Despite sophisticated technologies for representational fidelity in hybrid meetings, in which co-located and remote participants collaborate via video or audio, meetings are still often disrupted by practical problems with trying to include remote participants. In this paper, we use micro-analysis of three disruptive moments in a hybrid meeting from a global software company to unpack blended technological and conversational practices of inclusion and exclusion. We argue that designing truly valuable experiences for hybrid meetings requires moving from the traditional, essentialist, and perception-obsessed user-centered design approach to a phenomenological approach to the needs of meetings themselves. We employ the metaphor of ‘configuring the meeting’ to propose that complex ecologies of people, technology, spatial, and institutional organization must be made relevant in the process of design.
Interest in hybrid collaboration and meetings (HCM), where several co-located participants engage in coordinated work with remote participants, is gaining unprecedented momentum after the rapid shift in working from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, while the interest is new, researchers have been exploring HCM phenomena for decades, albeit dispersed across diverse research traditions, using different terms, definitions, and frameworks. In this article, we present a systematic literature review of the contexts and tools of HCM in the ACM Digital Library. We obtained approximately 1,200 results, which were narrowed down to 62 key articles. We report on the terms, citations, venues, authors, domains, study types, and data of these publications and present a taxonomic overview based on their reported hybrid settings' actual characteristics. We discuss why the SLR resulted in a relatively small number of publications, and then as a corollary, discuss how some excluded high-profile publications flesh out the SLR findings to provide important additional concepts. The SLR itself covers the ACM until November 2019, so our discussion also includes relevant 2020 and 2021 publications. The end result is a baseline that researchers and designers can use in shaping the post-COVID-19 future of HCM systems.
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