Walking Away from the Desktop Computer: Distributed Collaboration and Mobility in a Product Design Team

Bellotti, V. and Bly, S. 1996. Walking away from the desktop computer: distributed collaboration and mobility in a product design team. In Proceedings of the 1996 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (Boston, Massachusetts, United States, November 16 – 20, 1996). M. S. Ackerman, Ed. CSCW ’96. ACM Press, New York, NY, 209-218

In this field study, the authors aimed to learn how collaboration was and was not supported by current technology and to seek opportunities for design innovations. It was found that work involved a lot of local mobility (instead of long distance, car, public transportation). While local mobility sets up challenges for technology to support individual work, it is even more significant for collaboration. However mobility supporting local communication and mutual awareness, makes it harder for distributed team member not only to locate remote colleague but to stay in touch more generally (lack of awareness).

Lack of awareness means lack of the context and familiarity necessary for the essential, lightweight interactions and communication which are key to collaboration.

The authors suggest two design goals to support mobility

• To replicate for remote colleague some of the opportunities for building awareness and for informal communication and coordination that local mobility enables.
• To reduce the penalties for distributed colleagues of trying to communicate, collaborate and coordinate with others who are away from their desks.

Relation to my thesis: The term of “local mobility” is key because I am interested in instantaneous synchronous ubicomp environments supporting collaborations. That is to support real-time tasks when awareness and communication are synchronous. Not when ubiquitous applications are envisioned as workflow systems that can be accessed from work, home and 3rd places (like Making Sharing Pervasive: Ubiquitous computing for share not taking).