Awareness

This article is mostly based on Nova (2002:21-27)

When people work together in a shared environment (virtual or not), they need information about the action and the intentions of their teammates. Those information are critical to a successful collaboration, especially in groupware systems (Dourish & Belloti, 1992). This knowledge of others, result of the interaction of the participants and their environment, is named awareness. Dourish and Belloti (1992) have given one of the best-known definitions for awareness: awareness is an understanding of the activities of others, which provides a context for your own activity.

More precisely, Gutwin and Greenberg (1999a) state that awareness:

• Is knowledge about a state of the work environment in a limited portion of time and space.
• Provides knowledge about changes in that environment.
• Is maintained by all the interactions between the team-mates and the environment.
• Is a part of an activity (completing a task, working on something\u2026). Maintaining awareness is not the purpose of an activity. Awareness is used to complete a task.

Therefore, awareness is a process that sums up the knowledge extracted from an environment and updates it thanks to the interaction between the participants and their environments.

Greenberg, Gutwin, and Cockburn, (1996) make the distinction between four different types of overlapping awareness

• Informal awareness, that is knowing who is where, whether people are busy and what kind of activity they\u2019re engaged in. Greenberg (1996) thinks that this type of awareness plays a role of social glue between people.

• Social awareness, that is all the general knowledge about the others in a social or conversational context. It can indicate whether a partner is paying attention or being interested.

• Group-structural awareness: it is all the information about the composition of the group: status, roles and responsibilities of the others.

• Workspace awareness: Gutwin & Greenberg (1999a) define it as the up-to-themoment understanding of another person\u2019s interaction with the shared workspace [\u2026] It is awareness of people and how they interact with the workspace, rather than awareness of the workspace itself.

All those elements are a starting point from which individuals can infer their partner\u2019s activities, ava ilability, troubles and so on. From Table 1 and 2, it can be seen that the most important awareness information are the elements that answer who, what, where, when, and how. In a groupware system, all those information are captured and distributed by awareness tools. Thus people can keep track of these things.

Which information is shown ?

According to Gutwin and Greenberg (1999a), elements of workspace awareness can be divided into two parts: those related to the present (cf. Table 1) and those related to the past (cf. Table 2).

How awareness information is gathered ?

Workspace awareness information may be used for a large variety of ways in collaboration. Gutwin & Greenberg (1999a) describe five types of activity aided by the information described in table 1 and 2.

In a shared environment, workspace information is gathered thanks to (Gutwin & Greenberg, 1999a): - Visible activity appears to be an essential flow of information. Auditory sign may also be useful. It can be bodily actions, gestures, the posture of the other person's body in the workspace, the movement of a limb, the sounds in the environment, etc. Those information are the consequence of a non-intentional communication: the producer of the gesture do not move intentionally to inform a partner. This kind of communication is named consequential communication. An example given by Norman (1993) relates that, in aircraft cockpits, when the captain reaches across the cockpit over to the first officers side and lowers the landing-gear lever, the motion is obvious: the first officer can see it even without paying conscious attention. The motion not only controls the landing gear, but just as important, it acts as a natural communication between the two pilots, letting both know the action has been done. (p. 142). - The manipulation of the workspace artefacts provides visual or acoustic information. For instance, the scratch of a pencil indicates that someone in the environment is writing. This mechanism is named feedthrough. It is different from feedback in the sense that this kind of information is not only given to the person who is performing the action, but also to the others who are watching or hearing. Information gathered by an individual provides cues about a modification of an artefact manipulated by a teammate. Hence, it is possible to determine what is being done to an artefact by seeing and hearing changes in the environment. - The conversation and the intentional communication are also significant. Verbal communication is the most important medium to collaborate in a group. The authors distinguish three ways picking up information from conversation: hearing someone's conversation, asking a question like what are you doing? and by picking up others' verbal shadowing (commentary people often produce to themselves when they perform a task). For instance, navigation teams on navy ships talk on an open circuit in order that everyone can hear each other's conversations. Therefore, member of the team listen in on these conversations to learn from more experienced partners or to monitor the actions of a junior member.

The use of workspace awareness

First, workspace awareness can be deployed for the management of coupling. Coupling is the degree to which people are working together. The coupling is tight when people see an opportunity to collaborate. It is loose when somebody sees that his/her partner is too busy to interrupt his/her task. By allowing people to know what a team-mate is doing with the appropriate awareness information, they can recognize when the collaboration is possible, when they can confront their work to a partner, etc.

Second, simplification of communication is a way to employ awareness information: by simplifying verbal communication and making it more efficient. For instance, in a referential communication, if an individual talk to me about an object that I cannot see, an AT can show what my addressee look could be useful. Consequently, my partner has not to describe or to cite the object; he has just to refer to what is being shown by the AT. It can be a way to overcome the grounding problems (see part 2.2.1) due to the medium.

Third, workspace awareness aids to coordinate actions in collaborative activity. By informing partners about where the team-mates are, what they have already done or what they intend to do, it allows people to know when they can collaborate

Four, the expectations of what is going to be done by the partners can be made thanks to workspace awareness information. Anticipation and predictions are based on extrapolating forward from present. By seeing that a partner is catching an object, one can infer that this artefact is going to be used.

Finally, assisting others is a way to use workspace awareness. It can be employed to know if a partner needs help and how. Knowing what he has done, where he is and what he intends to do is useful to help him.

Gutwin and Greenberg (1999a) sum up the process by the figure 1. This schema shows how information gathered as we have explained in part 1.5.3 is employed. One of the most striking features is that it is a cycle. As a matter of fact, the use of workspace awareness can be seen as a perception-action cycle. People gather information about their environment, integrate it and use it to perform actions. Consequently, this leads to more efficient collaborative interactions.

Dourish, P. & Bellotti. V. (1992). Awareness and coordination in shared workspaces. In J. Turner & R. Kraut (Eds.), Proceedings of ACM CSCW'92 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 107-114, Toronto, Canada.

Greenberg, S. (1996). Peepholes : Low Cost Awareness of One's Community. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI'96), 206-207, Vancouver, Canada : ACM Press.

Greenberg S., Gutwin C. & Cockburn A. (1996). Awareness through fisheye views in relaxed WYSIWIS groupware . In Proceedings of the Graphics Interface Conference, 28-38, Toronto, Canada. Morgan-Kaufmann.

Gutwin, C. & Greenberg, S. (1999a). A framework of awareness for small groups in sharedworkspace groupware. (Technical Report 99-1), Department of Computer Science, University of Saskatchewan, Canada.

Gutwin, C. & Greenberg, S. (1996). Workspace awareness for groupware, Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ISBN:0-89791-832-0

Nova, Nicolas (2002), The impact of Awareness Tools on Mutual Modelling in a Collaborative Game, MSc Thesis, TECFA, University of Geneva, October 2002.