CORDIS Archive

Developing a Reference Model for Networked Flexible Work through Industry Trials

David Leevers, CICC/RESOLV
VERS Associates, UK
http://www.vers.co.uk/dleevers.htm

Summary
Networked Collaboration in Industry
ACTS Project CICC
Telepresence and Collaborative workspaces
The Reference Model for Networked Collaboration
The Cycle of Collaboration
Fractal Communications
The Cycle of Information
People and Information Finder
The Hyperbola of Synchronization
The Parameter of Trust
Using the Reference Model
Design Guidelines for Collaborative workspaces
Conclusions
References

Summary

As the many different technologies supporting multimedia communications, telepresence and Virtual Reality reach maturity they merge into a seamless enhancement of local reality. This chapter describes a proposed framework for developing services for networked flexible work within the context of this enhanced reality.

The PC started as a clerical tool but is rapidly transforming into a persistent portal to the universal information ecosystem and to the networked global community. Research in Human Computer Interaction is shifting from ergonomic and perceptual issues to more fundamental cognitive processes. Our thoughts are not locked to the PC in the way that our hand and eyes are so developing future applications will require a much deeper appreciation of social behavior and the human lifecycle.

A number of EC research projects over the last decade have been working towards a reference model for describing a new symbiosis between the emerging global community and the emerging global network. This model includes a complementary "Cycle of Collaboration" and "Cycle of Information" that are linked through a "People and Information Finder", that relates the way both people and information are found both locally and across the network.

One of most recent of the EC projects, CICC, has included components of this reference model in a number of trials and explored their viability in workplace studies before and during the trials.

The ultimate objective of this is no longer telepresence at one other place or even shared virtual presence within an information structure. It is to enhance the reality of the local community with those aspects of remote people and places that encourage collaboration, equity, fulfilment and quality of life.

Networked Collaboration in Industry

About 15 years ago researchers in the UK construction and cable making company BICC were inspired by the book "Architect or Bee" by Mike Cooley to explore how the full capabilities of shop floor staff could be tapped through the use of networked PCs. A primary objective was achieve a paradigm shift from process centred to "Human Centred" thinking.

Early work concentrated on networking the workplace. Then EC RACE project DIMUN (1988-91) explored the potential benefits of voice, data and video communications between all types of staff in distributed manufacturing enterprises. The objective was to explore whether the early network technologies could help a distributed organisation to be as effective as a co-located one. A multimedia communications prototype demonstrated how sales staff in one country, designers in another and shop floor workers in a third could hold meetings in a networked virtual environment that included video views and shared whiteboard. In this simulation the network was confined to a single site and distance was simulated by locating staff of different nationalities in separate rooms.

This exercise demonstrated that multimedia communications had more potential for supporting the informal grapevine than the formal channels up and down the hierarchy. Since most informal communication remains undocumented whereas formal messages are well-defined and often contractual this new equity of infrastructure implied a dramatic shift of power. Indeed a decade later there are numerous examples of devolved responsibility with staff having all relevant information at their fingertips.

The organisational structure was also studied. It was suggested that only those on the direct manufacturing value chain needed the full power of instant broadband two-way communications. Those in management and strategic functions work on longer time-scales in which mature judgement dominates. Thus as technology improved the balance of traffic could be expected to shift away from the management level much faster than had been expected. This has been shown over the subsequent 10 years; astronomic growth in web access by everyone contrasted with slow growth in the boardroom video conference, and the video game requiring far more processor power than the executive e-mail processor.

The DIMUN multimedia communications interface included perhaps the first visualisation of a Virtual Meeting Room. This presented the many network services in terms of their real world metaphors. For instance video was seen through the virtual room’s real window and copying was achieved by dragging documents on to the image of a copier. Although very useful during the start-up phase of a networked meeting the meeting room image tended to be hidden by the ubiquitous whiteboard as soon as participants got down to serious work.

As a user gains experience each explicit metaphor sinks down into the subconscious and becomes a new personal reality. In some cases metaphor reversal can take place. Many people do not realise that cutting and pasting requires scissors and glue and one of the missing scenes from the movie "9 to 5" showed Jane Fonda, on her first day at work, placing the trash can on top of the desk because that is where she had seen it on her home Macintosh.

