The Model offers an analysis of communication and collaboration in the workplace, including physical, virtual and hybrid work environments, also including the theoretical base for explaining how people accomplish the common ground, that is, shared knowledge and beliefs, and mutual understanding, through interaction.
The Model is intended for use in research that can be applied in interaction design, including human-computer interfaces in the real-life workplace.
It can be used as an articulation methodology for workplace design as it shows how to analyse different kinds of communicative situations (co-located or not, synchronous or not) to identify their potential and constraints in supporting and enabling joint work activities.
It has provided the basis for the development of configuration methodology that incorporates issues of space and technology as resources in the form of shared artefacts and shared representations that help focus joint activities.
With respect to people identifying a hierarchy similar to that in the spatial domain is not directly possible. Here the related concept of communication is offering a solution. It is assumed that all knowledge work (the declared focus of the SANE project) is meant to be communicated in some way sometime to someone.
The motivation and objective of the Human Environment model was to increase the knowledge of how people achieve mutual understanding in communication and to improve understanding of interactions in the workplace from the human environment perspective in order to design sustainable workplaces that support communication in physical, mediated and hybrid environments.
For the Human Environment we need a modelling technique that can link and separate at the same time the static and dynamic aspects of the workplace by shifting the focus on either the static or the dynamic elements of the environment. More specifically, the model should be able, by following an analytical approach, to focus on the dynamics of the interactions and the communication across co-located or non co-located environments in synchronous and asynchronous spaces. Nonetheless, when the model is following a structural approach, it should be able to focus on the static aspects of the semantics of people, places, processes and technologies of the context of the communication.
The Human Environment Model captures every case of communicative interaction by providing a dynamic representation of how two distinct categories of communication frames (human agents and resource mediators) link to form communication pathways across co-located or non co-located environments in synchronous and asynchronous spaces.
In addition the Human Environment Framework describes the theoretical basis underpinning the dynamic relationships between the communication frames by displaying the Common Ground as a continuum extending across different types of communicative temporal and spatial locations.
The Human Environment Model captures every case of communicative interaction by providing a dynamic representation of how two distinct categories of communication frames (human agents and resource mediators) link to form communication pathways across co-located or non co-located environments in synchronous and asynchronous spaces.
In addition the Human Environment Framework describes the theoretical basis underpinning the dynamic relationships between the communication frames by displaying the Common Ground as a continuum extending across different types of communicative temporal and spatial locations.
The innovative potential of the Human Environment Model is that, as previously explained, it is a dynamic representation of how two distinct categories of communication frames (human agents and resource mediators) link to form communication pathways across co-located or non co-located environments in synchronous and asynchronous spaces. The model, thus, unlike static representations, allows us to change the frames according to the specific communicative circumstances.
More information on the Sane project can be found at: http://www.saneproject.com