Page 241 - Culture Technology Communication

224 Lorna Heaton

technique allowed users to combine individual workspaces, and to
point to and draw on the overlaid images simultaneously.
The three-member design team began to use the prototype on a
daily basis in July 1989, and informal evaluations of its use pointed
to the importance of gesture as a means of enforcing the sense of
shared space. They preferred hand gestures to pointing or marking
with a mouse “because hand gestures are much more expressive,
and because hand marking is generally quicker” (Ishii and Miyake
1991, 45). Since the TWS prototype was designed without a formal
floor control mechanism for passing the input control among collab-
orators, voice contact played an important role in preserving infor-
mal social protocol and coordinating action, especially the use of the
limited workspace on the shared screen (Ishii and Miyake 1991, 45).
The faces of collaborators were displayed in separate windows
beside the shared workspace in TWS. But spatial awareness was al-
ready a concern, and was developed further by ClearFace and later
ClearBoard. All previous approaches to CSCW screen layout (tiling—
i.e. laying them side by side—or overlapping windows) required users
to shift their focus between the shared drawing space and the facial
images and deal with separately. Developed initially as a solution to
a technical problem, how to make the most of limited screen size (14''
in the TWS prototype), the ClearFace interface proposed translucent,
movable, and resizable face windows which overlay the shared work-
space window. The user could see the drawing space and his collabo-
rators’ faces in the same space and shift easily between the two. The
team explained this facility using Neisser’s theory of selective looking
and the high recognizability of human features, further reasoning
that it is rarely necessary to attend to both at the same time (figure
ground relationship), thus eliminating possible confusion of different
“layers.” In use, they observed that people hesitated to draw or write
over people’s faces, inciting them to make the face windows movable
and resizable.
With ClearFace, the design team began to explore the dynamic
relationship between elements in design meetings. Their focus
shifted away from task—what workers are doing—to how they are
relating to each other as they do it. In one of their later papers, Ishii
et al. present this change as a transition from a focus on shared
workspaces to the creation of interpersonal spaces (Ishii, Kobayashi
and Grudin 1992, 33).
At the same time, in the discussion, the participants are speak-
ing to and seeing each other, and using facial expressions and ges-
tures to communicate. In the conversations it is essential to see the