ACTS Project CICC

In ACTS project CICC, Collaborative Integrated Communications for Construction, we explored the potential for networked collaboration between the many different types of participant in construction projects. Since this was done before many of the applications were robust enough to be used in project critical situations individual components were explored in trials that ranged from a huge construction project to a two-person shared virtual environment. The key trials are outlined below:

Global Virtual Factory, 6 factories

This was the earliest and also the most advanced trial in that it implemented most parts of the reference model. It was a self-contained demonstration that suspended disbelief amongst potential users for the half-hour required to understand the "CICC Vision". It was of great importance in helping to specify the more down to earth pilots and showing how they related to each other. The strategic objective was to encourage staff in 6 cable making plants across 4 countries to think of their own factory as just part of much larger virtual factory and hence view members of the other factories as colleagues not competitors.

The factory demonstration included many components of the People and Information Finder; a standard home page layout, conferences with live video and participation from the shop floor, a virtual reality reference factory and photographic tours of real factories. It was possible to switch between key positions, such as the annealing furnaces, in the reference factory and any of the real factories. Understanding the context of other people’s workplaces was an important step towards seeing things from their point of view and hence opening the door to positive collaboration.

Figure 4: Home page of a Factory Member

Shared Virtual Environment

The research laboratories of BT and Telefonica were linked by an 8MB/s multimedia communications channel so that people at each end could inhabit the same Virtual Reality office or construction site. This was both the most literal interpretation of a shared virtual environment and also the most disappointing. Avatars that represented other people in a standard anonymous office did nothing to lower social barriers and filled screen space that could have held more relevant material. Seeing the avatars within, say, a visualisation of the completed building was also confusing, perhaps because collaboration is more effective when everyone can share exactly the same view, figure 4. The fact that two people cannot stand in the same place and that nearby people hid part of the view are two of the disadvantages of the real world that can actually be avoided in virtual reality.

Bluewater Shopping Centre, over 100 enterprises

E-mail and bulletin boards were added to the proven Hummingbird document database and the complete system was used by hundreds of individuals over the 3 year life of this very large retail development. The effectiveness of the basic Hummingbird system prepared the minds of this group for brief demonstrations of the many prototype services that were tried out at the site. These included video conferences, desktop video, awareness indicators, photographic ‘walkarounds’ of the site, public web page showing live video from a surveillance camera and a networked screen saver that paged through the latest site photos, giving staff in remote offices a strong feeling of identity with the project.

Ove Arup Intranet, 15 countries

A "People and Information Finder" of home and team pages was set up by one of the CICC partners, Arup Communications. Within a few months, 30 groups across 15 countries had copied the approach. This achieved a dramatic but unquantifiable improvement in competitiveness, primarily because it became very much easier to find relevant people when preparing bids.

EuroProject People and Information Finder, client and consultant

The trial was implemented as a conventional web site that held all the designs and supporting information about company projects such as building the marina at Expo98. It provided an effective link between the headquarters of the EuroProject consultancy in Barcelona and the construction site in Lisbon. It was innovative in two respects

1. the client had direct access to the design and testing data
2. the same web interface was used to access people, documents, structured information and live video from the site

CICC Team People and Information Finder

This was a public web site that included CICC format home pages for members of the research team. These included video glances and screen glances and links to about half a dozen nearest neighbours, i.e. the people they had most contact with. The glances could be arranged in groups to form a virtual open plan office or placed across the top of the screen to simulate sitting on the other side of a table during a meeting. By reducing the update rate to once every 30 seconds (except when people were actively communicating) and making the screen glances so small that text could not be read the approach was felt to be no more intrusive than being seen in an open plan office. Figure 6 shows the screen configuration during a networked meeting.

Stanford University Centre for Integrated Facilities Engineering, student team design exercises

Each design team included 4 people distributed across the campus and sometimes at another university. They worked together for 3 months on complete exercises using NetMeeting and some other collaboration tools that had been developed in-house. Meetings were logged on video so that much of the ethnographic analysis of using the mixture of local and networked communication could be carried out afterwards.

