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Supporting Effortless Coordination: 25 Years of Awareness Research

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Abstract

Significant progress has been made in awareness research in Computer-Supported Cooperative Work over the last 25 years. This survey addresses awareness and effortless coordination—that is, how a mutual understanding in distributed teams can be gained and maintained, while still keeping the team members’ coordination efforts to a minimum. I characterise the origins of awareness and its ethnographically-informed and the technology-oriented roots, and discuss the notion of awareness. I review technical solutions for awareness support—both in applications as seen by users, and in base technology as seen by developers. Design tensions in awareness research and solutions are identified. A discussion contrasts awareness as seen from a users’ activity and effort perspective versus awareness as seen from a systems’ support and automation perspective.

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Acknowledgments

Thanks go to the members of the Cooperative Media Lab; special thanks to Christoph Beckmann, Mirko Fetter, Sascha Herr, and Christoph Oemig for stimulating discussions and feedback on early thoughts. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewers for invaluable comments on earlier versions of this paper and beyond.

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  1. Human-Computer Interaction Group, University of Bamberg, Kapuzinerstr. 16, 96047, Bamberg, Germany

    Tom Gross

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Correspondence to Tom Gross.

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Gross, T. Supporting Effortless Coordination: 25 Years of Awareness Research. Comput Supported Coop Work 22, 425–474 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-013-9190-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-013-9190-x

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