Dhaval Vyas thesis 2011

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Designing for Awareness:
An Experience-focused HCI Perspective
Dhaval Vyas

PhD dissertation committee:
Chairman and Secretary:
Prof. dr. ir. Ton J. Mouthaan, University of Twente, NL
Promotor(s):
Prof. dr. ir. Anton Nijholt, University of Twente, NL
Prof. dr. Gerrit van der Veer, Open University, NL
Assistant-promotor:
Dr. Dirk Heylen, University of Twente, NL
Members:
Prof. Alan Dix, Computing Department, Lancaster University, UK
Prof. Liam Bannon, Interaction Design Center, University of Limerick, Ireland
Prof. dr. Anton Eli¨
ens, Control Engineering, University of Twente, NL
Prof. dr. Wim Poelman, Industrial Design, University of Twente, NL
Human Media Interaction group
The research reported in this dissertation has been carried out at the Human Media Interaction group
of the University of Twente.
CTIT Dissertation Series No. 11-190
Center for Telematics and Information Technology (CTIT)
P.O. Box 217, 7500 AE Enschede, NL
AMIDA Publication
The research reported in this thesis has been supported by the European IST Programme Projects AMI
(Augmented Multi-party Interaction) and AMIDA (Augmented Multi-party Interaction with Distant Ac-
cess), FP6-506811 and FP6-033812. This thesis only reflects the author’s views and funding agencies
are not liable for any use that may be made of the information contained herein.
SIKS Dissertation Series No. 2011-11
The research reported in this thesis has been carried out under the auspices of SIKS, the Dutch Research
School for Information and Knowledge Systems.
ISBN: 978-90-365-3135-1
ISSN: 1381-3617, number 11-190
DOI: 10.3990/1.9789036531351
Cover picture by Hinal B. Bhatt.
© 2011 Dhaval Vyas, Enschede, The Netherlands

DESIGNING FOR AWARENESS:
ANEXPERIENCE-FOCUSED HCI PERSPECTIVE
DISSERTATION
to obtain
the degree of doctor at the University of Twente,
on the authority of the rector magnificus,
prof. dr. H. Brinksma,
on account of the decision of the graduation committee
to be publicly defended
on Friday, February 18, 2011 at 16:45
by
Dhaval Maheshbhai Vyas
born on March 27, 1981
in Vadodara, India

This thesis has been approved by:
Prof. dr. ir. Anton Nijholt, University of Twente, NL (promotor)
Prof. dr. Gerrit van der Veer, Open University, NL (promotor)
and
Dr. Dirk Heylen, University of Twente, NL (assistant-promotor)
© 2011 Dhaval Vyas, Enschede, The Netherlands
ISBN: 978-90-365-3135-1

Acknowledgments
I would like to thank my parents for making me what I am today. My parents have
been instrumental in guiding my education from my childhood. Without their con-
stant care and support this thesis would not have been possible. I also want to thank
the almighty God for giving me the strength and blessing me with good things in life.
I would like to thank my promotor, Anton Nijholt, for offering me this PhD posi-
tion at the Human-Media Interaction group. I cannot forget the encouragement and
freedom he has given me. I have nothing but admiration for him both as a person and
as the head of HMI. Gerrit van der Veer has been the godfather of my research career.
I thank him for inviting me to the Netherlands in 2004 and supporting my research
in his group at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. In the past six years, he has been a
great teacher and a friend. My visits to Gerrit and Elly’s home have been memorable.
My daily supervisor, Dirk Heylen, has taught me how to be a good researcher. His
rigorous and detailed comments on my work have really shaped my thesis. I have
always learned new things from him and I thank him for all his help in guiding this
thesis.
I thank the members of my dissertation committee: Anton Eli¨
ens, Alan Dix, Wim
Poelman and Liam Bannon. Anton has been closely associated with my PhD. He has
been a mentor for me since my days at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. His help in
the Panorama project has given me great inspiration. I have known Alan Dix since
2001, when I took his HCI course at Lancaster University, UK. Indirectly, he is the
trigger for my pursuit of HCI. I want to thank him for the interesting discussions we
had in Eindhoven. I thank Wim Poelman for agreeing to review my PhD thesis and
offering me a job at a time when I was writing my thesis. It really helped me in stress-
less writing. I thank Liam Bannon for discussing my research and agreeing to review
my thesis during the COOP conference in Aix-en-Provence.
During my PhD, I have had opportunities to visit other institutes. With the help
of Kees Overbeeke, I was able spend several weeks at the Industrial Design depart-
ment of the Technical University of Eindhoven. This not only helped me in my data
collection for my research but also helped me in learning Design. With the help of
Tilman Becker, I spent four months at DFKI Saarbr¨
ucken in Germany. I thank Tilman

vi |Acknowledgements
for arranging my visit and the European Union for financially supporting it. At DFKI, I
worked with Alexander Kr¨
oner on the CAM project. This cooperation helped me gain
a lot of knowledge about Intelligent User Interfaces. I thank Alexander for all his help
at DFKI. I also want to thank Michael Schmitz, Tim Schwartz, Michael Schneider and
Gregorious Petkidis for helping in various issues during my work at DFKI. In addition,
I thank Marek van de Watering and Edwin Keijl for their help in my projects.
I have enjoyed my work at the HMI group. I consider this four years as one of the
best experiences of my life, as far as professional work is concerned. I have had the
best working environment and best colleagues in this group. I feel really sad about
leaving this group and I really hope that all my future jobs give me an experience
that is as pleasant as this one. I wish to thank my office-mates Andreea and Bram for
putting up with me. I thank my paranimfen Andreea Niculescu and Andrea Minuto.
You both have been good friends. Dinners at Yujia’s and Andreea’s homes have been
very enjoyable. Thanks Yujia for your advice during the thesis writing. Charlotte,
Alice and Hendry have been a great help. I am amazed by Charlotte’s energy and her
dedication to her work. I thank her for the uncountable things that she has done for
me. I cannot forget her help in filling out the 100 page long M-form from the Dutch
Tax Office. I thank Elly Lammers for taking a good care of me when I was at the Vrije
Universiteit. I also thank Lynn Packwood for proofreading my papers and this thesis.
It has been wonderful to know you, Lynn. I thank Ronald for helping me with LaTeX
for this thesis. The Faculty Club gatherings have been very enjoyable.
The Indian community at the University of Twente has made my stay really en-
joyable. I thank Pramod-Vishakha, Supriyo-Anindita, Jigar-Falguni, Chandra-Minaxi,
Vijaya-Sangita, Vikram-Ashmita, Mayur-Shradhha, Jitu-Lavanya, Srivatsa, Hemant
and Shashank for being great friends. You have all been there when I needed it. Piet
Nandpersad (Piet bhai) and Kamla bhabhi have become my family in Holland. My
Gujju friends: Nitinbhai, Mehulbhai, Pravinbhai and Chintan have made a wonderful
contribution to my social life. I also thank my Cricket, Badminton and Football gangs
for the enjoyable sport sessions. I acknowledge the support of the Indian Student
Association (ISA@UT) in different social activities at the University.
I thank all my relatives and friends for their support and encouragement. In partic-
ular, I thank my brother Dipen for his motivations; Bhadresh papa and Kinnal mummy
for helping in various domestic issues; and Preeti masi and Shreyas masa for support-
ing me in different ways when I was studying in the UK. My school/college friends
Lucky, Hardik, Falak, Rahil, Vishal, Ronak, Amrish, Birju and society friends have also
been inspirational.
Last but not least, I want to thank two important persons of my life: my wife Hinal
and my three-month old son Aryan. Hinal is the love of my life. My journey with her
started at the same time when I started this PhD. Her caring love and affection has
made me a better person. She took great care of me and comforted me when I needed
it the most. I am so lucky to have her in my life. My son Aryan was born when I was
writing my PhD thesis. I will always remember holding him in one arm and reviewing
parts of my thesis. His presence in our lives makes everything worthwhile.
Dhaval Vyas
Enschede, January 2011

