Peripheral Tools to Support Collaboration: Probing to Design Collaboration Through Role-Playing

Peripheral devices like smart phones offer an opportunity to lower the barrier to spontaneous collection and sharing of information during distributed collaboration. We have completed development of guidelines and a framework that focuses on peripheral devices in collaboration. In order to explore the design space generated by our principles, we conducted a role-playing experiment about commissioning a building, in which an “on-site” team and a “design” team were expected to find and resolve discrepancies between requirements, design documents, and the actual site. The teams were given Styrofoam panels to act as pretend smart peripherals to invoke play and help probe the design space. We found that “reflection on action” (debriefing and subsequent brainstorming) was fruitful for ideation and theorem building about interaction, but “reflection in action” failed. Yet, reflection in action, particularly with such probes, is important to capture the “mechanics of collaboration”. Therefore, we are considering adapting improvisational theatre to our study of distributed collaboration