Augmented Reality, shared artefacts

This trial comprised a series of demonstrations carried out during development of this registration and tracking software. This provided feedback during the software development process. . It was clear that Augmented Reality is a powerful tool for lowering communications barriers between the sector and outsiders. As well as being of immediate support to project staff, AR can help clients and neighbours appreciate the appearance and implications of a building before and during construction. In the longer term AR technologies will provide a way of using wearable computers to access the database for all relevant information about what is being looked at on the construction site.

Overall, CICC has given us a very clear vision of how the construction work practices could become more flexible and which collaborative tools are most relevant. In particular it indicated which aspects of lean manufacturing could be transferred to construction as soon as mobiles and wearable computers become as ubiquitous as PCs are in the factory.

Since the construction sector includes virtually all aspect of working life this is proving a useful starting point for identifying the range of collaboration tools required to enhance reality for the rest of us.

Telepresence and

Collaborative workspaces CICC was just one of a group of EC ACTS projects known as the "Telepresence and Collaborative workspaces" chain. These projects have been exploring the scope for enhancing the real with the telepresent and the virtual in a number of different settings. The services explored are the most complex and integrated implementations of the four key communications modes;

1. One to One - rapport and fact transfer, supported by the telephone and e-mail
2. One to Many - dissemination, supported by the broadcasting technologies
3. Many to One - information retrieval, supported by the data communications
4. Small Group - collaborative, supported by the audio and video conferences

The low level infrastructures for the four modes in these projects were an ad-hoc mixture of copper, glass fibre and radio and they are likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. However there is a true convergence at the user interface, primarily in the Web browser. Before the appearance of the browser the four modes were separate industries, each having its own distinct and part time interface to the individual; perhaps 1 hour per day in front of the PC screen, 2 hours on the telephone, 3 hours in front of the television set and an occasional one hour video conference session.

The Web browser is a suitable starting point for developing a mature, persistent and ubiquitous interface that supports all four modes. This persistence turns the interface into more than a link between individual and computer. It becomes something of immense significance; a universal "Community-Network Interface" that is a new social glue linking all of networked humanity.

The Reference Model for Networked Collaboration

This framework evolved in the light of experience in the CICC pilots described above. It includes the following components:

1. Cycle of Collaboration, CyColl
2. Cycle of Information
3. People and Information Finder, PIF
4. Hyperbola of Synchronisation

The Cycle of Collaboration is a representation of the many aspects of moving between private and collaborative activities, the Cycle of Information covers the components of the information environment that support collaboration, and the People and Information Finder links the two. The Hyperbola of Synchronisation demonstrates one facet of the CyColl; the collaboration process between two people.

The Cycle of Collaboration

The Cycle of Collaboration provides a temporal framework for the different communications modes, both locally and across the network. By focusing on the most likely transitions from one mode to another this cycle indicates how the diversity and richness of collaborative activities can be mapped on to the variety of new voice, data and video services .

The stages of the cycle; Territory, Map, Landscape, Room, Table and Theatre, describe a paradigmatic route through different communications modes. Each stage can be made up of any combination of digital and natural components.

Figure 5: The Cycle of Collaboration

Territory

Territory is the non-communicating stage, when the individual is safely inside their personal fortress of home or workplace. Every workplace has some area within which the individual’s tasks are performed: the wall the bricklayer has been asked to build or the office where a paper is written. It is usual for others to respect this area and avoid interruption unless invited. At home this territory is that quiet corner where ideas are formulated and plans are made.

There is an equivalent mental territory, that part of the unconscious mind that reviews what we have recently learnt and adjusts personal reality to fit in with new experiences. This process includes rehearsing the implications of new ideas, perhaps in dreams or in play. However there are usually unanswered questions and it is the need to resolve them that drives us forward into the next stage, the Map.

Map

The Map is any stable representation that is effectively a signpost to more up-to-date but not necessarily reliable information. When we start to venture out from the security of our own Territory we are not immediately ready to confront and question others. The Map might be the morning paper, Yellow Pages, web pages or database - anything that provides a reliable starting point for addressing the real challenges of the day. These challenges are clarified in the Landscape.

