Page 157 -

126 Chapter 4 Design for collaboration and communication

and so started announcing this to the passengers on the platform before controller
A had even finished talking with the train driver. At other times, the two con-
trollers keep a lookout for each other, monitoring the environment for actions and
events which they might have not noticed but may be important for them to know
about so that they can act appropriately.

hat do you think happens when one person of a closely knit team does not see or hear
ething or misunderstands what has been said, while the others in the group assume they
have seen, heard, or understood what has been said?

Comment In such circumstances, the person is likely to carry on as normal. In some cases this will re-
sult in inappropriate behavior. Repair mechanisms will then need to be set in motion. The
knowledgeable participants may notice that the other person has not acted in the manner
expected. They may then use one of a number of subtle repair mechanisms, say coughing
or glancing at something that needs attending to. If this doesn't work, they may then re-
sort to explicitly stating aloud what had previously been signaled implicitly. Conversely,
the unaware participant may wonder why the event hasn't happened and, likewise, look
over at the other people, cough to get their attention or explicitly ask them a question.
The kind of repair mechanism employed at a given moment will depend on a number of
factors, including the relationship among the participants (e.g., whether one is more se-
nior than the others-this determines who can ask what), perceived fault or responsibility
for the breakdown and the severity of the outcome of not acting there and then on the
new information.

4.2.6 Designing collaborative technologies to support awareness
The various observations about awareness have led system developers to con-
sider how best to provide awareness information for people who need to work to-
gether but who are not in the same physical space. Various technologies have
been employed along with the design of specific applications to convey informa-
tion about what people are doing and the progress of their ongoing work. As
mentioned previously, audio-video links have been developed to enable remote
colleagues to keep in touch with one another. Some of these systems have also
been developed to provide awareness information about remote partners, allow-
ing them to find out what one another is doing. One of the earliest systems was
Portholes, developed at Xerox PARC research labs (Dourish and Bly, 1992). The
system presented regularly-updated digitized video images of people in their of-
fices from a number of different locations (in the US and UK). These were shown
in a matrix display on people's workstations. Clicking on one of the images had
the effect of bringing up a dialog box providing further information about that in-
dividual (e.g., name, phone number) together with a set of lightweight action but-
tons (e.g., email the person, listen to a pre-recorded audio snippet). The system
provided changing images of people throughout the day and night in their offices,
letting others see at a glance whether they were in their offices, what they were
working on, and who was around (see Figure 4.10). Informal evaluation of the