Computer-supported and face-to-face collaboration on design tasks

The issue of how people's discourse is affected by computer-supported collaborative work (CSCW) tools and shared workspaces was explored by examining collaboration on shared design tasks. Pairs of 28 less experienced and 28 more experienced engineering design students undertook a computer-assisted design task, either face-to-face (FtF) or remotely. The CSCW medium provided views of interlocutors' faces and upper body plus good quality audio links, in addition to a joint view of the drawing task space. Differences in communication due to expertise and media occurred, including higher rates of interruptions in CSCW dialogues. Analysis of verbal reference and gesture showed that the less experienced students showed more frequent use of gesture to accompany their verbal references and that this difference was particularly marked in the remote condition (in which they used on-screen cursor movements as a deictic gesture). These findings indicate that the affordances of the respective media interacted in subtle ways with the experience levels of the participants, with less experienced participants using gestures to build in extra redundancy to their referential utterances, and particularly so in the remote condition.