AmbiTeam: Providing Team Awareness Through Ambient Displays

Sarah Morrison-Smith, Jaime Ruiz, Lydia Chilton

Keywords: Collaboration, remote work, awareness, ambient display

TL;DR: We discuss AmbiTeam, which assists researchers experiencing the problem of perceived prioritization, and found that, despite shortcomings with activity tracking, AmbiTeam affects user's motivation as well as perceptions of their team's effort.

Abstract: Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, research is increasingly conducted remotely without the benefit of informal interactions that help maintain awareness of each collaborator's work progress. We developed AmbiTeam, an ambient display that shows activity related to the files of a team project, to help collaborations preserve a sense of the team's involvement while working remotely. We found that using AmbiTeam did have a quantifiable effect on researchers' perceptions of their collaborators' project prioritization. We also found that the use of the system motivated researchers to work on their collaborative projects. This effect is known as ``the motivational presences of others,'' one of the key challenges that make distance work difficult. We discuss how ambient displays can support remote collaborative work by recreating the motivational presence of others.

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