Situational awareness support to enhance teamwork in collaborative environments

Abstract

Motivation-Modern collaborative environments often provide an overwhelming amount of visual information on multiple displays. The multitude of personal and shared interaction devices leads to lack of awareness of team members on ongoing activities, and awareness of who is in control of shared artefacts. This research addresses the situational awareness (SA) support of multidisciplinary teams in co-located collaborative environments. This work aims at getting insights into design and evaluation of large displays systems that afford SA and effective teamwork. Research approach-An exploratory (Wassink et al., 2008) as well as experimental approach is applied. The results of our exploratory studies, which included contextual observations, interviews and task analysis, have been translated into requirements for support of multidisciplinary teamwork in life sciences (Kulyk and Wassink, 2006). Currently we perform practical case studies in omics experimentation domain (Kulyk et al., 2007). In a first controlled study we assess shared SA of team members, providing new SA concepts on a shared large display. Findings/Design-We developed several concepts for SA support on large shared displays. Memory Board is an interface that automatically stores and visualizes the activity history on a shared large display. This allows team members to retrieve annotations made on previous slides or visualizations. It also provides awareness of who is currently in control of any display, and who is manipulating and annotating the visualizations. Highlighting on Demand interface enables a team member to highlight or fade out any part of a display using any personal interaction device. Take away message-Designing systems that support situational awareness is of great importance to ensure that a collaborative environment enables efficient and effective team coordination and decision making.

Comparing Horizontal and Vertical Surfaces for a Collaborative Design Task

“…Observations of groups working together on shared displays have revealed that people frequently switch between loosely and closely coupled styles of work [8]. Research shows that even during loosely coupled work, maintaining awareness (e.g., what is being worked on by whom, and how your actions will affect others) is critical to ensure efficient and effective team coordination [9]. Supporting awareness is even more critical when team members are working at different locations.…”

Explicit & Implicit Interaction Design for Multi-Focus Visualizations

“…For collaborative scenarios I have to deal with additional requirements like a democratized from of collaboration or an enhanced situational awareness (awareness of ongoing activities, and awareness of who is in control of shared artefacts [9]). …”

Do you know what I know? : situational awareness of co-located teams in multidisplay environments

“…Presenting visualisations on a shared display in a collaborative working environment can support group discussions [Borchers, 2006;Huang, 2006;Rogers and Lindley, 2004]. Looking at the statistical representations of the same data on a shared large display enables scientists to assess the quality of the entire omics experiment at a glance [Kulyk et al, 2008a] (see Figure 2.3). The visualisations on the various parts of the display are implicitly related, in the sense that they refer to the same experiment, but currently it is not always evident what the precise relation is.…”

“…In life science experimentation, there is a strong need for visualising the large genomics datasets during multidisciplinary collaborative discussions for comparing and sharing data [Kulyk et al, 2008a;Li et al, 2005] (see Figure 3.1). Designing awareness visualisations for collaborative use will enhance exploration of heterogeneous information and enable information sharing, which is one of the common barriers in gaining shared situational awareness [Kaber and Endsley, 1998].…”

“…Based on the results of the exploratory user study and task analysis results (chapter 4.3), we have come up with a number of situational awareness (SA) concepts to explore various alternative solutions [Kulyk et al, 2008a] in order to support group decision making in co-located collaborative environments, presented earlier in chapter 4.3. One example is a Highlighting-on-Demand interface, which enables a team member who is currently controlling the shared display to draw the attention of the other team members by highlighting a certain visualisation, for example, using a slider on a shared display or a personal interaction device.…”