Workspace Awareness in Real-Time Distributed Groupware: Framework, Widgets, and Evaluation

Abstract

The rich person-to-person interaction afforded by shared physical workspaces allows people to maintain up-to-the minute knowledge about others' interaction with the workspace. This knowledge is workspace awareness, part of the glue that allows groups to collaborate effectively. In real-time groupware systems that provide a shared virtual workspace, the possibilities for interaction are impoverished when compared with physical workspaces, partly because support for workspace awareness has not generally been a priority in groupware design. In this paper, we present the concept of workspace awareness as one key to supporting the richness evident in face-to-face interaction. We construct a conceptual framework that describes the elements and mechanisms of workspace awareness, and then show several widgets that can be embedded in relaxed-WYSIWIS groupware systems to support the maintenance of workspace awareness.

The Problem with `Awareness': Introductory Remarks on `Awareness in CSCW'

“…CSCW researchers are obviously far from confident with using the term and thus often use the term in combination with different adjectives, e.g., 'general awareness' (Gaver, 1991;Bly et al, 1993, p. 29), 'collaboration awareness' (Lauwers and Lantz, 1990), 'peripheral awareness' (Gaver, 1992;Bly et al, 1993, p. 34;Benford et al, 1994), 'background awareness' (Bly et al, 1993, p. 34), 'passive awareness' (Dourish and Bellotti, 1992, p. 107;Dourish and Bly, 1992, p. 541), 'reciprocal awareness' (Fish et al, 1990;Schmidt, 1994;Robertson, 1997, pp. 19-21, 155-158), 'mutual awareness' (Benford et al, 1994;Schmidt, 1994;Rønby Pedersen and Sokoler, 1997), 'workspace awareness' (Gutwin, 1997;Gutwin and Greenberg, 1999;Gutwin and Greenberg, 2002), etc. The proliferation of adjectives is a clear indication that the term 'awareness' is found to be equivocal, that researchers are aware that the term is being used in significantly different ways, and that it is in need of some qualification to be useful.…”

Enhancing Creativity with Groupware Toolkits

“…For example, our group created a flurry of systems illustrating different methods for supporting awareness within a visual workspace, sometimes turning around several different design ideas in a single day. Figure 1 shows two example systems illustrating how people within a group could maintain awareness of others' actions [13,9]. Because we could now try out our ideas, we could quickly determine which ones were worth pursuing and which were not.…”

Applying distortion-oriented displays to groupware

“…The problem is that groupware workspaces do not yet afford the richness of interaction available in their physical counterparts. In particular, it is difficult to maintain a sense of workspace awareness: the up-to-theminute knowledge about another person's interactions with the shared workspace [4,5]. One solution provides users with separate awareness windows alongside a conventional full sized viewport.…”

“…One solution provides users with separate awareness windows alongside a conventional full sized viewport. These add-on windows supply either an overview of the entire workspace, or a detailed view of what the other person can see [3,4,5]. However, this approach introduces a seam: to gather awareness information, people must attend to and mentally integrate two displays that differ in both scale and physical location.…”