Contents
1 Introduction 1
1.1 Awareness in HCI and CSCW . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.2 Experience-focused HCI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.3 TheThesis.................................. 4
1.3.1 ResearchApproach......................... 5
1.3.2 ResearchContext.......................... 8
1.4 Contributions................................ 9
1.5 Thesisoutline................................ 10
I Background 13
2 Awareness and Awareness Systems 15
2.1 Introduction................................. 15
2.2 Awareness.................................. 15
2.2.1 Characteristics of Awareness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
2.2.2 Awareness: An experience-focused perspective . . . . . . . . . 18
2.3 AwarenessSystems............................. 19
2.3.1 MediaSpaces............................ 19
2.3.2 TeamWorkStation.......................... 21
2.3.3 InformativeArt........................... 22
2.3.4 Hello.Wall.............................. 23
2.3.5 Hermes ............................... 24
2.3.6 Whereabouts Clock . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
2.3.7 FamilyPortraits........................... 26
2.4 Summary .................................. 27
3 Theoretical Frameworks for Understanding Group Work 29
3.1 Introduction................................. 29
3.2 Theoretical Frameworks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
3.2.1 Activity Theory (AT) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
3.2.2 Distributed Cognition (DCog) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
3.2.3 Grounded Theory (GT) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
3.2.4 Ethnomethodology (EM) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
3.2.5 Participatory Design (PD) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33

viii |Contents
3.2.6 Summary .............................. 34
II Design Case 1: Awareness in a Department 37
4 Fieldwork in an Academic Department 39
4.1 Introduction................................. 39
4.1.1 Play@Work?............................ 40
4.2 SocialAwareness .............................. 41
4.2.1 Early Work on Social Awareness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
4.2.2 Social Awareness beyond Work-Related Activities . . . . . . . . 42
4.2.3 Conceptualizing Social Awareness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
4.3 Studying Social Awareness in a Work Organization . . . . . . . . . . . 44
4.3.1 Ethnographic Field Study . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
4.3.2 Organizational Probes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
4.3.3 Participants ............................. 47
4.4 Results.................................... 48
4.4.1 SelfReflections........................... 49
4.4.2 Casual Encounters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
4.5 Discussions and Implications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
4.5.1 On‘Play’............................... 62
4.5.2 On‘Place’ .............................. 63
4.5.3 Implications for Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
4.6 Summary .................................. 67
5 Panorama and its Field Trials 69
5.1 Introduction................................. 69
5.2 Panorama: Supporting Playfully-mediated Social Awareness . . . . . . 71
5.2.1 Representation ........................... 73
5.2.2 Two Levels of Communication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
5.2.3 Early Assessments of Panorama . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
5.2.4 Results of Early Assessments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
5.3 Field Trial of Panorama . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
5.3.1 TheSetup.............................. 77
5.3.2 Methods............................... 78
5.4 Results.................................... 81
5.4.1 Observations and interviews . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
5.4.2 RGT ................................. 89
5.5 Discussion.................................. 93
5.6 Summary .................................. 95
III Design Case 2: Awareness in Design Studios 97
6 Fieldwork in Design Studios 99
6.1 Introduction................................. 99
6.1.1 The design studio culture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101

Contents |ix
6.2 Related Work – Studying Design Practices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
6.3 StudyMethods ............................... 105
6.4 Results – Practices that Support Creativity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
6.4.1 UseofArtefacts........................... 107
6.4.2 Useofspace............................. 118
6.4.3 Designerly Practices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
6.5 Discussion and Implications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132
6.5.1 Implications for Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
6.6 Summary .................................. 136
7 CAM and its Field Trials 137
7.1 Introduction................................. 137
7.1.1 RelatedWork ............................ 138
7.2 Cooperative Artefact Memory (CAM) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139
7.2.1 How CAM follows ‘Design Implications’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140
7.3 FieldTrials ................................. 141
7.4 Observations ................................ 142
7.5 Results I: How CAM was used... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142
7.5.1 Digital Extension of Physical Objects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143
7.5.2 Design narratives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144
7.5.3 Designarchive ........................... 144
7.5.4 Types of tagged artefacts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144
7.5.5 Statisticsofuse........................... 145
7.6 Results II: how CAM Supported Awareness and Design Activities . . . . 146
7.6.1 Awareness and Communication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146
7.6.2 Expression and Aesthetics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150
7.6.3 Playful................................ 151
7.6.4 Creative Exploration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 152
7.6.5 Reflection and Critique . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154
7.7 Discussion.................................. 154
7.7.1 Internet-of-Things . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155
7.7.2 ObjectMemory........................... 156
7.8 Summary .................................. 156
IV Reflections 157
8 Discussions on Awareness 159
8.1 Introduction................................. 159
8.2 Experience-focused HCI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159
8.3 Awareness grounded in people’s practices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160
8.4 Artefacts and Physical Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161
8.5 “Less is more” – for supporting awareness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162

x|Contents
9 Conclusions 165
9.1 Contributions ................................ 165
9.2 A word on Methodology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166
9.3 Limitations ................................. 166
9.4 FutureDirections.............................. 167
9.5 FinalWords................................. 168
Bibliography 169
Summary 185
Appendix 1 187
Appendix 2 191
Appendix 3 193
Thesis Publications 195
SIKS Dissertation Series 197

1
Introduction
The multidisciplinary field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is experiencing a
continuous change in its topic of study. One of the recent and arguably the most im-
portant topics of study has been the experience-focused perspective on HCI. As I shall
elaborate on in this thesis, experience-focused HCI attempts to design technologies
by taking a holistic view on understanding how people experience technology in their
everyday environments. Secondly, it also aims to design for the wide-ranging, com-
plex and situated experiences people have with technologies. As the title suggests,
this thesis is about designing computer-based interactive systems that can support
‘awareness’ between people so that they can carry out their ongoing joint endeavors.
The technologies that support awareness can be loosely termed as awareness systems.
In my thesis, I will use two design cases to explore how one can design awareness
systems using the experience-focused HCI perspective. In these two design cases,
I investigate how early-technology ideas can be matched with people’s experiences
and their specific practices to inspire novel design. My thesis primarily focuses on
workplace environments and looks at awareness as a situated and experiential phe-
nomenon.
1.1 Awareness in HCI and CSCW
The notion of awareness has been central to Computer-Supported Cooperative Work
(CSCW) research. It has its origins in workplace studies such as the London Under-
ground study [106] and the air traffic control room study [100, 116, 219]. In its
original conception, awareness was seen as a tool to understand how actors effort-
lessly pick up information about what is going on around them and make practical
sense of it, and in turn, seamlessly adjust their activities [203]. In another study that
motivated research on awareness, Kraut et al. [144] showed that people who are
situated in close physical proximity are more likely to collaborate on projects simply
because they are more easily able to engage in informal conversational encounters.
Studies such as these encouraged researchers to develop technologies that can sup-
port ‘informal awareness’ between co-workers, especially when they are dispersed

