München, Techn. Univ., Diss., 2001. / Computerdatei im Fernzugriff.

München, Techn. Univ., Diss., 2001. / Computerdatei im Fernzugriff.

München, Techn. University, Diss., 2001.

Stuttgart, Universität, Fakultät Informatik, Diplomarb., 2000.

This thesis first reviews the literature about the nature of cooperative design activity and its technological support. It is noted that knowledge of how designers work together in real-world settings is less than complete. Moreover, after over a decade of developments in Computer Supported Cooperative Work, the state-of-the-art in collaborative technology does not fully support such activities. Two substantial case studies are presented. The first draws upon fieldwork with designers at a large, distributed engineering design company, where a pilot study of collaborative technologies was carried out, focusing on the organisational context for such interventions and the reasons behind the qualified success of the experimental technology. In the light of the lack of use of synchronous tools in particular, a second case study was carried out. This was a complementary analysis of face-to-face co-working in a series of meetings held by a small design group. The results of both pieces of fieldwork are analysed in the context of existing studies of designers in both real-world and laboratory settings. This leads to the identification of a number of important characteristics of cooperative design, some newly identified, others confirming or extending the results of existing work. They include the identification of tension between traditional engineering design culture and the underlying assumptions of new technology; the intrinsic difficulties in sharing some types of design artefacts; and the way in which design entails an interweaving of individual and group activity, with consequences for resource exploitation, distributed cognition and workspace navigation in group sessions. The findings are integrated into an organising framework for cooperative design, with emphasis on the support of coworking designers distributed across multiple sites. Current technologies are reviewed against scenarios based on the framework and recommendations are made for further work.

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One way to strengthen the bond between popular applications and their online user communities is to integrate the applications with their communities, so users are able to observe and communicate with other users. The result of this integration is a Multiuser Online Application (MOA). The problem studied in this thesis is that MOA users and systems will be overloaded with information generated by large communities and complex applications. The solution investigated was to filter the amount of information delivered to users while attempting to preserve the benefits of dwelling in a MOA environment. This strategy was evaluated according to the amount of information it was capable of reducing and the effects as seen by MOA users. It was found that filtering could be used to substantially reduce the information exchanged by users while still providing users with the benefits of integrating application and community.

Embodiments are virtual personifications of the user in real-time distributed groupware. Many embodiments in groupware are simple abstract 2D representations such as avatars and telepointers. Although current user embodiment techniques can reveal information related to position and orientation, they show far less than what is available in a face-to-face situation, and as a result, collaboration can become more difficult. The problem addressed in this research is that it is difficult for groupware users to recognize and characterize other participants using only their embodiments. The solution explored in this thesis is to provide more information about groupware users by enriching their embodiment. This scheme encodes state and context variables as visual augmentations on the embodiment. Providing information about characteristics such as skill, expertise, and experience can be valuable for collaboration; increasing the information in visual embodiments makes it easier and more natural for collaborators to recognize and characterize others, and thus coordinate activity, simplify communication, and find collaborators.<p> Rich embodiments were tested in three separate experiments. The first experiment showed that users are able to recall a large number of variables displayed on embodiments, and are able to accurately determine the values of those variables. The second study showed that rich embodiments are useful in terms of collaboration and interaction in an actual groupware context a multiplayer game. The final study further examined information-rich embodiment in a shared drawing task, and further revealed the potential of increasing awareness using embodiment.