Page 159 -

128 Chapter 4 Design for collaboration and communication

Figure 4.1 1 The Tickertape and Tickerchat interface for ELVIN awareness service.

events (e.g. lunch dates), making announcements, and as an "always-on" communi-
cation tool for people working together on projects but who are not physically co-
located. It is also often used as a means of mediating help between people. For
example, when I was visiting the University of Queensland, I asked for help over
Tickertape. Within minutes, I was inundated with replies from people logged onto
the system who did not even know me. At the time, I was having problems working
out the key mappings between the PC that I was using in Australia and a Unix edi-
tor I couldn't find a way of quitting from on a remote machine in the UK. The sug-
gestions that appeared on Tickertape quickly led to a discussion among the
participants, and within five minutes someone had come over to my desk and
sorted the problem out for me!
In addition to presenting awareness information as streaming text messages,
more abstract forms of representation have been used. For example, a communica-
tion tool called Babble, developed at IBM (Erickson et al., 1999), provides a dy-
namic visualization of the participants in an ongoing chat-like conversation. A
large 2D circle is depicted with colored marbles on each user's monitor. Marbles
inside the circle convey those individuals active in the current conversation. Mar-
bles outside the circle convey users involved in other conversations. The more ac-
tive a participant is in the conversation, the more the corresponding marble is
moved towards the center of the circle. Conversely, the less engaged a person is in
the ongoing conversation, the more the marble moves towards the periphery of the
circle (see Figure 4.12).

- Figure 4.12 The Babble interface, with
dynamic visualization of participants in
0
ongoing conversation.