Designing to support situation awareness across distances: an example from a scientific collaboratory

Abstract

When collaborating individuals rely on situation awareness (the gathering, incorporation and utilization of environmental information) to help them combine their unique knowledge and skills and achieve their goals. When collaborating across distances, situation awareness is mediated by technology. There are few guidelines to help system analysts design systems or applications that support the creation and maintenance of situation awareness for teams or groups. We propose a framework to guide design decisions to enhance computer-mediated situation awareness during scientific research collaboration. The foundation for this framework is previous research in situation awareness and virtual reality, combined with our analysis of interviews and observations of collaborating scientists. The framework suggests that situation awareness is comprised of contextual, task and process, and socio-emotional information. Research in virtual reality systems suggests control, sensory, distraction and realism attributes of technology contribute to a sense of presence (Witmer & Singer, 1998). We suggest that consideration of these attributes with respect to contextual, task and process, and socio-emotional information provides insights to guide design decisions. We used the framework when designing a scientific collaboratory system. Results from a controlled experimental evaluation of the collaboratory system help illustrate the framework's utility.

Is it really better to share? Distributed situation awareness and its implications for collaborative system design

“…Notwithstanding this, and well over two decades of scientific investigation, SA remains a highly contentious topic; for example, comprehensive reviews of SA theory (Salmon et al 2008a) and measures (Salmon et al 2006) indicate that significant issues require resolution. Of most relevance given the complexity of modern day socio-technical systems and the increasing presence of teams (Fiore et al 2003) are the limitations of existing models and measures when applied to teamwork (Artman and Garbis 1998, Sonnenwald et al 2004, Shu and Furuta 2005, Gorman et al 2006, Patrick et al 2006, Salmon et al 2006, 2008a, Siemieniuch and Sinclair 2006, Stanton et al 2009). …”

Evaluation of a Scientific Collaboratory System: Investigating Utility before Deployment

“…However, are all system features, including multiple communication channels, synchronous task execution and haptics, equally important for situation awareness? In other work (Sonnenwald, et al, 2004) we begin to explore these issues proposing that contextual, task and process, and socio-emotional information is needed to create and maintain situation awareness when performing tasks collaboratively across distances. We further suggest that when designing collaboratory systems, control, sensory, distraction and realism attributes of technology should be considered with respect to their ability to facilitate access to these types of information.…”

“…The collaboratory version of the nM was designed based on results of an ethnographic study from which we developed an understanding of scientific collaborative work practices, the role of an nM as a scientific instrument, and scientists' expectations regarding technology to support scientific collaborations across distances (Sonnenwald, Bergquist, Maglaughlin, Kupstas-Soo & Whitton, 2001;Sonnenwald, 2003;Sonnenwald, Whitton & Maglaughlin, 2004).…”

On the Collaboration Support in Information Retrieval

“…Several works [66,116] have highlighted the bene t of leveraging collaborators' complementarity to enhance the collaborative e ectiveness. With the purpose of structuring the collaborative search session, users' complementarity could be modeled through roles [66].…”