2|Chapter 1
over geographical locations. Hence, the issue of awareness became an important
topic of research in the fields of HCI and CSCW – which, in the 80s and 90s, focused
heavily on the applications and systems to support office work, organizations and
aspects related to workplace collaboration. Here, awareness involved knowing who
was around, what activities were occurring, who was talking with whom and focused
on providing a view of one another in work environments. The assumption here was
that awareness might lead to informal interactions, spontaneous connections, and the
development of shared cultures [54] – all important aspects of maintaining working
relationships which were denied to groups distributed across multiple sites.
The issue of supporting informal awareness in work environments paved the route
for technologies such as media spaces [17] – a technology that supports audio-video
links between two (or more) remote workplaces. Media spaces and other related
technologies utilized the notion of informal awareness among remotely-located co-
workers by placing such a technology in the common areas of their work environ-
ments, so that all sides can have a view from each other’s respective common areas.
Subsequently, the fields of HCI and CSCW saw a large number of software appli-
cations attempting to develop awareness systems that focused on conveying people’s
presence, activities, and availability of members of a community (read [94] and [193]
for comprehensive reviews). Systems that attempt to convey awareness are called
awareness systems. A recent text on awareness systems [163] defines them as: “sys-
tems intended to help people construct and maintain awareness of each others’ activities,
context or status, even when the participants are not co-located.”
There are a large number of highly inter-related and overlapping notions of aware-
ness, such as social awareness [22], situational awareness [60], workspace awareness
[95] and contextual awareness [162], among others. In addition, a large number
of awareness systems have been designed for differing and sometimes contradictory
purposes. On the one hand applications such as TeamWorkStation [125] were built
to support real-time, smooth collaboration with a remotely located co-worker. On
the other hand, Nardi et al.’s [173] conception of awareness dealt with interrupt-
ing others by sending instant messages. The notion of awareness, which started from
supporting informal communication in workplaces, has shifted to supporting interper-
sonal communication between friends and families, taking into account the non-work
situations. HomeNote [215], Whereabouts Clock [28], ASTRA [164] and Family Por-
traits [170] are a few examples of awareness systems that have been developed for
domestic environments to support interpersonal communications.
1.2 Experience-focused HCI
As the use of technology has extended beyond work environments, a need has arisen
to take into account the cultural, emotional, interpersonal and other subjective as-
pects for designing new technologies. Since the late 90s, a growing body of work
[185, 175, 131, 20, 167, 102, 132] within HCI has attempted to shift the focus from
the task-based or functionalist view points to a more holistic view on how users ex-
perience technologies. Experience-focused HCI can be seen as an umbrella topic that
keeps ‘human experience’ at the center of any type of HCI investigation. This reflects

Introduction |3
a paradigm shift in the current HCI research from usability and task-based approaches
to experience-focused perspectives. Buxton [35] argues the following: “Ultimately, we
are deluding ourselves if we think that the products that we design are the “things” that
we sell, rather than the individual, social and cultural experience that they engender, and
the value and impact that they have.” Experience-focused HCI aims to design for the
multiple, complex and situated experiences people have with technologies.
The notion of experience has been a tricky topic in HCI and is yet to have a widely-
accepted definition. Dewey [49] and McCarthy and Wright [167] describe experience
as a totality of a human’s interaction with an object. They conceptualize experience as
a subjective, constructive, holistic and spatio-temporal phenomenon. It is important
to recognize that experiences are situated and are formed in the course of a specific
interaction and any representation of an experience is inherently incomplete. Hence,
at times researchers [23] have termed experience as an ineffable phenomenon. It
is something that may not be fully understandable, but its richness can be felt. Mc-
Carthy and Wright [167] discuss experience as the “irreducible totality of people acting,
sensing, thinking, feeling, and making meaning in a setting” (p. 54). Even if human
experience is subjective and situated in its nature [49], it can still be interpreted to in-
spire design. This perspective is also prominent among other researchers who investi-
gate how experience-centered design activities can inform, inspire or understand HCI
design beyond usability [167, 266, 218]. In the last 10 years, HCI researchers have
developed conceptual frameworks to understand experience [77, 103, 167, 76]. The
use of pragmatist philosophy [184] and phenomenology [52] has also informed how
designers can incorporate experience-focused perspective into HCI. Although the au-
thors did not label their work as experience-focused, the ethnographic fieldwork done
in domestic environments such as the one by Taylor and Swan [233] can also be seen
as an attempt to incorporate experiential aspects into design. In particular their focus
on the peoples’ situated actions in very particular places and situations is at the heart
of experience-focused HCI. Role playing methods [29, 25, 128] have also emerged
as important techniques to inspire experience in the design process. Such methods
focus on innovating novel technological solutions by physically acting out potential
problems and solutions. Additionally, probe-based methods have also gained promi-
nence in HCI research to incorporate experience in the design process. Methods such
as cultural probes [82] and technology probes [123] have provided a very useful way
to support design explorations. Although not directly related to this thesis, some of
my own work on experience such as developing a conceptual framework [260], an
evaluation approach [261] and philosophical underpinnings of experience [247] has
inspired me to use experience-focused HCI for designing new technologies.
As an important note, I would like to point out that this thesis does not attempt
to explore the notions of user-experience nor does it focus on conceptualizing it. My
sole focus here is to design technologies to support awareness. I do, however, use
experience-focused perspective to do this. To read PhD theses focusing on user expe-
rience, I recommend the work of Battarbee [10], Kaye [132] and Karapanos [130].

4|Chapter 1
1.3 The Thesis
Ever since the industrial revolution in the late 18th century, aspects such as efficiency,
productivity, rationalism and so on have gained primacy and a higher level of interest
in different ‘work’ domains over the subjective and experiential aspects such as fun,
play and pleasure. This thesis extends the current notions of awareness systems –
supporting task-based and instrumental aspects between co-workers – to supporting
experience-focused interactions, in the context of work environments. Within HCI
and CSCW research, one can find several examples of awareness systems that support
emotional, playful and curious interactions. However, this has been mainly in the
non-work domains such as domestic, leisure and gaming environments. The main
research question this thesis attempts to address is:
RQ How can we design awareness systems for workplaces that incorporate an experience-
focused HCI perspective?
To clarify this question, I do not intend to develop a ‘methodology’ of some sort to
design awareness systems. On the contrary, my thesis explores this research question
by means of two design cases where, using an ethnographic approach, I design two
awareness systems and study their use in realistic settings. In both the design cases, I
follow the complete design cycle – beginning from the problem definition and in-situ
observations, through developing a working prototype to field trials of the prototype.
In the first design case, the aim was to develop an awareness system in an aca-
demic department setting that could playfully-mediate social awareness between co-
workers. The focus here was on supporting non-work and pleasurable interactions be-
tween co-workers. I began by studying the everyday interactions of the staff members
in the department using ethnographic methods and an inspirational technique called
organizational probes [246] – a modified version of the cultural probes technique by
Gaver et al. [82]. From the results of this six-month long field study, I developed im-
portant design implications for awareness systems and subsequently designed a situ-
ated display for the staff room in the department, called – Panorama [257]. Panorama
is a large-screen, situated display which allows staff members to send their person-
alized digital contents such as holiday and conference pictures, personal comments
and ‘news of the day’ quotes, personal achievements and announcements, and other
socially-relevant information. Such contents are then played on the large screen of
Panorama with a semi artistic representation. Secondly, Panorama, can stream images
and videos in real-time from the public spaces of the department to create a curious
environment in the staff room. Thus, Panorama supports user-initiated and system-
initiated interactions to support casual and pleasurable social awareness in a playful
manner. A two-week long field trial of Panorama was carried out in the department
to observe how Panorama supported awareness in the department. Chapters 4 and 5
will provide detailed information on this design case.
In the second design case, the aim was to develop an awareness system that could
support and enhance creative interaction between co-workers in a design studio set-
ting. Unlike the first design case, this design case focused on supporting work prac-
tices of designers and supporting the collaborative practices of designers that support

