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International Conference on Cooperative Design, Visualization and Engineering

CDVE 2014: Cooperative Design, Visualization, and Engineering pp 134–142Cite as

Messy Work in Virtual Worlds: Exploring Discovery and Synthesis in Virtual Teams

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 8683))

Abstract

The challenges of engineering team collaboration—establishing trust, fostering productive informal communication, cultivating knowledge exchange—are often exacerbated in virtual teams by geographical separation as well as team members’ cultural and linguistic differences. Researchers have observed that powerful collaboration in collocated teams is supported by shared visualizations with which the team engages in informal, flexible and active ways. In studying virtual team interactions in a virtual world known as the CyberGRID, we see that just as with AEC collocated teams, shared visualizations were instrumental for the teams as they define, understand, and generate knowledge when working on interrelated tasks. Emerging from this analysis is an empirically supported theory that while avatar-model interaction supports mutual discovery, more messy interactions of brainstorming, knowledge exchange and synthesis requires flexible, active, and informal shared visualizations.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Construction Management, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

    Carrie Sturts Dossick

Authors
  1. Carrie Sturts Dossick
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Balearic Islands, 07122, Palma de Mallorca, Spain

    Yuhua Luo

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© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

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Dossick, C.S. (2014). Messy Work in Virtual Worlds: Exploring Discovery and Synthesis in Virtual Teams. In: Luo, Y. (eds) Cooperative Design, Visualization, and Engineering. CDVE 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8683. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10831-5_19

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10831-5_19

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-10830-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-10831-5

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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