Fractured ecologies: creating environments for collaboration

  • Authors:

  • Paul Luff;Christian Heath;Hideaki Kuzuoka;Jon Hindmarsh;Keiichi Yamazaki;Shinya Oyama

  • Affiliations:

  • Work Interaction and Technology Research Group, The Management Centre, King's College, London, UK;Work Interaction and Technology Research Group, The Management Centre, King's College, London, UK;Institute of Engineering Mechanics and Systems, University of Tsukuba, Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan;Work Interaction and Technology Research Group, The Management Centre, King's College, London, UK;Faculty of Liberal Arts, University of Saitama, Saitama, Japan;Human-Computer Intelligent Interaction Group, Communications Research Laboratory, Kyoto, Japan and University of Tsukuba, Japan

  • Venue:
  • Human-Computer Interaction
  • Year:
  • 2003

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

It is increasingly recognized that social interaction and collaboration rely on the participants' abilities to accessand use a range of resources including objects and artifacts from within the immediate environment. In recent years, system support for remote collaboration has begun to address this issue, and we have witnessed the emergence of a number of technologies designed to provide remote participants with access to (features of) each others' environment. In this article we examine the use of one such system, an innovative mixed media environment designed to enable participants to refer to and point at objects and artifacts within each other's remote environment. The article addresses the ways in which participants use the system to undertake various collaborative activities and discusses the problems and issues that emerge, for the participants' themselves, in coordinating action with and through objects. We then consider these issues with regard to interaction and collaboration in more conventional environments such as work settings, and we discuss the ways in which the interpretation and production of action are inextricably embedded within the immediate environment, an environment of action that is inadvertently fractured in even this more sophisticated media space.