Introduction |5
creativity. So, supporting collaborative creativity was the ‘experience’ I intended to
facilitate. With this aim in mind, I studied both academic and professional design
studios to understand how designers work, how they collaborate with each other and
in general how creativity is supported by the various practices that they follow. Fol-
lowing this eight-month long fieldwork in design studios, I developed important im-
plications for designing an awareness system in the design studio environment. The
Cooperative Artefact Memory (CAM) system was developed as a result of this inves-
tigation [255]. CAM is a mobile-tagging based messaging system. It allows designers
to collaboratively store relevant information onto their physical design artefacts, such
as sketches, collages, storyboards, and physical mock-ups in the form of messages,
annotations and external web links. This way, CAM empowers designers to create a
digital profile of their physical design artefacts that can be accessed by co-workers in
a joint design project. CAM conveys the information of the ongoing projects through
these tagged artefacts to make co-workers aware of each other’s activities. I carried
out a field trial of CAM in an academic design studio involving design students. The
field trials of CAM shed light on how CAM facilitated expressions of design aesthetics,
allowed designers to have playful interactions, supported the exploration of new de-
sign ideas, and supported designers’ reflective practices. In general, our results show
how CAM transformed mundane design artefacts into “living” artefacts that made the
creative and playful side of cooperative design visible. Chapters 6 and 7 will provide
detailed information on this design case.
By using these two design cases, my aim is to show two different viewpoints on
awareness. In the first design case the focus is to support casual, pleasurable and non-
work interactions between co-workers. Whereas in the second design case, the aim is
to support work-oriented creative communications between designers in their design
studios. Both design cases keep the notion of experience-focused HCI at the center of
their design process. In other words, neither of the design cases focuses on the task-
based, productivity and efficiency oriented aspects but employ 1) ‘pleasurable social
interactions’ in the first design case and 2) ‘creative communications’ in the second
design case, as their experiential aspects. In fact, the second design case is based
on supporting work practices but I aim to go beyond the productivity and efficiency
measures to elicit how creativity emerges in the collaborative processes of designers.
I also believe that these two differing situations can make my quest for supporting
experience-focused HCI much stronger. This is because, as mentioned before, the use
of experience-focused HCI is often seen in the domain of domestic, public and other
non-working social environments. In this thesis, using these two design cases, I show
that the experience-focused HCI perspective can be applied in work domains, too.
1.3.1 Research Approach
In the literature, there are two general approaches for studying experience and de-
signing technologies to support experience: 1) Reductionist and 2) Holistic. The re-
ductionist approach [238, 104] has its roots in cognitive psychology which attempts
to provide evaluative value to a product’s experience. This approach serves to com-
pare multiple designs, assess the value supported by a design or develop a theory and
criteria to support evaluation [130]. On the other hand, the holistic approach has an

6|Chapter 1
inspirational value. Holistic approaches used in [167, 82, 77, 76] are grounded in
either John Dewey’s [49] pragmatist philosophy or phenomenology and are qualita-
tive in nature. Holistic approaches conceptualize experience as a coherent whole and
attempt to view it in an irreducible totality.
In this thesis, I apply the holistic approach to supporting experience in awareness
systems. By using ethnographic methods, this thesis addresses the research question
(RQ) by understanding how we can design technology that fits within people’s exist-
ing social and physical contexts. This means designing awareness systems that not
only support the practices that people have developed in their routines over time,
but enhancing these practices by designing technology that overcomes the challenges
people may face.
1.3.1.1 A Qualitative Approach
My research follows a qualitative orientation to designing awareness systems. In both
of the design cases, I begin my investigation using ethnomethodologically-informed
ethnographic fieldwork to understand people’s behaviors, practices, shared under-
standing, and use of artefacts in their natural settings. I use these understandings for
developing ‘implications for design’ that are able to direct design. This way, my re-
search is completely empirically-driven. The ethnomethodological orientation is well
suited to a project such as this one, where the importance is not on validating frame-
works or theories by using observed phenomena, rather, the aim here is to highlight
emerging phenomena that can be further explored or re-used for designing technolo-
gies. The reason for selecting a qualitative approach as opposed to a quantitative
approach was to gain an understanding of what sort of processes people employ and
why they employ them, from their perspective, so that better design decisions can be
made. This is precisely the goal of ethnomethological orientation. Additionally, the
use of a qualitative approach can explain why particular processes are undertaken as
opposed to others. To analyze qualitative data, I use widely accepted methods such
as open coding [223] and affinity diagramming [110].
Qualitative approaches often run the risk of a lack of validation. I have taken this
fact into account and dealt with this in three ways. 1) I have discussed my findings
with several HCI experts during the course of my fieldwork in both the design cases.
In design case I, another researcher provided extensive support in collecting and ana-
lyzing our fieldwork data. In this case, we corroborated our findings and avoided any
individual biases. I also attempted to put my findings in comparison to the current
research to understand how and why my findings validate, extend, or refute existing
knowledge. 2) During my fieldwork, I tried to spend extensive time in the field to
reflect on my findings. In design case 1, I spent six months in the field, observing,
taking interviews with my subjects and using other techniques to gain an insight. Ad-
ditionally, in design case 1, I was focusing on an academic environment that I was
familiar with. Hence, this helped me in validating certain facts very easily. In design
case 2, I spent nearly eight months in different academic and professional design stu-
dios. To ‘get into the shoes’ of the designers, I took a couple of design courses and
became a resident design student for nearly a month. This gave me a lot of confidence
in my findings. 3) In both of the design cases, I have used triangulation to generate

