Physicality in Distributed Design Collaboration

Geographically distributed design teams face barriers to effective collaboration that current communication technologies have difficulty mediating. We have found several key aspects, or building blocks, of effective, physically collocated interaction, which include: the exclusive physical presence of individual participants within the team workspace; the explicit and implicit body language signals that they exchange; and the ability to point to, and act upon, artifacts in a context that is shared with teammates. These provide the social and contextual clues that contribute to free-flowing, creative exchanges. However, when teams are distributed, they lose many, if not all, of these capacities. To re-establish them, we are introducing expressive, tele-operated robotic avatars into designers’ workflows to provide a physical and social presence for distant team members. Our explorations going forward focus on employing physical avatars when design activity is most physical or tangible: during conceptual development, which occurs largely before ideas can be articulated with precision, and during prototype development, which generally occurs after a verbal or written exchange of ideas.