Landscape

As issues become clearer it becomes necessary to track down the most up-to-date information. This is carried out in a physical or virtual Landscape made up of people together with the documents and databases that they are actively working on. The physical Landscape is an open-plan office where actions are visible, conversations are overheard and it is easy to ask advice or glance at public documents. The networked version can be a shared virtual environment in which remote people are represented as avatars and information as icons in a perhaps perspective abstract landscape. When two or three members of a networked team get into conversation video from their webcams might be embedded in the virtual landscape, thus supporting the casual and continually changing conversational clusters that are one of the main justifications for team offices.

Room

Contentious or unresolved issues require more privacy and more concentration than is possible in the public open plan Landscape. The ambience of the Room supports building rapport and trust before starting the meeting proper. It is where first impressions are made and the real or metaphoric handshake takes place. If participants have not met before it is often an impressive reception area rather than the meeting room itself. A comparable impact is achieved across the network by using a high quality video link.

The solid walls and closed door of a real room convey privacy and encourage the occupants to share confidences. There is a need for an equivalent privacy for the networked meeting. As yet there are no good examples, plain virtual walls look meaningless on the screen and they get hidden by foreground material such as the video windows of participants faces. The high quality video windows have to remain on the screen until the group has established mutual trust and orientation. Then they feel confident enough to look down at the shared Table and make do with webcam video glances.

Table

The Table is the space where the shared objects (common artefacts) required for collaboration are displayed and manipulated. In real life the "Table" could be the desktop, building site or factory. On the network it is a shared window or whiteboard. Each person also needs a private area, their real life notebook or a private part of their own screen.

In the CICC factory prototype the Virtual Table has occupied the lower part of the computer screen. Above the Table were a pair of views, video glance and a screen glance for each of the participants. These miniatures serve the same function as looking across a real table to see what the others are doing. As in real life, the miniatures are not clear enough to read text but they do indicate the extent to which the others are focusing on the shared task. These views are important in maintaining rapport and trust, even when their occupant is not contributing to the conversation.

Figure 6: Networked meeting with 5 members and 2 active participants

The Table is a very rich area for current design work. There are many other features that should be supported in a production system, including the ability to momentarily zoom in on one video view and to call on an outer group of people who are on standby, ready to participate when their expertise is required. As the networked flexible work functions have clarified and PCs have reached adequate speed so these features have started to appear in commercial shared virtual environment systems such as NetMeeting, BT’s Presence, Blaxxun, etc.

Theatre

The Theatre is that place where the results of collaborative activities are conveyed to others. A meeting is only of value if the results are eventually accepted by the relevant audience; customers, colleagues or students. In project work the theatre metaphor applies to any material that conveys results to a wider audience; minutes of meetings, a project database, multimedia presentations, giving instructions to staff at the start of the day.

Communication in the Landscape or around the Table is informal, sometimes barely structured, often using the abbreviated or specialist language of a group who know and understand each other well, sometimes dependent as much on body language as on speech. When we talk to the outside world, however, we have to create a performance. We have to choose our language so that it is understood by the audience. We need to emphasise and reinforce some points, and compress or discard others. We need to set the scene. We need to choreograph the relationship of words and pictures. We need presence; we need timing; and we need to handle the particularity of applause and the anonymity of booing.

More than that, we need to create an atmosphere of community and of trust in the audience. We may have to convey difficult concepts or unwelcome truths. So, in behavioural terms, we need to weld a disparate collection of individuals into a single resonant group.

An effective performance changes the way the audience will think in future. The performance can be said to have killed the previous personality and given birth to a perhaps wiser one. This is one reason for the rituals of trust associated with going to the theatre; checking reviews before buying a ticket, studying the mood of others in the foyer and being aware of their presence during the performance. The loss of these rituals on the early Internet was one reason for scepticism about the quality of the information found on it.

