Dix, A. (1995). Cooperation without (reliable) communication: Interfaces for mobile applications. Distributed System Engineering, 3(2):171–181. [url]

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The author reviews in this article some factors that make mobile devices less functional, for collaborative purposes, than stationary equivalents.

The aurthor uses a nice visual representation for the CSCW framework (figure 2), explaining what are the relationships between participants and artifacts in a face-to-face cooperative working situation. If the participants are cooperating, then we might expect that their direct communication is about and makes reference to the artefacts on which they are working. In F2F working, these references are very rich.

In remote communication it is often the relationship between communication and action which is lost. Often explicit means are introduced to help. The author refers to ‘group pointers’ as an arrow that can be picked up by one of the participants and then displayed on all the screens.

Annotations supports this link between action and communication in asynchronous applications. The author refers to systems as Quilt (Leland et al., 1988) and Prep (Neuwirth et al., 1992).

Feedthrough (figure 3) is the term that the author uses to define the feedback that is offered when one of the participants act on the artifacts and this action is then visible to the other participant(s). Feedthrough can be seen as a form of communication through the artefact. Feedthrough is usually slower than general feedback, however the author cautions that when these two are too out of step a problem of deictic reference might occur.

Tags: Computer Supported Collaborative Work, human communication, human computer interaction