How Can Groupware Preserve our Coordination Skills? Designing for Direct Collaboration

Groupware systems often propose coordination protocols inspired from computer technologies. Such protocols are rigid compared to the subtle coordination hints and to the social rules used by humans. Protocols act as intermediate between users in the same way as command languages once did between users and tasks. We propose to reduce the role of those intermediates in what we call direct collaboration interfaces. We then explore design rules that support direct collaboration: media and activity integration, and interaction styles that support prosody and social hints. We finally describe an application to air traffic control.