GROUP'99 - Tutorial
Sunday, November 14, 1999

The following tutorial is offered at GROUP'99. There is a registration fee to attend the tutorial which includes lunch and refreshments.

Working through Collaboration:
A Framework for Designing Technology Support

John L. Bennett
Independent Consultant,USA
jbennett@acm.org

and

John Karat
IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, USA
jkarat@us.ibm.com

Origin: A highly-rated CSCW 98 tutorial

Goals and content: As we design computing technologies to support collaboration face to face and at a distance, it is important to have a basic understanding of what makes collaboration work. This tutorial focuses on:

• distinctions among types of collaboration,
• the roles of conversations in establishing and maintaining collaboration;
• the importance of partnership in successful collaboration, and
• the role of culture in supporting collaboration.

Examples of software support using a commercial product (Lotus Notes/Domino) and the World Wide Web will illustrate strengths and weaknesses of existing systems. We will illustrate points drawn from a SIGCHI papers review process and from a longitudinal study of a customer service group.

This tutorial evolved from a highly successful series of international tutorials. We engage participants in lively interactive exercises and discussions. These bring out participant experience that illustrates and supplements the tutorial notes we distribute.

After completing the tutorial, attendees should be able to formulate plans for designing, evaluating, installing, and bringing into practice technological support for collaboration.

Intended audience: Anyone interested in gaining new insights on fundamentals relating to collaboration, in seeing how collaboration can be facilitated to achieve desired results, and in considering the role of emerging technologies in support for collaboration.

About the instructors: John Bennett specializes in work with design teams developing systems that support effective human-computer interaction. While at IBM Research he served as an IBM Research Staff Member, project leader, manager, and consultant to development divisions. At several ACM SIGCHI annual conferences he taught (with people from Digital Equipment Corporation) tutorials on "Usability Engineering" and on "Contextual Inquiry" methods. He collaborated in producing the book Bringing Design to Software, edited by Terry Winograd. He contributed "Building relationships for technology transfer" to the feature articles in the September, 1996, Communications of the ACM.

John Karat's current research is focused on improving the design process for usable systems. He is a member of the ACM SIGCHI Advisory Board, is the United States representative to IFIP TC 13 (Human-Computer Interaction) and a member of the Board of Directors of the Federation on Computing in the United States (FOCUS). He and John Bennett co-presented tutorials at CSCW94, CSCW96, and ECSCW97. He has been an instructor for the University of Michigan Summer Schools in Human-Computer Interaction since 1996. He organized workshops at CHI'91, CHI'94 and CSCW92, and built on the results of the CHI'91 workshop to produce an edited book outlining the area (Taking Software Design Seriously: Practical techniques for human-computer interaction design).