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Designing for Common Ground in Mobile Distributed Collaborative Systems

Overview

Background and Contribution

This project built upon previous work that developed a theory of human communication and collaboration in co-operative work settings (O'Neill, 2000), and explored the production and use of representations to support communicative and collaborative processes (O'Neill, 1996; O'Neill, Johnson and Johnson, 1999). This project built upon the previous work to develop the theoretical concepts of 'participation frameworks' and 'interaction spaces' (O'Neill 1996; O'Neill, Johnson and Johnson 1999), and explore the interaction between them. In synchronous, colocated activities (i.e. with the participants in the same place at the same time), representations and other artefacts of the collaboration define a limited space in which participants may effectively collaborate. These representations constitute an essential component of the environment that accommodates and supports the collaborative activities, facilitating the communication and collaboration of participants.

Another important concept is that of 'common ground' (see Clark 1992, 1996), as simultaneously a product and a facilitator of communication and collaboration. O'Neill (1999) and O'Neill and Johnson (1999) generated an account of user-developer interaction in terms of the joint construction of two distinct forms of common ground: common ground about the participants' present activities, including their shared environment, artefacts and representations, and the common ground about the topics of these joint activities (in this case software systems and users' work domains).

This project extended this research into collaborative activities in other domains, including hospital Accident and Emergency departments (in collaboration with Royal London Hospital), veterinary surgery and game playing. It extended and operationalised the theoretical concepts of common ground, participation frameworks and interaction spaces to distributed, mobile, collaborative activities, and developed design principles to exploit the developed theory in the design and evaluation of distributed, mobile, collaborative, computer-based systems.