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1 10 Chapter 4 Design for collaboration and communication

Kinds of conversations
Conversations can take a variety of forms, such as an argument, a discussion, a
heated debate, a chat, a t6te-8-tete, or giving someone a "telling off." A well-
known distinction in conversation types is between formal and informal communi-
cation. Formal communication involves assigning certain roles to people and
prescribing a priori the types of turns that people are allowed to take in a conversa-
tion. For example, at a board meeting, it is decided who is allowed to speak, who
speaks when, who manages the turn-taking, and what the participants are allowed
to talk about.
In contrast, informal communication is the chat that goes on when people so-
cialize. It also commonly happens when people bump into each other and talk
briefly. This can occur in corridors, at the coffee machine, when waiting in line, and
walking down the street. Informal conversations include talking about impersonal
things like the weather (a favorite) and the price of living, or more personal things,
like how someone is getting on with a new roommate. It also provides an opportu-
nity to pass on gossip, such as who is going out to dinner with whom. In office set-
tings, such chance conversations have been found to serve a number of functions,
including coordinating group work, transmitting knowledge about office culture,
establishing trust, and general team building (Kraut et al, 1990). It is also the case
that people who are in physical proximity, such as those whose offices or desks are
close to one another, engage much more frequently in these kinds of informal chats
than those who are in different corridors or buildings. Most companies and organi-
zations are well aware of this and often try to design their office space so that peo-
ple who need to work closely together are placed close to one another in the same
physical space.

4.2.2 Designing collaborative technologies to support conversation

As we have seen, "talk" and the way it is managed is integral to coordinating social
activities. One of the challenges confronting designers is to consider how the differ-
ent kinds of communication can be facilitated and supported in settings where
there may be obstacles preventing it from happening "naturally." A central con-
cern has been to develop systems that allow people to communicate with each
other when they are in physically different locations and thus not able to communi-
cate in the usual face to face manner. In particular, a key issue has been to deter-
mine how to allow people to carry on communicating as if they were in the same
place, even though they are geographically separated-sometimes many thousands
of miles apart.
Email, videoconferencing, videophones, computer conferencing, chatrooms
and messaging are well-known examples of some of the collaborative technologies
that have been developed to enable this to happen. Other less familiar systems are
collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) and media spaces. CVEs are virtual
worlds where people meet and chat. These can be 3D graphical worlds where users
explore rooms and other spaces by teleporting themselves around in the guise of
avatars (See Figure 4.1 on Color Plate 5), or text and graphical "spaces" (often
called MUDS and MOOS) where users communicate with each other via some