Concepts that support collocated collaborative work inspired by the specific context of industrial designers

ABSTRACT

Based on a naturalistic study of industrial designers engaged in collocated collaborative design work in a technologically unsophisticated environment, we observed a number of interactions that lead to a number of insights, namely, (1) seating and the shape and orientation of the working surface has an effect on line of sight and eye-contact behaviors, (2) being able to reach objects on the working surface effects an individual collaborator's ability to become the focus of attention, (3) in collaborative work, people may work on the same document or divide labors to work on different documents simultaneously, (4) supporting the use of conventional artifacts that users are familiar with is as important as supporting the use of informational devices, (5) large workspaces with different privacy levels support both the needs of sharing information and the needs of keeping information private, (6) changes of document orientation socially represents a corresponding change of control and privacy level. From these insights and from other sources in the literature, we describe and illustrate a number of concepts for integrated technologies and environments that can support collocated collaborative work specifically in the context of design work. These concepts are intended as an exercise in divergent design thinking that owes to carefully constructed insights based on observations.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.2 Design Tools and Techniques
          Subjects: User interfaces

General Terms:
Design

Keywords:
CSCW, HCI, collaborative design, concept sketching, ethnography, insight development, naturalistic study