Joe's Jottings
Jottings Number 63, Reply B, by Melissa Monty, John Podkomorsky, and Joni Podolsky
Date: Fri, 25 Oct 96 08:15:00 -0700
The research on enhancing remote communication has an interesting
niche - virtual workgroups or virtual offices. The results of this
research are regularly presented in such forums as the yearly
conference of the Association of Computing Machinery's (ACM) special
interest group on Computer Human Interaction (SIGCHI) and various
forums on Collaborative Work. Xerox's EuroPARC is one hotbed for this
research along with the University of Toronto, MIT, and others.
Some of my favorite tidbits from this growing body of research come
from EuroPARC. They have placed cameras, speakers, and microphones in
teleconnected offices including some home offices. One of my
colleagues and old classmates, Bill Gaver, has investigated how the
sound of knocking and squeaky doors opening and closing adds to a
participants sense of security. It seems to be a bit easier to have a
camera trained on your private workspace at all times if you have some
sense of when someone might be looking in on you.
Another important aspect of this research is the fact that there are
keen advantages to having open-ended access to those you are working
with remotely while maintaining a sense of when it is best to
interrupt or not interrupt. It seems clear that if you have a sense
of how busy a person is and whether they are coming or going, it is
easier to manage the complexities of the dynamics of communication
while meeting your own needs.
My first personal experience with this was when I was at PARC in Palo
Alto in the mid '80s. They had a camera, monitor, speaker, and
microphone set up in the open area in the center of a pod of offices.
The other end of the connection was located in a similar public area
in a remote but related PARC lab located in Oregon. One could walk
out of one's office, pass by the camera, and see on the monitor if
anyone in Oregon was hanging out in the open area. You could speak
loudly and the folks in the Oregon offices might actually hear you,
walk out of their offices, and join you in conversation. You could
wander by, see and hear the Oregon folks having a conversation, and
nod but otherwise not disturb them -- very much like you might walk
past people talking in the hallway.
There is much to be learned from these areas of research. Another
facinating example from Japan is an electronic white board which is
actually not white, but transparent. One person in one location
stands on one side of the board and draws or writes notes. The other
person from the other location is projected on the board along with
their additions to the drawings. So while you are writing, you are
also watching the remote collaborator on the other side of the board
also writing and adding to your notes.
While these examples are intriguing, the actual effectiveness of the
technology is still quite limited. However, the increase in bandwidth
of the visual and auditory communication may do much to improve these
tools with time.
One other comment. I personally do not consider the cost of a
videoconference to be particularly cheap relative to the cost of
travel within California, for example. If I am able to work on the
plane and in the airport while traveling to a one-day or half-day
meeting, the dollar cost may actually work out to be about the same.
The stress of the travel does not factor in to this equation however,
and that definitely increases the personal cost. I have somewhat
enjoyed the effect travel restrictions have had on my personal life,
though the long-term cost to HP for the lack of communication in the
HP human factors community is probably greater that anyone is willing
to admit.
Melissa Monty
Human Factors Engineer
San Diego Division
Joe, as an really active remote user, I resonate with the need to "be there" - maybe from a different perspective, however. I work mostly from my home when I'm in my base city (Roseville). During that time, I spend a lot of time on the phone, and a lot of time at my desk on the pc. This is exactly the pattern I would follow in the working office. What I DON'T get to experience are the spontaneous converstations with office mates, or the creative exposure to the ideas and reactions of co-workers. I miss this exposure some, but offset that loss with much higher personal productivity due to the lack of "interruptions". Clearly this is a mixed blessing. The productivity improvement would not be there if it were not for enough team building to become familiar with the people on the other end of the phone. Unless I can "visualize" their body language the content of their message is just not complete. There is one specific part of team behavior that cannot be replaced - the water cooler or coffee machine. Working on teams which are geographically dispersed eliminates the ability to stimulate team creativity by having team members collide in a less focused environment, resulting in conversation, thinking, stimulus that is orthogonal to whatever they are focusing on. When you talk to your team mates, you specifically discuss the item you are working on, and don't get a chance to know them as people, or to experience the random inputs that come over coffee and often stimulate new ideas. That's a big loss, I think, and it won't be fixed by any technology gizmo. Having an office in Roseville (instead of working from home) would provide some social stimulus, but would not fix the team issue - my "team" is located all around the world. Does anyone else miss this type of contact? John Podkomorski 748-0888
Yeah, overall I see what your saying. It's an old argument. However,
I have to take exception to: "Brooks observes that television, for
example, arguably the most pervasive information product of the past
half-century, is a passive, frantic, non-social environment."
Actually, television is a VERY social environment. Besides the
education we rec eive from television, be it good or bad, or the
ability to empathize with situations dramatized, the world has been
made MUCH smaller due to television.
How many times have you come into the office only to find yourself
with a group of workers discussing last night's X-Files episode (Ok,
not you, Dad, but others). Or seen people huddled around the tv in
the lunch room watching a soap opera toget her and arguing over how
the different characters are responding to their variou s problems?
Everyone in the country was discussing who shot JR, and most everyone
in the country watched the last MASH episode.
In many ways, television unifies us and gives us similar social
frameworks. This is very important in a culture that is as large and
diverse as America's. People talk about how we have no sense of
nationalism in the US, that unity is much more evident in other
countries. I think that television helps provide more unity. And,
with the advent of satellite feeds, etc. I think that this unity is
progressing at a world-wide level.
The Web, I think, is similar to television in this way, although I
think it is even better--it's interactive and global! Rather than
stifling it, I think that technology is making it easier to have
social interaction. Perhaps it doesn't involve all of our senses
(yet), but it's better than nothing.
The problem I see with this kind of technology is the loss of smaller
communities and small-community social interaction. For example, I
have very few friends that actually live in the city I live in. My
friends all live at least 10-20 miles away from me or another state,
or another country. However, as we've seen through projects like
NetDay, technology can also be a catalyst to make communities work
together and get to know one another.
Joni Podolsky
Smart Valley, Inc.
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