Awareness and Informal Communication in Smart Office Environments

Distributed teamwork gained significant importance within the last years. With team members collaborating from different locations, the role of workplace communication dramatically changed. Besides task-related communication, especially informal communication and awareness are important requirements for successful teamwork. While goal-oriented information exchange is widely supported by existing communication technologies, social communication is not.
Carsten Röcker presents a novel approach for promoting informal interactions and awareness within distributed project teams. The author starts by outlining the characteristics as well as problems of multi-site teamwork and identifies the communication requirements of distributed teams. Based on these requirements, specific design guidelines for multi-user awareness systems are defined. In order to validate the guidelines, different communication tools are developed and tested in several evaluations.
The author: born 1975, studies in electrical engineering and management at the Technical University of Darmstadt; from 2001 until 2006 research associate at the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Information and Publication Systems (IPSI) in Darmstadt; author and co-author of over 20 scientific publications in the areas of Ambient Intelligence and Intellectual Teamwork.