Table Of ContentMedia Space 20+ Years of Mediated Life
Computer Supported Cooperative Work
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Steve Harrison
Editor
Media Space 20 + Years
of Mediated Life
Editor
Steve Harrison
Virginia Tech
USA
Computer Supported Cooperative Work ISSN 1431-1496
ISBN: 978-1-84882-482-9 e-ISBN: 978-1-84882-483-6
DOI: 10.1007/978-1-84882-483-6
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2009922616
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Contents
1 An Introduction to Media Space.............................................................. 1
Steve Harrison
2 A Brief History of Media Space Research and Mediated Life .............. 9
Steve Harrison
3 Section 1: The Social Space ...................................................................... 17
Paul M. Aoki and John C. Tang
4 Creating Assemblies in Media Space: Recent Developments
in Enhancing Access to Workspaces........................................................ 27
Paul Luff, Hideaki Kuzuoka, Christian Heath,
Keiichi Yamazaki, and Jun Yamashita
5 From Media Spaces to Emplaced Media:
Digital Poster Boards and Community Connectedness ......................... 57
Elizabeth F. Churchill and Les Nelson
6 Social Catalysts for Creating Sociable Media Spaces ............................ 75
Karrie G. Karahalios
7 Privacy Factors in Video-Based Media Spaces ....................................... 97
Michael Boyle, Carman Neustaedter, and Saul Greenberg
8 Affect and Dyads: Confl ict Across Different
Technological Media ................................................................................. 123
Jamika D. Burge and Deborah Tatar
9 The Watcher and the Watched: Social Judgments
about Privacy in a Public Place ............................................................... 145
Batya Friedman, Peter H. Kahn Jr., Jennifer Hagman,
Rachel L. Severson, and Brian Gill
v
vi Contents
10 (Dis)connecting Cultures: The Diary of a Short
Lived Media Space .................................................................................. 177
Sara Bly and Steve Harrison
11 Section 2: The Space of Media Space .................................................... 199
Steve Harrison
12 Constructing Space ................................................................................. 205
Austin Henderson
13 Mediaspace – Meaningspace – Meetingspace ....................................... 217
Bill Buxton
14 Media Space, After 20 Years .................................................................. 233
Robert Stults
15 From Analog to Digital, from the Offi ce
to the Living Room: Why I Happily Worked
in a Media Space but Don’t Live in One ............................................... 261
N. Roussel
16 The Video Window: My Life with a Ludic System .............................. 269
William W. Gaver
17 Section 3: Communications .................................................................... 281
Steve Harrison
18 Bringing Media Spaces Back to the Streets:
Notes on the Interplay of Research on Media Space
and Mobile Communication................................................................... 287
Paul M. Aoki, Margaret H. Szymanski, and Allison Woodruff
19 Media Spaces and Mobile Video Telephony ......................................... 303
Kenton O’Hara, Alison Black, and Matthew Lipson
20 Media Spaces, Emergency Response and Palpable Technologies ....... 325
Margit Kristensen and Morten Kyng
21 Videoconferencing and Connected Rooms ........................................... 351
Austin Henderson and Lynne Henderson
22 The Halo B2B Studio .............................................................................. 357
Mark Gorzynski, Mike Derocher, and April Slayden Mitchell
Contents vii
23 Presence in Video-Mediated Interactions:
Case Studies at CSIRO ........................................................................... 369
Leila Alem
24 Build It: Will They Come? Media Spaces
in the support of Computational Science .............................................. 393
Brian Corrie and Todd Zimmerman
25 Section 4: Where Are We?
Refl ections on Media Space .................................................................... 415
Steve Harrison
26 Fast Forward: Applying Media Space Experiences
to Current Technologies ......................................................................... 417
John C. Tang
27 Refl ecting on Several Metaphors of MUD-Based Media Spaces ........ 425
Saul Greenberg, Gregor McEwan, and Michael Rounding
28 Making Contact ....................................................................................... 441
Austin Henderson
29 About the Authors ................................................................................... 443
Index ................................................................................................................. 461
Chapter 1
An Introduction to Media Space
Steve Harrison
In the mid-1980s, Bob Stults and I created the first media space at Xerox Palo Alto
Research Center (PARC). From our initial office-to-office always-on real-time audio
and video connections grew a switched network of continuous connections for a small
laboratory split between Palo Alto, California and Portland, Oregon. Offices and pub-
lic spaces had cameras, microphones, video monitors, and computers. Users were in
charge; they could turn their cameras or audio off, or focus cameras out of the window;
they could choose to connect to one person or another; however, the underlying connec-
tion was always there, with no setup, changeable with a click of a mouse button.
