Awareness
An understanding of the activities of others, which provides a context for your own activity.
Key Components:
Context
The information (of what other people around you around doing)
The information is CRITICAL because this is the way for the group to manage the work process.
The context is important to make sure that everyone is working on the same goals for the group.
Why is awareness important?
- So the group doesn’t work against itself
- Make goals known
- Inclusion in the group / co-presence
- Stay on topic
In CSCW, when talking about awareness…
- WHO is around (or not around)?
- Even if working face to face
- What sorts of activities are taking place?
- initial brainstorming
- looking at what’s going on as a group
- The work enviornment (setting)
- Face to Face = Obvious Space
- NOT colocated, is there space? lack of space?
- Who is working on what in a shared space
Benefits of Awareness
- Increased Efficiency
- Sense of Level of Progress
- Reduce Conflict
- Establish Common Ground
- Increased Productivity
- Feeling of co-presence / belonging
Awareness is particularly difficult when working with a team from a different culture. NOT just because of the language, but because of HOW they work and HOW they reach this awareness.
In CSCW there are a few ways for a collaborative system to reach awareness:
- Information – Tell everyone what’s going on
- Problems:
- Falsely implies that everything is useful.
- May not be as accurate as face to face conversation
- Everyone can populate information in this system.
- Role Restricted – Author can see some things that a Viewer cannot.
- Problems
- Role Changes
- Top Down Communication
- Put in the wrong role, might lose key information
- What you get is controlled by the person sending the information (creates an awareness that it has been restricted.)
- Official idea of what people should know vs. what they really know
- Requires more wok.
- Google Groups / Base Camp / Unfuddele / etc.
- Sort of a combination
- Innate hierarchy
- Are we suggesting that a “good” collaborative system will combine the first 2?
Older collaborative systems were not made for user appropriation. The way the field is shifting however, internal collaboration is MUCH more important. Many many more systems are being designed for massive collaboration from the users. What about participatory design?
Social Awareness
The awareness of the social status of the group members. What is going on in the lives of your group members. (This DOES have an effect on how you’re working together.)
What are they doing?
Are they talking to someone?
Can they be disturbed?
Environment isn’t the only important consideration. The social status of the group is also critical!
A distributed team is a much more difficult thing to attain a level of social awareness than an in person team.
Why Social Awareness?
- Getting the work done
- Provides interaction cues
- Can increase conflict without
It’s very difficult to design for social awareness. But, its a pretty important component of group work.
Boundary Objects
Anything that is an artifact that means different things to different groups.
Flexible enough to address different groups needs, but robust enough to have a common identity among groups.
Has a LOT to do with standardization.
- Examples:
- Blueprints – In construction they mean one thing. In marketing or eLearning another.
- Financial Records (Payroll) – In financial services they will know quite a bit more about the details about the payroll record, vs. what a manager might know when he / she goes to hire an employee.
A boundary object does NOT have to be a physical artifact. Data can be a boundary object.
Improving Krauss’s framework
Krauss is VERY focused on spoken words. It would be good to take into consideration what different languages, icons, and digital interactions mean to people.
Flush out the idea of iteration from a design sense.
FIND EXAMPLES when you start looking into these sorts of things!!!