TV has taken over many of the functions of the physical theatre while adding the new element of a global shared experience. What it cannot do is re-create the atmosphere of excitement and the sense of togetherness experienced by an audience when they share the real physical space of an auditorium. It is to be hoped that the interactive two-way features of digital television will restore this feeling of being part of a vast and responsive audience.

Fractal Communications

The Cycle of Collaboration can be seen as reflecting daily life: waking at home, setting off using a map, actively browsing the office landscape in the morning, negotiating over the midday meal and collaborating in the hazy glow of the afternoon, then taking a seat in the theatre as the sun sets to surrender the mind to the persuasive powers of playwright and actor, finally going home with new ideas teeming inside the head, ideas that will have slightly altered us when we wake up next morning.

Similarly the cycle can be seen to represent our journey through life: emerging from the home of the womb, spending a few months in a map of clarifying sensations, then learning from the social Landscape of other children and adults. Adolescence is spent working towards a rapport with the rest of society in a Room of continually changing personalities. Then the individual settles down to more focused activities at the Table of career and family. Finally the respect of the community is gained and cultural lessons are passed on to the next generation in the Theatre of grandparents stories.

Participants in a particular meeting will individually go through a complete cycle in reacting to what someone has said and then presenting a response. Thus the CyColl can be applied to an enormous range of time-scales from the formulation and presentation of a single statement to the lifecycle of a civilisation. The longer cycles include many levels of smaller cycles, each belonging to particular individuals or group.

The Cycle of Information

The Cycle of Information includes four distinct information sources:

Figure 7: Knowledge Management

• Information in People’s Heads

When this information is emotionally neutral and trust has been established a direct question can be asked. However the more important the information the less likely it is to be neutral. Extracting such information from inside another person’s head can then become an enormously ingenious exercise which is highly dependent on the degree of understanding and commitment between the two. The other person is no longer an information source but a collaborator, as indicated in the downward arrow on the left of the diagram.

• Information in Documents

. Both paper and electronic documents are included. These are raw unstructured facts that have yet to be logically related to each other in the database.

• Structured Database

. A database includes a vast amount of information in a structured but not necessarily convenient form. It can be difficult to link its structure to the subtleties of the real world. Object orientation has improved flexibility and made it easier to insert these links as they are discovered.

• Physical Reality

. Much of the information inside our heads comes from the physical world. After passing through the document and database stages, this value-added information returns to the physical world as new and rearranged objects. Individuals’ responses to the new physical reality starts a new iteration . This cyclic process is particularly clear at the construction site and on the factory shop floor where people are continually responding to what they see happening around themselves.

People and Information Finder

Information in any of the stages of the Cycle of Information is reached using a wide range of tools. It is becoming increasingly clear that the quality and compatibility of these tools has a dominant effect on the success of a project. As this is recognised the role of Knowledge Manager is expected to clarify. The PIF implementations in CICC included the following components:

Home Pages

A person’s Home Page includes awareness of their position in the organisation and their availability. In its most direct form this includes a small video window and a miniature of the persons PC screen that are updated every 30 seconds. Having some idea of what they are doing makes it easier for others to choose the right time to interrupt them, as in an open-plan office. Pointers to the half dozen organisational "nearest neighbours" are included on the home page

Task View

. This is the primary common artefact for supporting a particular collaborative activity. In construction and manufacturing this is usually a fixed image rather than anything dynamic. A top-level Task View or project chart is an important component of any group activity. If it captures the essential structure of a project it helps to bring new team members up to speed. A classic example is the London Transport Underground map, the common artefact for every member of the London commuting community. In construction a visualisations of the current state of the project is often used.

Augmented Reality

. The real world is a grossly under-utilised source of information. Far more of this information could be used if it was logically linked with the database. This is the promise of wearable Augmented Reality, not only is the project model registered with what can be seen on the site but the visualisations can support hyperlinks to related information that can be shown on the see-through head-mounted display.

Directories

. Directories are well established in both paper and electronic filing systems. A remarkable step towards universal compatibility has been taken recently in presenting web documents in the same format as those on the local hard disc. The next step may be to extend this common format to objects in the physical world of the workplace and the mental worlds of colleagues minds - a cultural impertinence that deserves considerable debate!

