Observing Collaboration: Group-Centered Design
Saul Greenberg · The MIT Press eBooks · 2007
It is the late 1980s. Along with a other technologists, I was just getting interested in the new discipline of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), where my focus was on how geographically distributed groups could work together in real time over a shared visual workspace. In that era, groupware design was mostly by the seat of our pants; what we built was often a consequence of balancing our intuitions about the collaborative process against technical considerations. John Tang’s PhD dissertation (Tang, 1989) and his various derivative publications (e.g., Tang, 1991) changed my view of groupware design, as it introduced the notion of ‘group-centered ’ design. 2 John, who was interning at Xerox PARC, was interested in technical support for small design groups. Instead of just building technology, he decided to observe, describe, and quantify how small groups actually worked together on conceptual design tasks when interacting over shared visual work surfaces such as a whiteboard or table. His approach was strongly influenced and supported by the