract. The received understanding of the status of formal organizational constructs in cooperative work is problematic. The paper shows that the empirical evidence is not as strong as we may have believed and that there is evidence from other studies that contradicts what we may have taken for granted for years. This indicates that the role of formal constructs is more differentiated than generally taken for granted. They not only serve as ‘maps ’ but also as ‘scripts’. Thanks to impressive CSCW systems such as TeamWork-Station [25], GroupDesk [16], wOrlds [15], and TeamRoom [33], to name but a few, it is by now widely accepted that computer artifacts can provide effective support for cooperative work by offering a ‘shared space ’ through which actors can interact directly, i.e., by means of generic competencies such as talking, gesturing, pointing, monitoring etc., without

ions through Manipulation of a Program Visualization A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science by Robert William Bowdidge Committee in charge: Professor William G. Griswold, Chair Professor Edwin Hutchins Professor Keith Marzullo Professor Joseph Pasquale Professor Richard N. Taylor Copyright Robert William Bowdidge, 1995 All rights reserved. The dissertation of Robert William Bowdidge is approved, and it is acceptable in quality and form for publication on microfilm: Chair University of California, San Diego 1995 iii For Christine iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Signature Page : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : iii Dedication : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : iv Table of Contents : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : v List of Figures : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : ix List of Tabl...