Designing For Awareness Promotion In Complex, Distributed Collaborative Activities
Open Access
- Author:
- Yu, Bo
- Graduate Program:
- Information Sciences and Technology
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- November 15, 2012
- Committee Members:
- Guoray Cai, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Guoray Cai, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Alan Maceachren, Committee Member
Mary Beth Rosson, Committee Member
Xiaolong Zhang, Committee Member - Keywords:
- CSCW
Collaboration
Activity Awareness
Dependency
Event-based Systems - Abstract:
- Maintaining awareness is central to effective collaboration. Existing awareness solutions work for relatively simple and well-defined collaboration in traditional workspace envi- ronments, but they become less flexible or lack of scalability when applied to distributed, collaborative activities that are characterized by higher level of complexity, such as emer- gency response. The overall objective of this study is to address the major challenges of awareness support in these complex, distributed collaborative activities. By following the design science paradigm, we first developed an integrated conceptual model to understand unique requirements for awareness support when the complexity of collaboration is scaled up. Built on top of the conceptual model, we then proposed the awareness promotion framework, emphasizing the active role of computer to me- diate awareness processes based on a formal knowledge representation of collaborative activities. Following the computational framework, we developed the prototype system, EDAP, and performed an in-depth case study in emergency response to demonstrate its feasibility and utility. This study has made two major contributions towards the research objective. Firstly, it provides an integrated conceptual model on top of several interrelated constructs, i.e. activity, local scope, and dependency, to understand the distributed nature of the aware- ness phenomena. The model is able to account for how the awareness is distributed across multiple team members through the integration of individual cognitive processes and team processes. Secondly, it presents a computational framework for awareness pro- motion. Comparing with existing awareness support systems, our awareness promotion approach emphasizes the active role of computer to mediate awareness processes among multiple team members. It utilizes a formal knowledge representation of collaborative activities to dynamically model collaborative activities and offload some of the repre- sentation and reasoning efforts from the human to the computer so as to handle the increased level of complexity in distributed collaborative activities.