Team work occurs in a wide variety of spaces that affording different types of collaborative activities. For example, a personal office is used differently than the informal area around the coffee machine or a meeting room. Physical workspaces are designed specifically to bring about effective collaboration in collocated teams. These activities range from low-coupling tasks such as informal awareness and casual interactions, to highly coupled such as designing or pair programming. Distributed teams, in contrast, only have a small number of restricted channels for communication in particular settings. However useful and necessary these channels are, they fail to provide the rich collaboration environment afforded by a collection of shared physical spaces. Our approach to investigating this problem is to design an ecology of blended spaces. Blended spaces are shared virtual spaces that connect distributed physical spaces in context appropriate ways. For example, a blended hallway space connects physical hallways at multiple sites. It is important that the hallway does not try to support the complete range of interaction activities - it only supports what is appropriate to a hallway and supports transitioning to other blended spaces for other activities. With a range of blended spaces supporting informal and formal collaborative activities, distributed groups are able to engage better and be more collaborative across the team. We are currently designing three blended spaces to support a distributed team across three sites: an informal space; a personal office space; and a meeting room space.
Authors: Gregor McEwan
Event: SF08: Embodied Interaction in Mobile, Physical and Virtual Environments Workshop