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Losing our Place: A Foray into the Attenuated Non-spaces of Groupware and Back Again

Published: 15 February 2021 Publication History

Abstract

In 1986 four idealistic researchers at XEROX PARC, informally crossing organisational and spatial boundaries, spent two weeks working by video link. As this medium created a new space between them, they called it the Media Space. The field blossomed; within ten years researchers delineated place from space, and later work articulated principles for designing distributed place for collaborative creativity and recognised the Ba-Principle (場) of enabling contexts. In 2020 hundreds of millions of us find ourselves in a prolonged version of the same experiment, but rather than convivial workplaces we observe participants fatigued by bare virtual meeting rooms with ephemeral surfaces, void of boundary objects, only weakly affording ambient presence, staging, social signalling or situated action. By contrasting these observations with known design principles, we reveal which are most lacking in contemporary systems and propose a path back to constructing shared meaning in distributed place.

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OzCHI '20: Proceedings of the 32nd Australian Conference on Human-Computer Interaction
December 2020
764 pages
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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Published: 15 February 2021

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Author Tags

  1. affordances of place
  2. ba-principle
  3. boundary objects
  4. collaboration
  5. creativity
  6. cscw
  7. design
  8. geographically distributed collaboration
  9. media spaces
  10. place
  11. situated action

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