Introduction |7
the results by employing a variety of methods and techniques. The majority of the
results came from contextual interviews and naturalistic observations. However, in
design case 1, a method inspired by the cultural probes study was used to get access
to my subjects’ inspirations, aspirations and experiences. On the other hand, in de-
sign case 2, during the trials of the prototype, I used the Repertory Grid Technique
(RGD) in combination of semi-structured interviews. More detailed descriptions will
be provided in the main chapters of my thesis.
1.3.1.2 The Process
In both of the design cases, a common process was used to design awareness systems.
This process can be described by the following six steps:
1) Study cooperative (work) practices
2) Find out ‘instances’ and interesting patterns of interaction
3) Develop ‘implications for design’
4) Create a design concept
5) Develop a working prototype
6) Trial the prototype in natural settings
These six steps make a full cycle for a complete design process. My investigation
starts from studying the everyday practices of my subjects in their natural environ-
ments. As mentioned earlier, I use ethnomethodological orientation to understand
how and why people do what they do, from their own perspective. I have used meth-
ods such as contextual interviews and naturalistic observation and in some cases used
cultural probe-like methods and video recorded sessions of subjects’ collaboration.
Next, the large amount of multi-modal data (pictures, videos, field notes) was ana-
lyzed using open coding and affinity diagramming. Here the intention was to find
specific patterns from subjects’ interactions that are used to support awareness. Next,
‘implications for design’ – a complimentary step for ethnomethodologically-informed
fieldwork, was generated. Here I sought to generate specific design features based
on the empirical evidence. Next, a set of conceptual designs were generated in the
form of sketches and other visual means. These conceptual designs were discussed
extensively with colleagues and experts to make a feasibility comparison and fine-
tune any specific design concept. Next, a final design concept was agreed upon and
a working prototype of that concept was developed. In both of the design cases, the
prototypes were intentionally made in such a way that they did not show a complete
or a final product. This was done mainly to support an iterative design process. Fi-
nally, working prototypes were put to the test by carrying out trials in the natural
settings of the subjects. The importance was given to the experience of using such
a prototype and not to ‘evaluating’ them. I do not attempt to fully evaluate these
prototypes mainly because, within the qualitative orientation, these prototypes were
designed using experience-focused HCI perspective and the experience of using such
prototypes is more central than the evaluation of how efficient and effective these
prototypes are.

8|Chapter 1
1.3.2 Research Context
This thesis contains several important facets that motivated me to carry out such
a research project. I see this research as a combination of 1) workplace studies, 2)
interaction design, 3) ubiquitous computing and 4) experience-focused HCI, as shown
in figure 1.1.
Figure 1.1: The four components of the thesis Designing for Awareness.
Designing awareness systems in workplace environments needs a thorough un-
derstanding of ‘how work is being carried out’ in the first place. In CSCW, workplace
studies have played a major role in informing the design of computing systems in
organizations [157]. In the context of this thesis, the workplace studies can provide
plenty of useful information about co-workers’ everyday routines, coordinative prac-
tices, their use of tools and artefacts and so on. Such an understanding of workplaces
can inform us what awareness information is needed, to whom this information is
conveyed and how, how awareness is maintained and, most importantly, how this
information can be used for designing awareness systems. Workplace studies can
elicit several complexities of work practices, especially when the notion of work is
becoming more mobile and ubiquitous.
The second component, interaction design, poses specific challenges to explore the
ways in which people can interact with awareness information. Hallnas and Redstrom
[97] define interaction design: “interaction design is designing the acts that define
intended use”. As some of the research on awareness (e.g. [106, 22]) has shown, co-
workers make each other aware of their individual activities and status information
through subtle and unobtrusive mechanisms. For designing technologies that can
support awareness, a lot of emphasis has to be put on the way co-workers will interact
with this awareness information and designing for awareness would mean designing
interaction to support awareness.
The third component, ubiquitous computing, conveys a technology push that goes
beyond the traditional desktop metaphors. Ever since Mark Weiser [264] coined the
term, ubiquitous computing, a large number of technologies have been developed

Introduction |9
to support people’s wide-ranging interactions with everyday objects. Inspired by the
notion of ubicomp (short for ubiquitous computing), my research has focused on de-
veloping awareness systems that go beyond the desktop and explored ways by which
technology can be physically and socially embedded into people’s practices. The two
awareness systems that I have developed and described in this thesis are both exam-
ples of ubicomp.
The fourth component, experience-focused HCI, which is at the core of this re-
search, delves into designing computing technology to support people’s wide-ranging
experiences. This perspective focuses not only on completing specific tasks with a
technology but takes a holistic view of how people experience a technology taking
emotional, pleasurable, playful and other ineffable aspects of using a technology into
account. I believe that since technology is becoming part of people’s everyday lives,
designers need to ground the design of their technologies in this broad range of peo-
ple’s experiences.
1.4 Contributions
There are three main contributions that can be relevant to the HCI community: 1)
Methodological, 2) Empirical and 3) Technological. I will describe these in the fol-
lowing.
The methodological contribution would show how one can design for awareness.
The two design cases in this thesis deal with two different kinds of situations where
the definition of awareness is different. In design case 1, I am interested in the
non-work, interpersonal awareness between co-workers in an academic department.
Whereas in design case 2, I focus on the collaborative practices of industrial designers
that could convey awareness of creative work. This is reflected in the methodological
focus of the two design cases. In design case 1, I use situatedness as a lens to under-
stand how non-work, interpersonal awareness is practiced. In this case, I take into
account the forms, activities, agents, places and contents of awareness. In design case
2, I use physicality [51] as a lens to understand how materiality of the design studio
culture plays a role in supporting awareness. I take into account the material aspects
such as the physical space, material design artefacts such as sketches, storyboards,
and physical models. More importantly, I show how, in these two different situations,
experience-focused HCI perspective can be applied.
The empirical contribution would provide new insights into collaborative prac-
tices, not studied extensively within the CSCW and HCI fields. Studying and designing
for awareness means taking into account the salient and implicit practices of individ-
uals. These practices may not be seen without a longitudinal exposure within the
field of work. In the thesis, I will use examples from the field that will illustrate how
such implicit and tacit practices are achieved by people. Additionally, this thesis will
provide an alternative view on work organizations. As in the first design case, I look
at the non-work, interpersonal and pleasurable practices of members in an academic
department. In the second design case, I will provide empirical evidence of physi-
cality of the design studio culture and show how designers’ practices are inherently
material in nature. A look into these aspects of work environments is not covered in

10 |Chapter 1
CSCW and HCI research, hence, this thesis will provide new empirical insights into
such aspects of work environments.
The technological contributions of this thesis is minor compared to its method-
ological and empirical contributions. However, from an interaction design point of
view the two technological prototypes that are described in this thesis show novel
interaction possibilities. Panorama, which is the prototype developed in design case
1, is a large screen display that plays user-generated images and texts messages and
system-generated live video streams in a continuous way using semi-artistic repre-
sentation. CAM, which is the prototype developed in design case 2, is basically a
combination of off-the-shelf tools that allows designers to store relevant information
onto their physical design artefacts. Our field trials of these prototypes showed that
the value of the technology was seen to be more important than the technology itself.
1.5 Thesis outline
Figure 1.2: The thesis outline.
As I have attempted to establish in the earlier part of this chapter, the goal of
this thesis is to explore how we, as HCI researchers, can apply an experience-focused
perspective for designing awareness systems. I aim to do this using two design cases,
where a complete design cycle is followed. The thesis is divided into four parts, and
will be described in the following. Figure 1.2 provides a high-level schema of the
structure of this thesis.
PART I: Background
In the first part, I attempt to lay a background for the thesis. I will review related
literature from theoretical, conceptual and technological standpoints. Chapter 2
provides a short account of awareness from the HCI and CSCW literature. Using
its original conceptualization, I will identify important characteristics of awareness.
Subsequently, I will also provide a view of awareness from an experience-focused HCI
perspective. In the second part of Chapter 2, I will review some well-known examples
of awareness systems, starting from Media Spaces to the current awareness systems.
In particular, I will not provide an exhaustive all-inclusive review, rather, I aim to cap-
ture the diversity in the conceptualization and implementation of awareness systems.

