A9CunninghamStarbirdSmith

A9CunninghamStarbirdSmith

To-Do

please discuss / address the following issues:

1. enumerate, analyze, and discusses different "distances"
2. describe technologies for all the distances (existing ones, envisioned ones) which you identified in (1) which help to overcome and reduce these distances
3. does distance matter?
   1. yes? (under which circumstances)
   2. no? (under which circumstances)
4. describe one example based on your personal experience where distance and diversity was
   1. a positive experience
   2. a negative experience

Group Members

Kate Starbird, Dara Cunningham, Matt Smith

enumerate, analyze, and discusses different "distances"

The article, "Distances and Diversity: Sources for Social Creativity," describes distances related to collaborative design as being oriented: "(1) spatially (across physical distance), (2) temporally (across time), (3) technologically (between persons and artifacts), and (4) conceptually (across different communities)" (Fischer, 2005). An example of successful spatially oriented collaborative design is Open Source software, which is written by many users who don't know each other (Fischer, 2005). The temporal dimension of collaborative design refers to the practice of building on the work of others and long-term collaboration (over a period of many years). With the assistance of a domain oriented design environment (DODE), a designer can collaborate with technology rather than other people (Fischer, 1994). Conceptual distance in collaborative design can occur among Communities of Practice or among Communities of Interest, with more diversity occurring with Communities of Interest (Fischer, 2001).

describe technologies for all the distances (existing ones, envisioned ones) which you identified in (1) which help to overcome and reduce these distances

Spatial distances have become less of an issue over the past century thanks to the car and air transportation. In the future there will/has been work on air transportation that takes less time by traveling further into the atmosphere and at faster speeds. Another technology which has helped close the spatial distance for collaboration has been the web, it allows people from across the earth to communicate instantly. Google Docs and other communication / collaboration tools help bridge spatial distance, bringing together geographically dispersed minds for common creative causes. Video-conferencing and now 2nd Life conferencing are also attempts to bridge spatial distance for the creative work of meeting and planning various tasks.

Temporal distance has been effected in recent years by the internet because the spatial and technological distances have been shortened by it. It allows communication between different groups to collaborate faster and with more ease which in the past might have taken years to share the data between groups to collaborate on the same project. Technologies that aid documentation are vital for bridging temporal distances in software development. As the article states, future designers and programmers need to be aware of earlier decisions and rationale (as well as roads not taken) to continue to effectively evolve the system. Encouraging current programmers to document is a great idea, but that alone does not insure good documentation. Perhaps tools could be developed that allow programmers to more easily record decisions and rationale, with prompting and perhaps even audio-recording answers to system-generated questions.

The paper categories critiquing systems and DODEs as technologies meant to bridge technological distances. I also see end-user programming environments in this category. They give users the tools and the framework to (more easily) create new technologies and meet personalized computing needs. Technological distances have been shortened by the open source movement and the internet. It has allowed people to share products that in the past groups would not have had as fast access to.

Conceptual distances have been shortened thanks to the web because people are more able to gain an understanding of different cultures and environment. Diversity has become common in collaboration projects with people spanning from all over since the web has opened a door so that people of all different backgrounds can now interact and collaborate. Communities of Interest are heterogeneous groups, bringing together individuals with diverse backgrounds and skills. These groups often face conceptual distance issues. Domain-oriented technologies like the EDC encourage productive interaction of diverse stakeholders in a collaborative design task, attempting to both bridge and harness conceptual distance.

does distance matter?

With the new technologies being implemented and investigated today, distance is becoming less of a problem. Since the early 1990s, people have become more and more connected. As people become more connected, collaboration between multiple diverse cultures who have never been or have had difficulties in the past collaborating on assorted issues has become more common. The world is growing smaller as people find additional ways to communicate with each other and collaborate on new ideas and concepts. Distance does and does not matter still today. It does matter when it comes to social interaction and face-to-face collaboration, but it doesn't matter any more if the right tools are available and used to collaborate and share ideas.

describe one example (per group member) based on your personal experience where distance and diversity was

Dara: In this class and last semester's class, distance and diversity have been a positive experience. The groups I have worked were from differing Communities of Practice but shared Communities of Interest and have worked well together at a spatial distance, using Google Docs to collaborate on the same documents at the same time. I have had many bad experiences working with groups, either in person or a distance, where at least one group member was not participating at all in the process. Regardless of the distance or diversity involved, the crucial factors in any successful collaboration are motivation and a willingness to work with others.

Kate: Conceptual distance can often be a very positive experience. I have been working on a multi-person research project through the School of Education for four semesters. Coming from a technical background, my conceptual understanding of our research task has often differed greatly from that of other members of the group, predominantly researchers of education. However, these differences have enabled us to create a novel software application to qualitatively analyze our research data (200,000 mobile phone messages). Without extensive exposure to the rest of the group's concept of qualitative analysis, which was initially alien to me, I would not have been able to create the application and they would not have been able to easily and effectively analyze much of their data. Conceptual distance and its possibilities for spawning creativity are key features of inter-, multi-, and trans- disciplinary work.

Though I have not found conceptual distance to have a negative weight on my educational experiences, I have seen it have a severe negative influence in my athletic career. Athletic pursuits were qualified in the article as creative projects, and I feel that a discussion of conceptual distance on athletic teams isn't too far removed from conceptual distance in other types of work. Teamwork is crucial to team sport success, but is often tricky to forge when team members have severe language and cultural differences. At the college level, teams have time to forge bonds and work through cultural and conceptual differences, but at the professional level, where players come and go quickly, these differences can be huge stumbling blocks to team success. Conceptual differences in how different cultures define work ethic, sportsmanship, and showing off can have drastically negative consequences on team chemistry and subsequently, team success. They can also affect on-field or on-court interactions, as games are taught differently in different countries (and different universities) and the conceptual understanding of how people should move towards achieving in-game goals differs in different "systems".

Matt: One event that was a positive experience with distance and diversity has been working in my UID course this current semester. The members of our group do not live near each other and is difficult to find meeting times and places that everyone can meet to collaborate. So we have turned to google docs for collaborating and working together to create our presentations and reports. This technology has allowed us to communicate fast and creatively as to what information will be put into our reports allowing each member to contribute simultaneously. Each member of my group has come from a different diverse background as well so we each have our own views which we have been able to string together to form a collaboration of ideas and works.

My recent negative experience with distance has actually been working on this assignment. Our group collaborates on a google doc because we are all seperated by different distances. We collaborate before posting on the wiki and one google doc had been created last week, where another had been created last night. I ended up working on the document that was not being worked on by the other members of the group. I also had ended up working on one of the same questions that had already been elaborated on extensively, so then I had to do a combination of the two answers and work harder on answering some of the other questions. This just shows that the technologies that have made our lives easier for collaboration at a distance has also taken away part of the communication part of collaboration and sometimes poses problems such as this, even though things have all played out nicely.