Supporting Casual Interaction between Intimate Collaborators

Saul Greenberg Department of Computer Science University of Calgary

Over last decade, we have seen mounting interest in how  groupware technology can support electronic interaction between intimate collaborators who are separated by time and distance. By intimate collaborators I mean small communities of friends, family or colleagues who have a real need or desire to stay in touch with one another. While there are many ways to provide electronic interaction, perhaps the most promising approach supports casual interaction. The general idea is that members of a distributed community somehow detect when others are on-line, and use that awareness to move into interaction with each other. On the popular side, we see this manifested by the explosion of text-based instant messaging services: a person sees friends and their on-line status in a personal buddy list, and can selectively enter into a chat dialog with one or more of them.

On the research side, I (and others in my group) are exploring the nuances of electronic casual interaction, and it is these nuances that will become the focus of this presentation. These include:

• how we can enrich on-line opportunities for casual interaction by providing the group with a rich sense of awareness of others: who is around, what they are doing, and what they are working on;
• how awareness information is presented at the periphery, where it becomes part of the background hum of activity that people can then selectively attend to;
• how people can seamlessly and quickly move from this awareness into conversation and actual work;
• how others can overhear and enter into ongoing conversations and activities;
• how the same opportunities work for a mix of co-located and distributed collaborators;
• how we balance distraction and privacy concerns.

As part of the discussion, I will present several prototype systems built by members of my group as case studies in designing groupware for casual interaction and how they are used in practice.

Bio. 

Saul Greenberg, a professor in Computer Science at the University of Calgary, is an active researcher in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). As head of the GroupLab team, he and his group are investigate how people work together, how the computer and related technologies (groupware) affect group behaviour, and how software can be designed to support and augment group work. Notable technologies produced by his group include Groupkit (a groupware toolkit) and TeamRooms (a room-based groupware environment now commercialized as TeamWave Workplace). His team also studies other aspects of HCI, including usability engineering methods and information visualization and manipulation. He is the author/editor of several HCI and CSCW books, has numerous publications, serves on several journal editorial boards, and has a high service involvement in both the ACM CSCW and CHI conferences.

Samples of Grouplab work and papers are available at http://www.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/grouplab/