Portholes: Supporting Awareness in a Distributed Work Group Paul Dourish and Sara Bly Proceedings of CHI ’92, pp

Supporting Awareness in a Distributed Workgroup? Media Space technologies (like the video walls we’ve looked at) tend to emphasize direct connections, information sharing, and collaboration. People at PARC and EuroPARC were in the forefront of these technologies. Awareness is knowing (being “aware”) of what’s going on: who’s talking to who, who’s busy, etc. Rather than focus upon a single physical location, what if we try to support awareness via a “shared awareness space” built using media spaces?

Portholes: a system to do this. Design Aspects Using bandwidth effectively + latency issues are the driving technical problems Awareness information doesn’t require quite so much immediacy, thus less bandwidth – can send infrequent snapshots. Client(s) + Server architecture with replication of data locally is a good solution to allow immediacy of manipulation.

Portholes: Architectural Decisions Information servers individually responsible for some domain of media sources Client programs which access data from local server, all access through closest server. Media source includes not just still images but also properties which might include audio or other rich data (including address, etc.) Domain Data (what domains are out there, how to reach them) actively propagated, versus Source Data (images and property) sent as-needed.

Porthole Client Implementations Three different clients with different functionalities:  pvc – basic multi-image fetcher + viewer, and GLANCE actions  edison – adds audio LISTEN function  viewmaster – pvc but constrained only to public spaces (not offices)

Findings from Use About a year of observation (and development). 10 – 22 staffers at EuroPARC and PARC used system. 15 users asked to participate in survey and usage study (11 respondents) Some implementation issues (stability, screen real-estate) but extremely positive about tool. Used as:  Information Tool – find when people are free.  Community/Shared Space – “see” friends, feel connected.

Future Work Importance of awareness in group activity generally – more research needed. Porthole’s effectiveness in providing awareness - possible use of other media, particularly since audio use enhanced community sense without real passive awareness content. Further work on client interfaces to present information meaningfully – deal with real-estate issues and investigate alternative approaches.

The Authors Paul Dourish  From Scotland, CS & AI student at U. Glasgow  Received Ph.D. at University College, London (Cambridge)  Worked at Xerox EuroPARC (at time of writing)  Left for Apple, thence to PARC, finally to CS Department at U. C. Irvine Sara Bly  Xerox PARC for 12 years – Worked primarily on Media Spaces at PARC (i.e. this paper)  8 years running Sara Bly Consulting – User studies for design  Ph.D. CS (U.C. Davis), M.S. CS (U. C. Davis), M.A. Education (Stanford), B.A. Math (Kansas)