Traces of Time through Space

Technology have long been a partner of workplace meeting facilitation. The recent outbreak of COVID-19 and the cautionary measures to reduce its spread have made it more prevalent than ever before in the form of online-meetings. In this paper, we recount our experiences during weekly meetings in three modalities: using SAGE2 - a collaborative sharing software designed for large displays - for co-located meetings, using a conventional projector for co-located meetings, and using the Zoom video-conferencing tool for distributed meetings. We view these meetings through the lens of effective meeting attributes and share ethnographic observations and attitudinal survey conducted in our research lab. We discuss patterns of content sharing, either sequential, parallel, or semi-parallel, and the potential advantages of creating complex canvases of content. We see how the SAGE2 tool affords parallel content sharing to create complex canvases, which represent queues of ideas and contributions (past, present, and future) using the space on a large display to suggest the progression of time through the meeting.

User-Centered Design of Distributed Meeting Environments: An Initial Study of Experienced and Naive Users

In our study, a basic science approach was used to explore the constructs that defined the design of a distributed meeting space from the user's perspective. Although there is a body of literature in the group communication domain, the research in this multidisciplinary area has paid minimal attention to users' environmental preferences in the design of a meeting space. Fifty participants, half with experience and half without experience in distributed meetings, used foam-core components to create a design of their ideal distributed meeting space. Fourteen themes emerged from content analysis of responses to the post-task interview. These themes addressed the rationale participants used when creating their designs. There was a significant positive relationship between the experience level and the following design themes: visibility of displays, status, team collaboration, VTC (video teleonferencing) needs, and auditory clarity. There was also a significant positive correlation among the occurrences of several design themes.