Supporting intercultural collaboration with dynamic feedback systems: preliminary evidence from a creative design task

ABSTRACT

Intercultural collaboration is often hampered by the manner in which teams communicate, or fail to com-municate, their ideas, concerns, and feelings. Computer-mediated communication and the virtual nature of collaboration tend to exacerbate such communication issues into problems of conversation dominance, misattribution, and group conflict. New communication tools have the potential to mitigate some of these problems by augmenting individuals' and team's awareness of their communication inputs and processes. We explore how such feedback affects the communication content, attention distribution, and affective states of Chinese and American collaborators engaged in a creative de-sign task. We describe our tool, present preliminary findings from an ongoing lab experiment, and discuss next steps in our research regarding ways of detecting the impact of real-time conversation feedback in inter-cultural collaboration environments.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.3 Group and Organization Interfaces
          Subjects: Computer-supported cooperative work

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.3 Group and Organization Interfaces
          Subjects: Synchronous interaction

General Terms:
Experimentation, Human Factors

Keywords:
computer-mediated communication, cross-cultural communication, distributed work, feedback mechanisms