Regulating Prominence: A Design Pattern for Co-located Collaboration

Co-located people do things individually while participating in collaboration. It is, however, difficult for designers to foresee what they will do individually and what they will do jointly. Participants therefore need to be able to move any information object between private and public states, but that is cumbersome to do with objects confined to a traditional PC-based workstation. This paper describes a design pattern, which addresses the problem. Designers can resolve it by making a platform where users can regulate how prominent they want to make information for themselves and others. The pattern is based on field studies and design work in three different settings where desirable use qualities were identified, categorized and translated into forces in a design pattern. Conflicts between forces were noted as problems, and solutions were sought to establish a pattern. A multiple-device platform was finally derived from the pattern to provide an example of how it can be realized. It is concluded that use qualities from a qualitative analysis of technology usage can provide the empirical basis for a design pattern. This fits well with several traditions within HCI and CSCW such as ethnographically informed design, scenario-based design, and design space analysis.