The images on the screens and the sound coming out of the speakers created
shared offices, put offices onto hallways that were, in fact, 500 miles away, and
“virtually” doubled the size of the common area for both the Portland and Palo
Alto groups. Colleagues shared informal interactions, formal lab meetings, quick
conversations, in-depth discussions, cross-site projects, and cross-site reporting
relationships. There were difficulties in maintaining the technology-mediated com-
munication, but the participants interacted regularly and continued to learn about
each other (Stults, 1986; Bly et al., 1993; Harrison et al., 1997).1
Other research labs followed, with both internal-only and multiple-site
configurations. EuroPARC in Cambridge (Gaver et al., 1992; Bellotti and Dourish,
1997), BellCore (Fish et al., 1990), US West in Denver (Bulick et al., 1989), Sun
Labs in Palo Alto, (Tang et al., 1994), and the University of Toronto (Mantei,
et al., 1991) all began experimenting with forms of real-time audio, video, and
computer connection that put people into extended working situations with one
another. These lab-based projects were quite different from one another in both
(often important) subtle and (sometimes unimportant) obvious ways. These media
spaces supported a sense of community, extended one-on-one close collabora-
tion, and teleconferencing. “Media space” brought the topics of awareness, gaze
S. Harrison
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
e-mail: [email protected]
1 Before the PARC Media Space, the artists’ collective, Mobile Image, created the Hole in Space
that suggested many of the social and para-social relations that were observed at PARC and the
follow-ons (Galloway and Rabinowitz, 1980).
S. Harrison (ed.), Media Space 20+ Years of Mediated Life, 1
Computer Supported Cooperative Work,
© Springer-Verlag London Limited 2009
2 S. Harrison
and attention, visual reciprocity, para-social relationships, control, notification,
echo-canceling, spatialized real-time audio, collaborative sketching, and, of course,
privacy to the research table (Gaver et al., 1993). Through these, media spaces
engendered Computer-Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW) research in desktop
video conferencing, shared drawing, e.g., VideoDraw (Tang and Minneman, 1990),
TeamWorsktation (Ishii, 1990) and Clearboard (Ishii and Kobayashi, 1992), aware-
ness servers, e.g., Portholes (Dourish and Bly, 1992), time-shifting technologies –
WhereWereWe (Minneman and Harrison, 1993), and even some aspects of MUDs
and MOOs – Jupiter (Curtis et al., 1995).
Since that time, technology has changed. Affordable real-time desktop confer-
encing is an everyday reality. However, these technological advances do not render
the experiments of the past irrelevant. While there is a large array of devices –
ubiquitous cell-phone cameras, web cams, iChat, architectural scale displays, the
Internet, and globalized work – there is still little understanding of how and when
to use them. By and large, our images of use are confined to procedures of calls
between people. We have yet to fully understand and exploit the power of context,
to design for space, task, and working relationships instead of short-term connec-
tions between (at most) talking heads. Space is explored in some connected system,
such as through virtual environments like Second Life, but these environments do
something different than media spaces. They literalize the shared spaces rather
than drawing on the power of the real. Early research lauded the unfettering effects
of virtual connectivity on feelings of freedom, for example, in MOOs or MUDs
(Curtis et al., 1995). More recent work explores the detailed relationship between
anonymity and experience (as in Bargh, 2002; Bargh et al., 2002). But the very
power of fantasy and projection that this research explores may be too much for
ordinary workplace interaction. Like Second Life, media spaces create spaces. Like
the phone, it can be used to convey targeted messages using targeted informational
tactics, both conscious and unconscious. But a media space is different. It cannot as
easily be tailored to exclude all non-intentional elements of interaction. The real can
be revealing, and, in that way, reassuring, and, furthermore, freeing. Connectivity
and trust are deeply aligned concepts. I believe that over the next 10 years, as we
have come to understand that connected space even better in the context of everyday
life, the implicit balance between the nature of the media space, connectivity, trust,
and the desired degree of risk taking in the environment will come to be more
explicitly modeled.
But these elements are all here implicitly – even if not always emphasized and
drawn out. Reflecting on past systems and experiences can help us understand what
the roles are in the systems of what is displayed, what is known about the other,
and the kinds of work done. They can help us think clearly about when and to what
extent systems should employ socially negotiated control instead of enforcing an
established policy. What is the meaning of “awareness,” “presence,” and “notifica-
tion” apart from the systems that we happen to have on hand today? How do the
current devices change our experience, and also, has our experience truly changed?
What should the devices of tomorrow look like?