Search Agents

. These are one of the newcomers. Every time someone makes their way through the PIF to reach some nugget of information they leave a record of their pattern of work and recent requirements. The search agent can use this information, together with many other types of analysis, to provide faster ways of getting to information and more convenient ways of displaying it - the perfect mind-reading personal assistant.

The Hyperbola of Synchronization

The hyperbola brings out the way in which rapport and trust is built up as the messages between two people become shorter and more frequent and they converge on a real or virtual discussion space. Early exchanges take longest, letters, e-mails, telephone calls intercepted by an assistant. As common ground is established, the messages get shorter, more codified and more intense until sufficient rapport and trust has been established for sharing valuable information, collaborative problem solving and joint decision-making. Eventually the result of the combined contributions is captured in some way, perhaps as an agreed document or a diagram, and the meeting can be said to have achieved its objective.

If much of this process takes place across the network then the relevant services need to offer appropriate bandwidth and latency characteristics at each stage, not everything all the time, and support seamless transfers from one mode to another.

The Hyperbola of Synchronisation is a particular illustration of moving round the Cycle of Collaboration from the Map via the Landscape and Room to the Table until one member goes off to present results in the Theatre. As such it is closely related to the process of building trust.

Figure 8: Hyperbola of Synchronisation

The Parameter of Trust

Collaboration, and even civilised competition, requires trust. Trust is a surprisingly objective parameter. People are comfortable with weighing the degree of trust against the opportunity for gain when playing anything from a game of poker to the stock market. Trust is primarily an ability to predict to a certain distance into the future. For a member of the family this trust time-scale is measured in decades, close friends in years - and Internet day-traders in minutes.

The quality of the technology has an immense impact on trust. The style of an e-mail does not reveal much but a home page gives away an immense amount. Home pages were used in the CICC trials to speed the process of getting to know other people. By insisting on cross linking to other peoples home pages via "nearest neighbours" the work specific informal network of communications was made more visible and hence supported trust building.

A number of future web enhancements will provide better support for building trust. These include an awareness of who is browsing a page now and in the recent past, where the master information is located, and meta-information capturing the equivalent of the wear, tear and annotations seen on conventional documents. If Fermat had been reading a web page at the time there would have been no last theorem!

High quality video of the other people appears to be of great help in building trust (the Room stage of the CyColl) but in other stages it is not important. People prefer information about the subject of discussion once they are instep cognitively.

Using the Reference Model

The Cycle of Collaboration reflects the way people alternate between individual and collaborative activities. It is complemented by the Cycle of Information that shows how these activities interact with the surroundings. The two cycles are linked through the People and Information Finder. The complete model promises to be a starting point for co-ordinating the many functions offered by future information appliances and wearables.

Several years ago 3D collaborative workspaces showed great promise as a way of simulating the affordances required for collaboration in the real world. However they have proved disappointing. Commercial services such as Blaxxun have confined the 3D world to just one of several windows. The CyColl diagram indicates that the 3D virtual environment could be a suitable "Landscape" for meeting others casually but that it might not be appropriate for other stages in he collaboration process.

The two-way high quality video link is most relevant to the process of building trust and rapport. Work cannot start until trust is built but real work requires a shared workspace, the Table, and an effective language channel (voice or text) but only requires video if trust is fragile. Thus the services that have blossomed have been shared whiteboards and video glances whereas video conferencing has been confined to the board room, an environment where the very subject of the meeting is often the trustworthiness of an individual. High quality video is needed simply to pick up every nuance of body and face language.

In manufacturing and construction there is a vast range of communications configurations: people in different places, of different status, some on the shop floor or the construction site, many engineers constantly driving from site to site. Thus planning a communications infrastructure requires the integration of a vast repertoire of different services, mobile, VR, Video, Webs and so on. It is not possible to draw on laboratory HCI for guidance on how they will work together over the lifetime of a project. The reference model provides a framework for relating new services and transitions between them to our natural behaviour in the real world.