Introduction |11
Chapter 3 reviews some of the well-known theoretical frameworks to study group
activities and collaboration. Since, studying group activities is imperative for under-
standing awareness in a given situation, a review of the existing frameworks can be
very useful. I will review Activity Theory, Distributed Cognition, Grounded Theory,
Actor-Network-Theory and Ethnomethodology (EM). I will not attempt to make a
detailed comparative analysis of these frameworks.
The second and third parts will be about two cases, where, using an ethnographic
approach, I designed technologies to support awareness in two different workplace
scenarios: an academic department and a design studio.
PART II: Design Case 1 – Awareness in a Department
This part is dedicated to a case study of designing an awareness system in an aca-
demic department. Following the experience-focused HCI perspective, this case study
aims to support playfully-mediated social awareness in the department. The focus
here is not on the productive and task-based activities of the department, rather, the
importance is given on the casual, non-work and pleasurable interactions between
staff members. This case study is divided into two parts and will be described in the
form of two chapters.
Chapter 4 describes ethnomethodologically-informed fieldwork in the depart-
ment. Here, I will describe the interpersonal notion on awareness, the methods used
in the fieldwork and the detailed results of the fieldwork. I will particularly focus on
the awareness practices of staff members and describe the implications for designing
a new technology to support interpersonal awareness between staff members.
Chapter 5 shows the subsequent parts of design case 1. Here, I will describe the
prototype Panorama that was designed from results of the fieldwork in chapter 4.
I will show the design logic of Panorama and its representational aspects. Next, a
two-week long field trial of Panorama in the department will be described.
PART III: Design Case 2 – Awareness in Design Studios
This part is dedicated to a case study of designing an awareness system in the design
studio culture. In this I will describe design case 2, where I will be focusing on the
creative side of work practices. This will be done with the lens of physicality.
Chapter 6 will describe the longitudinal ethnomethodologically-informed field-
work in different academic and professional design studios. I will describe the meth-
ods used in the fieldwork and describe its results in the form of themes of collabora-
tion. As done in chapter 4, chapter 6 provides directions for designing an awareness
system in the form of implications for design.
Chapter 7 will show the subsequent parts of design case 2. Here, I will describe
the prototype CAM (Cooperative Artefact Memory) that was designed from results of
the fieldwork in chapter 6. I will show the design logic and the architecture of CAM.
Next, a set of field trials of CAM in a design studio is described. Here, I will show
how designers used CAM in supporting their ongoing design projects and focus on
the aspects that played a role in supporting design.

12 |Chapter 1
PART IV: Reflections
This part will provide a reflection on the work reported in the preceding parts of this
thesis. Chapter 8 provides a short discussion on awareness. I will summarize the
important aspects that came out of the two design cases. The last chapter, Chapter
9, will conclude this thesis with final words on the contribution, methodology and
future directions.

Part I
Background

2
Awareness and Awareness Systems
2.1 Introduction
The goal of this chapter is twofold. In the first part, I will provide a conceptualization
of ‘awareness’, as it has been discussed within the HCI and CSCW fields. From the
literature, I will extract the basic characteristics of the notion of awareness. Addition-
ally, I will provide my own understanding of awareness from an experience-focused
HCI perspective, that will be followed throughout this thesis. In the second part, I will
review some of the existing awareness systems. This will not be an exhaustive review
of awareness systems but I will describe a list of carefully selected awareness systems
that are distinct in their functionality, goal and interactions.
2.2 Awareness
Research in CSCW, in general, focuses on exploring how computing technology can
be designed to support people’s cooperative activities to accomplish their work more
efficiently and effectively [205]. Awareness is one of the central topics in the CSCW
research. While people go about carrying out their everyday activities, they maintain
awareness of things around them, which contributes to an understanding of what oth-
ers are doing, where they are and what they say. This understanding can help people
in making inferences regarding the intentions, actions or even emotions of others and
can provide a context for their shared activities and social interactions [163]. It is
believed that participants’ being aware of each other’s conduct and interaction has a
great importance for the design and development of technologies to support collabo-
rative work [106].
Schmidt [203] points out that the concept of awareness has provided a vehicle to
address the complex processes of organizational interaction that enable actors to sub-
tly and unobtrusively coordinate their actions and activities with each other. The sem-
inal ethnographic studies of the London Underground control room by Heath and Luff
[106] and air traffic control work by Lancaster University’s CSCW group [100, 116]
illustrated how actors ‘pick up’ cues, traces and signals about complex work related

16 |Chapter 2
activities from information rich environments and coordinate their ongoing joint ef-
forts. Early technologies to support awareness – such as media spaces [17] – have
often been specialized for mediating selective work related activities and relation-
ships, through computationally integrated audio-video links between geographically
dispersed co-workers [54, 85]. Here awareness is seen to be supported by facilitat-
ing informal chat and discussions between remotely located colleagues, providing an
idea of what is going on at the other end and supporting other social interactions in
an informal way. More recently, awareness technologies for work environments such
as @Work [235], Kandinsky system [75], Hermes [38], Elvin [71], Ambient Agoras
[224] have been developed to convey information about co-workers’ presence, their
on-going activities and their personalized messages. The scope of technology design
is broadening with the growing interest and need to support personally meaningful,
authentic, sociable and rich everyday experiences. The notion of mediated aware-
ness has also evolved from the objectively observable aspects encompassing informa-
tion about mainly the work-related and productive aspects of peripheral settings to
conveying subjective aspects such as love and intimacy [40, 134, 243], playfulness
[11, 81, 215] and other related issues.
In the context of collaborative work settings, the idea of awareness rests on the
participants abilities to remain sensitive to each other’s conduct while involved in their
distinct individual activities [108]. The real challenge here is, as Schmidt [203] points
out, to understand how co-workers effortlessly pick up these cues and signals about
what is going on around them and make practical sense of it. In order to design a
system that can support awareness amongst co-workers, we need to take into account
diverse coordinative practices through which cooperative work is routinely and seam-
lessly integrated. These coordinative practices differ from domain to domain. A firm
grounding into these practices, however, is essential to good technology design [157].
The words ‘abilities’ and ‘conduct’ are of a great importance to the understanding
of awareness. The word ‘abilities’ describes that there is more than one way people
can skillfully acquire knowledge about other people and their activities. And the word
‘conduct’ (which is meant in a plural sense) describes a large diversity of information
pertaining to people’s behaviors, activities and interactions that can be seen as impor-
tant for supporting cooperative activities. I shall get back to these terminologies in
the next section.
In the literature, there are two different ways awareness is conceptualized, re-
lating to two different scenarios. One, where concerned participants are co-located
and working towards achieving a common goal, for example in a control room or at
a cubical office space. And second, where participants are remotely located and are
attempting to collaborate via some kind of technological support (e.g. an audio-video
linked communication setup). These two scenarios require different treatments of the
term awareness. In the scenario of co-located settings, awareness is realized through
unobtrusive practices (such as, overhearing) through which cooperative activities are
somehow implicitly and unremarkably aligned and integrated into participants’ on-
going activities [106]. In the scenario of remotely-located settings, certain activities
are deliberately carried out (such as, typing an IM, or sending an SMS) that might
interrupt another participant’s flow of activities [173]. As Schmidt [203] remarks, the

