Abstract-Designers adopt a large amount of generalpurpose tools for supporting their remote collaborative tasks. Each tool provides very diverse functionalities: from file sharing to instant communication and video collaboration. The designer struggles when filtering and combining the right information spread across the multitude of tools. This research extends McGrath's framework of task circumflex to map the collaborative demands of the design practitioner and proposes Peepdeck, a design exploration to support them. Peepdeck is a dashboard that assembles information scattered across multiple tools in a personalized and organized way. Through two design iterations followed by evaluations of the user interface, several requirements were identified for supporting collaboration awareness in design teams. Insights confirmed the relevance of combining information from different but already familiar tools, rather than attempting to replace them. It was identified the importance of optimizing for visual scanning, supporting search of content and allowing users to customize the tool.

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This paper describes the design and implementation of Alice, an online collaboration system that integrates several commercial cloud storage services and reconfigures team member's interactions into a time-oriented visualization. Designers use social media and other general-purpose tools to collaborate across organizations due to their accessibility and ease of use and learning. However, such tools are cumbersome in covering the specific collaboration needs of design activities. Alice elicits ad hoc collaboration in design teams by facilitating team members to use their own set of tools in a seamless way. Participants highlighted that Alice serves as a central reference for the coordination of teamwork by providing an overview of rhythms and temporal relationships of design activities. Our work suggests that collaboration tools could be portrayed as technologies of time production. This reveals opportunities for future research on how the temporal agency embodied by the collaboration tools affects collaborative activities in design.