Design Guidelines for Collaborative workspaces

At a more down to earth level CICC and the other ACTS project making up the Telepresence and Shared Virtual Environment chain are helping to identify a number of "Enhanced Reality Design Guidelines", e.g.

1. Treat the virtual environment as a window within the real world, not an alternative to the real world. (immersive VR is most relevant to game and simulation applications).
2. Recognise that humans have a predator brain structure which uses stereo vision to focus on the prey rather than 360 degree vision to detect other predators. We only feel secure enough to think constructively when the action is taking place in front of us. This is why any group, not just Arthur’s knights of the round table, tend to form a circle, and why bigger groups that have to sit in rows need a chairperson. This also indicates that the screen is usually better matched to our cognitive abilities than the immersive headset or CAVE.
3. Recognise the power of humans to establish rapport and trust across any sort of communication link provided it is two-way and has predictable performance. The handshake, the shared meal and the golf game are all real world examples. A shared visualisation is not required to establish rapport across the network. Latency is not a big issue providing it is predictable. It simply determines the rate at which trust builds, a few seconds in the case of a handshake, several days for e-mail exchanges.
4. Recognise that collaboration, and even competition, requires that all parties see the subject from a shared point of view as well as from their private specialist points of view. Once this can be achieved, conflict of personalities and values usually dissipates into clarification of facts rather than arguments over fundamentals. This may explain the difficulty of placing participants in 3D collaborative workspaces: their virtual bodies would have to intertwine in order to see the same view on the screen (people do not enjoy the experience of walking through other bodies, even when they are virtual). Perhaps this is why the British House of Commons is a disastrous model for achieving consensus, participants are forced into a confrontational paradigm, seeing diametrically opposite views of their surroundings - and shared whiteboards are forbidden.
5. Recognise that individuals need to share two distinct spaces; a "mind space" in which they interact with others, and a "problem space" in which they see the common artefacts. This problem space is often a 2D electronic whiteboard but it might be a shared 3D visualisation of a future building. A shared virtual environment that combine the two may raise more problems than it solves.
6. Recognise that the hands and body need to feel as comfortable as the eyes, ears and mouth. The immediate touch environment of chairs, tables, and interfaces such as the steering wheel simulator and motorbike seat, need to be realistic for the experience to be satisfying.

Conclusions

Manufacturing could only break away from the stultifying framework of the assembly line after a Post-Fordist vision had been formulated. Perhaps now is the time to formulate a "Post-PC" vision of a Post-Information Society: a Global Networked Society that is a human-centred culture fully supported by information appliances in the surroundings and wearable computers on the body.

A complete parallel mental is not what we want. Because the mind is embodied there is no way that we can, like Alice, step through the looking glass of the PC screen and take our complete identity into cyberspace. We will always remain firmly attached to the sensory panorama of our immediate physical and social surroundings, but the new technology will add magic to these surroundings for everybody, not just for the few emperors who could afford the people intensive luxuries of the past. Wizards and intelligent agents will be everywhere, supporting every co-emperor of the Global Networked Society.

Eventually support for networked flexible work will become so effective that the process of physical travel could become as socially unacceptable as many other aspects of stone age life; the abattoir hides the killing of the lambs that we eat, the water closet hides human waste and naked bodies are covered with clothes. However not all travel is unpleasant; a small amount of pleasure travel can be expected to outlast the industrial age just as small amount of pleasure nudity has outlasted the stone age.

This chapter has discussed a reference model for flexible work that offers a framework for integrating the wide range of emerging technologies to achieve an enhanced reality that includes tele- and virtual additions to the local environment. However a greater understanding of how the embodied minds of humans find fulfilment is required so that what is delivered by information appliances and wearables can be effectively interleaved into our whole lives, not just the working day.

References

References and more complete coverage of the material in this chapter can be found at
http://www.vers.co.uk/dleevers.htm.

The CICC workplace studies are described in

Perry M, Fruchter R, Rosenberg D (1999): Co-ordinating Distributed Knowledge: a Study into the Use of an Organisational Memory, in Cognition,Technology and Work, ISSN1435-5558

The next section of this document: Support Services for Business Process Oriented Telework. The COBIP Project