Awareness and Awareness Systems |17
notion of awareness, in this sense, is being used in increasingly contradictory ways.
In my research, I am mainly looking at the co-located settings; hence, I conceptualize
awareness as an implicit skillful practice that is aligned into the everyday work of
participants.
2.2.1 Characteristics of Awareness
As Schmidt [202, 203] reported, there are several important characteristics of aware-
ness. I summarize some of these in the following points.
1. Awareness is implicit. Awareness is not a deliberate act that people perform to
find out, for example, where their colleagues are. It is also not a particular
mental state or a type of activity, rather, it is an integrated aspect of people’s
practice. As researchers, we can only access awareness indirectly, through the
analysis of space, mediators, and human conduct and culture [22]. In coordi-
native work scenarios, people become aware of each other’s acts implicitly and
without negotiation or other forms of focused interaction, that it is as if their dis-
tributed activities are ‘seamlessly’ integrated. As Heath and Luff [106] showed
in their London Underground control room study that co-workers’ ‘overhearing’
supported a kind of awareness between controller and divisional information
assistants which lets them coordinate and control their ongoing work.
2. Awareness is a skillful practice. Even though awareness is an implicit phe-
nomenon, it is not the product of passively acquired information. It is a class
of highly active and highly skilled practices. Actors scan for certain cues and
traces of the state of an ongoing work that could help them understand what
is happening and inform their future activities. It is an attribute of observable
action that is systematically accomplished during the course of actors’ everyday
activities. Actors apply skillful ways to design and produce actions to render
features of their conduct selectively available to others. These actions may be
intended for selected persons or for all the co-located people in general. The
ways in which individuals accomplish awareness is inextricably embedded in
the activities in which they are engaged, and the ways in which those activities
necessarily entail particular practices and procedures.
3. Awareness is about displaying and monitoring. The ways in which cues, traces
and indications of work-related activities are ‘displayed’ and ‘monitored’ are
central to awareness. In fact, displaying and monitoring are complementary
aspects of awareness. On the one hand, actors typically adjust and design their
own activities in such a way that their co-workers and other relevant personnel
are provided with cues, traces and other kinds of resources that may be relevant
for ongoing activities. This particular attribute of their practice can be called
‘displaying’. On the other hand, actors scan, observe, or listen to the activi-
ties of their colleagues to be able to determine the state, progress and direction
of ongoing activities. This aspect of their practices can be called ‘monitoring’
Displaying and monitoring are thus complementary aspects of the same coordi-
native practices.

18 |Chapter 2
4. Awareness is about ‘exploiting what is already there’. In supporting awareness
about their co-workers and the status of an ongoing work, actors try and gather
cues, traces and indications from established practices and the current state of
their ongoing work. They do not put extended effort into exploring awareness
related information, they try to infer from a giving status of the environment.
This way awareness is ‘ongoingly’ achieved in collaboration with others. Aware-
ness is awareness of actions and changes in the state of work (or any other
situation).
5. Work and workplace settings determine awareness. When engaged in a cooper-
ative effort, actors are objectively and materially interdependent. Their inter-
dependence inescapably has causal aspects, and their actions and interactions
are thus both intentional and material. The physical setting of a workplace and
the nature of a particular work afford as well as constrain awareness. Work-
place settings support awareness among a group of people via visual, audible
and movement-based cues. Heath and Luff [108] utilized the notion of ‘centers
of coordination’ (originally coined by Suchman [227]) to refer to specific work
settings (E.g. control rooms) that have particular characteristics which make it
necessary for individuals to ongoingly monitor each others’ conduct whilst en-
gaged in distinct but related activities. The nature of work itself also plays an
important role in supporting or hindering awareness. The work of architects, en-
gineers and designers would be represented externally in the form of artefacts
such as sketches, drawings and 3D models, whereas the work of accountants
and stockbrokers will be represented in the form of papers, excel sheets and in
other digital forms. As Schmidt and Wagner [207] points out these artefacts
play an important role in supporting awareness and coordination amongst a
group of co-workers.
2.2.2 Awareness: An experience-focused perspective
Some of the early examples of awareness systems focused on conveying instrumental
and productivity-oriented information such as co-workers’ presence [54, 181], activity
levels [187], their constant updates [235], availability [115] and privacy concerns
[180]. In fact, Gross and colleagues’ [94] comprehensive review on ‘awareness in
CSCW’ focuses on the very productivity and task-based issues of work environment.
So, how can we conceptualize awareness and awareness systems from an ‘experience-
focused HCI’ perspective?
I believe that from an experience-focused HCI perspective awareness should be
seen in a holistic sense and not limited to conveying utilitarian and practical infor-
mation. By this I propose to look at the non-instrumental activities and practices that
have ‘value’ for the overall experience in work environments. These non-instrumental
issues can be about pleasure, enjoyment, playfulness, creativity and so on depend-
ing on the situation and field of work. While designing awareness systems, we need
to take into account these non-instrumental aspects of people’s everyday lives in ad-
dition to utilitarian and instrumental aspects of work. Secondly, awareness should
not be seen in a pre-deterministic fashion. It should be seen as a situated prac-

Awareness and Awareness Systems |19
tice that may differ depending on the environment. Importantly, people should be
seen as entities that actively construct and maintain awareness information. Hence,
an awareness system should be seen only as a mediator for people to support their
awareness practices and not as the creator of awareness information. An awareness
system should facilitate interpretive and usage flexibilities. By interpretive flexibility,
I mean to suggest that an awareness system should leave room for people to interpret
the awareness information and not make decisions for them. By usage flexibility, I
mean to suggest that an awareness system should allow people to adapt the technol-
ogy to support their individual uses. Thirdly, to be able to collect information about
awareness activities, I believe that we need to develop the thick descriptions [86] of
people’s interactions with others, which should have detailed and rich description of
the overall context in which the interaction takes place. In particular, specific atten-
tion should be given to the situated practices of people. The essence of situated action
is that an experience is changed by the context in which it occurs.
This description on ‘experience-focused HCI’ to design awareness systems may not
be seen as canonical. User experience has several connotations and I have tried to use
my own understanding of user experience to design for awareness.
2.3 Awareness Systems
There has been a considerable amount of work done on developing technologies to
support awareness between co-workers, family members and even friends. Gross et
al. [94] and Rittenbruch and McEwan [193] have provided extensive commentaries
and reviews of different types of technologies that have been developed to support
awareness. I do not provide such an exhaustive review here. Instead, I have carefully
selected specific examples that should provide a glance into the diversity of aware-
ness systems. Within these examples, I will also provide an analysis of their focus on
the notion of awareness. Since, both of my design cases are related to workplaces,
my focus will be on the awareness-supporting technologies in work environments.
However, since my focus is on designing awareness systems from an ‘experience-
focused HCI’ perspective, I will also describe examples from non-work situations.
From these examples, a shift from usability and productivity-focused awareness sys-
tems to ‘experience-focused’ awareness systems should be recognized.
2.3.1 Media Spaces
Media spaces (figure 2.1) are a set of technologies that use audio and video channels
to connect distantly located sites and workplaces. The aim of media spaces is to pro-
vide an ‘always-on’ audio-video link between remote co-workers so that they can have
‘informal’ discussions and chats any time they want. Research into the media spaces
was motivated towards supporting informal communication between geographically
separated employees by providing an always-available view of their respective public
areas. The basic motivation here was to create a feeling in employees as if they were
all in the same area. Examples of such media space applications were seen in the form
of systems such as Portholes [54], RAVE [85] and Kasmer [17] at Xerox’s US and UK
laboratories; VideoWindow [69] and Cruiser [70] at Bellcore; Montage [232] at Sun

