Universal access to awareness information: using smart artefacts to mediate awareness in distributed teams

This paper presents a set of design recommendations for team awareness systems based on fundamental social and technical requirements. The work was motivated by recurring usability problems identified in evaluations of state-of-the-art awareness systems. Based on these findings, it is argued that the limited success of existing systems is mostly caused by conceptual shortcomings, which can be overcome by adhering to a set of design recommendations elaborated in this paper. To demonstrate the validity of this argumentation, the development and evaluation of an ambient awareness system is illustrated.