Sharing serendipity in the workplace

Abstract

The Forum is a collaborative working environment that consists of two shared spaces: a space for informal interaction (Contact Space), and a workspace for synchronous meetings using audioconferencing support (Meeting Space). It is designed to enable people, who should meet each other to do so naturally, providing an environment for richer online interactions. This paper discusses three evaluations of the Forum Contact Space: a conceptual evaluation, a prototype evaluation, and an ethnographic evaluation. Each evaluation was undertaken to improve the Contact Space usability, examine whether it supports chance encounters, and learn from participant feedback, areas for improvement of future Forum versions.The conceptual evaluation using focus groups showed group discrepancies regarding how the Contact Space would be beneficial for producing chance encounters. In the prototype evaluation, the findings suggest that chance encounters were produced and that the Concept Space was perceived as an environment for supporting group cohesiveness. A common theme from the findings of the ethnographic evaluation was the division of the Contact Space and its related parts into two tools: a core tool; and a peripheral tool, dependent on whether it was active. As groups are increasingly distributed over geographical distances, the benefits of a shared virtual space for communication and interaction are being realised.

Promoting awareness in distributed mobile organizations

“…The majority of CSCW awareness literature is concerned with maintaining workplace awareness [3,4] among distributed collaborators accountable for achieving common goals [see 4,7,8 for exceptions]. From this perspective, FlexGroup is a success story: The members, for the most part, use the tools available to them to stay in close contact with the other members of their current project groups.…”

From Chance to Serendipity: Knowledge Workers’ Experiences of Serendipitous Social Encounters

“…For instance, Erickson and Kellogg [44] introduced the concept of socially translucent systems aimed at increasing the visibility of employees' activities in large groups and organizations. Jeffrey and McGrath [17] designed the "Forum," a collaborative working environment as a space for informal online interactions that help employees make new connections and share knowledge.…”

“…Natural serendipity has been approached in exploratory studies on daily, spontaneous encounters [15] and social awareness [16] in co-located work environments. Constructive research on artificial serendipity has focused on designing systems that enable chance encounters or so-called impromptu encounters [17], with the aim to enhance social awareness and interactions among collocated or distributed workers. In the context of information retrieval, a typical example of artificial serendipity is enabling surprising, novel discoveries in content-based recommender systems to improve the diversity of recommendations [18][19][20].…”

Tracking serendipitous interactions

“…Chance conversations between individuals who are not necessarily part of the same group have long been judged to be essential for team coordination, cohesiveness and productivity [8,9,22]. This idea was recently further confirmed by Pentland et al, in a study of workplace communication patterns at a Prague bank [14].…”