20 |Chapter 2
Figure 2.1: Examples of the Media space application developed at the Xerox PARC (Source:
[17]).
Microsystems, and CAVECAT system [161] at the University of Toronto, among other
media space applications. This raft of media space applications with different audio-
video communication setups suggests that visual access can provide for new forms of
interaction and increase sense of presence between remote sites, which may eventu-
ally lead to positive and productive outcomes. Although the notion of awareness was
not explicitly emphasized in earlier media space systems, the commentary of Bly et
al. [17] suggests that supporting peripheral awareness was the most important use of
media spaces.
The research in media spaces caught a lot of attention from the CSCW community
and different adaptations on the original concept were developed. For example, in
the RAVE [85] system each person was equipped with audio and video devices that
connected him or her to other offices and common areas. In this case, users could
select the area they wanted to have displayed on their monitor with a videophone
connection that could be initiated by one user to connect with another users. The
Montage [232] used the metaphor of hallway, where participants could navigate in
the virtual hallway and glance into other’s offices. This glance could provide a good
impression of whether the other participant was approachable or not. Participants
could also put signs at their doors to provide others an idea of their availability.
Researchers also pointed to several shortcomings of media space applications.
Heath, Luff and Sellen [107] argued that in many instances what was required of a
video link between spaces was not the talking heads communication link, that many of
the media spaces supported, but also access to objects of interest. The same argument
was also raised in Schmidt’s [203] critique on the awareness research. Another short-
coming was that media space applications afforded interactions and working practices
that were largely different from the natural and existing models of interaction and the
comparison between the two was very difficult. Most importantly, Sellen and Harper
[214] pointed out that media space applications were being deployed and assessed
within the context of research laboratories of hi-tech companies. These applications
were not deployed and assessed in actual everyday working environments.
Overall, the media space applications can be broadly considered as supporting in-
formal awareness between a set of remotely-located participants. Informal awareness
is the foundation for casual interaction, which in turn proves to be vital for support-

Awareness and Awareness Systems |21
ing ongoing collaboration. This informal awareness can contain information of work
colleagues, their presence, activity and availability.
2.3.2 TeamWorkStation
Figure 2.2: Setup of the TeamWorkStation 2. (Source: [126]).
One of the main criticisms of media space technologies was their lack of focus
on artefacts or objects of discussion between the remotely located participants. Team-
WorkStation (TWS) (figure 2.2) was one such application that particularly paid atten-
tion to supporting shared view on objects [126]. TWS belongs to a category of systems
that support collaborative physical tasks between distant co-workers. A collaborative
physical task involves two or more people working together on physical objects in
the real-world [78]. Different applications have been developed using such an ap-
proach to support collaborative drawing and sketching [179], bicycle repair [145],
product design [259] and so on. TWS supports collaborative drawing and sketching
and discussions related to them. Figure 2.2 shows a version of TWS where a shared
screen is used to represent the common artefact – a drawing sheet between the two
participants. This shared screen was supported by an additional video channel that
showed both participants’ faces and an audio channel to complement these modali-
ties to support synchronous communication. The key ideas of TWS were the overlay
of individual workspace images in a virtual shared workspace and the creation of a
shared drawing surface. TWS supports awareness through the image of hand and pen
movements of drawing partners that is overlaid with the image of shared drawing pa-
pers. Although the actual drawing sheet is only available to one of the participants,
the changes and annotations made on the sheet are equally visible to both the par-
ticipants. Importantly, a remote participant (with no direct access to the drawing
sheet) can point to specific portions of the drawing and make gestures and could also
make annotations in a way that would not affect the drawing sheet but can still com-
municate certain ideas to the participant on the other end. For the remotely-located
participants, the most valuable aspect of TWS’s setup was being able to do things
simultaneously.
One of the problems with TWS systems was that participants could not have a
seamless gaze contact. In fact, they had to decide either to look down at the drawing
sheet or to look at the computer screen to see the other participant’s face. This defi-

22 |Chapter 2
ciency was later remedied by systems called ClearBoard-1 and ClearBoard-2. Details
of the TWS and ClearBoard systems are described in detail in [126].
Overall, TWS (and other systems that focused on collaborative physical tasks)
played an important role in supporting real-time awareness of co-workers’ activities
where the collaboration was centered around physical objects.
2.3.3 Informative Art
The previous two examples of awareness systems focused on supporting real-time
and simultaneous awareness of co-workers activities by utilizing video and audio
channels. Here, I will describe an awareness system that uses artistic visualization
to support awareness. Informative Art (figure 2.3) is a set of artistic installations
situated in the common area of a research institute [190]. These displays represent
generic information related to the work organization such as email and web traffic,
bus timetable, weather information and so on in an artistic and abstract manner that
informs co-workers about the ‘global’ view of their institute. Figure 2.3 visualizes
email traffic of individual workers in the institute using the Mondrian compositions
as inspirations. The transformation from 2.3a and 2.3b shows the growth in the email
traffic. Each colored field represents the e-mail traffic for one person in the group.
The size of the square grows and shrinks with the aggregate amount of e-mail that a
person has sent and received during the last few days.
Figure 2.3: Situated informative art displays installations. The email and web traffic to and from
the organization is represented using a Mondrian composition. (b) shows the changes
from the beginning stage of (a) (Source: [190]).
The Informative Art installations are developed using Mark Weiser’s [264] notion
of Calm Computing. The idea here is to create such information presentations that
disappear into the background when they are not used and people should be able
to perceive a greater amount of information available from the environment without
overburdening their cognitive or other skills. Since, these displays visualize the cur-
rent situation and ongoing activities in the organization, it helps members to reflect

Awareness and Awareness Systems |23
on the environment. Unlike information that is visible (or ‘publicly available’ [106])
from the environment, communications by email exchange, web usage and so on are
invisible to most the members in a group. By presenting cues for such information,
the researchers here have aimed to complement the information that is already avail-
able. One of the advantages of using artistic and abstract representation to deal with
awareness was its support for privacy issues. Since the information presented on the
display has a global view about the environment and is presented using artistic pat-
terns, it does not raise privacy concerns among members. There are other examples
of such systems that use abstract representations to convey complex information for
supporting awareness and better cognition. Pedersen and Sokoler’s [181] AROMA is
one such example.
2.3.4 Hello.Wall
Figure 2.4: Display of the Hello.Wall system and a person interacting with it using a device called
Viewport. (Source: [225])
In line with the previous example, Hello.Wall (figure 2.4) is also an ambient
aw