Raja Gumienny

Tele-Board: Enabling efficient collaboration in digital design spaces

Remote collaboration among geographically dispersed team members has become standard practice for many companies and research teams. A number of computer supported collaborative work systems exist, but there still lacks acceptable support for teams working in creative settings, where traditionally numerous physical and analog tools are used. We have created an environment for teams applying creative methods that allows them to work together efficiently across distances, without having to change their working modes. We present the Tele-Board system, which combines video conferencing with a synchronous transparent whiteboard overlay. This setup enables regionally separated team members to simultaneously manipulate artifacts while seeing each others gestures and facial expressions. Our systems flexible architecture maximizes hardware independence by supporting a diverse selection of input devices.

Supporting creative collaboration in globally distributed companies

Creative ways of working with whiteboards and sticky notes are growing in popularity even in global companies. However, digital tools for enabling these ways of working, especially for geographically distributed teams, have still not been adopted in these companies. We present Tele-Board, a web-based digital whiteboard and sticky note system and describe how it was used in a large company at three locations. From system log data and interviews recorded after three months of use, we found that idea generation and feedback collection can be facilitated if a system offers real-time synchronous editing as well as asynchronous input. Interestingly, the users who were not located at the companys headquarters regarded the tool as very beneficial and used it more than their colleagues at the headquarters. We provide a detailed analysis of the study and important points for fostering the adoption of creative tools in large companies.

Tele-Board: Follow the Traces of Your Design Process History

Introducing digital tools to creative work settings is challenging; capturing creative work and conveying design ideas to absent team-members is even harder. In this article we show a new way of saving and presenting creative work data that enables users to browse through past design activities. We extended our existing Tele-Board system – previously intended for real-time design work at different locations – with functionalities for time-delayed interaction. The “Tele-Board history browser” is a web-based user interface offering functionality to go back and forth in the timeline of a whiteboard. Additionally, it is possible to view the whiteboard’s usage statistics to gain insights on creative work. With our tool we can support design teams in fulfilling their common tasks more efficiently in dispersed teams and we can also assist design researchers to understand how designers work in an all-digital setting.

Tele-Board: Enabling Efficient Collaboration In Digital Design Spaces Across Time and Distance

Design Thinking is an approach for innovative problem solving. A typical characteristic of this approach involves multidisciplinary teams and the extensive use of tangible tools such as sticky notes, whiteboards and all kinds of prototyping materials. When team members try to collaborate from separate locations their traditional way of working becomes nearly impossible. A number of computer supported collaborative work systems exist, but there still lacks acceptable support for teams applying methods like Design Thinking. We have created an environment that allows these teams to work together efficiently across distances, without having to change their working modes. The Tele-Board prototype combines video conferencing with a synchronized whiteboard transparent overlay. This unique setup enables regionally separated team members to simultaneously manipulate artifacts while seeing each other s gestures and facial expressions. Our system s flexible architecture maximizes hardware independence by supporting a diverse selection of input devices. User feedback has confirmed that the Tele-Board system is a good basis to further enable collaborative creativity across distances while retaining the essential feeling of working together.

Towards cross-platform collaboration - Transferring real-time groupware to the browser

Mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets play an increasing role in todays working environment. The variety of computer platforms increased in the same way, which makes the development of cross-platform applications even more challenging. Tele-Board is a real-time remote collaboration system based on the Java programming language. Therefore, it cannot be run on most mobile devices. In order to overcome this limitation, we redeveloped the system on the basis of HTML5 technology. We present an approach for combining web based networking and rendering in a single application for real-time collaboration based on SVG, HTML5 Canvas, Websockets, and Web workers. In our prototype we implemented optimization mechanisms leveraging the Canvas APIs rendering flexibility. This way, our canvas based rendering performs better than a respective SVG version. Moreover, our solution integrates server communication effectively so that the rendering performance is hardly influenced by user input.

Tele-Board in Use: Applying a Digital Whiteboard System in Different Situations and Setups

Tele-Board is a digital whiteboard system that helps creative teams working together over geographical and temporal distances. The nature of Tele-Board’s synchronized setup allows every connected partner from anywhere in the world to join in the action. Tele-Board is rooted in traditional metaphors, which are easy to implement and come naturally to the user. Additionally, it is possible to follow a common thread in the development of ideas from their inception to conclusion. With the History Browser, the path of creative development can be retraced, reiterated and resumed – from any point in time – a huge benefit in ordering work and reaching conclusions. In this article, we report on several situations and setups in which Tele-Board was used by different teams. We demonstrate how our software suite can be used with various hardware setups and show how well the tools work in practical application. Furthermore, we illustrate Tele-Board use by globally distributed student teams, in remote test settings, during a sustainability conference, and by teams who are primarily used to traditional whiteboards and pen and paper.

Supporting the synthesis of information in design teams

User-centered designers often seek to synthesize data from user research into insights and a shared point of view among team members. This paper explores the synthesis process and opportunities for providing computational support. First, we present interviews with novice and expert designers on the common practices and challenges of syn-thesis. Based on these interviews, we developed digital whiteboard software support for sorting individual seg-ments of user research. The system separates out individual and group activity and helps the team externalize and syn-thesize their different views of the data. Through a case study, we explore two computer-supported approaches: a structured condition that externalizes the different perspec-tives on the data of each team member and an unstructured condition that allows each member to organize data into clusters. Novice designers tended to prefer the structured synthesis process, while more experienced designers pre-ferred to freely arrange information segments and create clusters on their own. We provide implications for design education and support tools for user research synthesis.

Handwriting recognition for a digital whiteboard collaboration platform

The research presented in this paper addresses challenges at the intersection of two disciplines: web based collaboration using digital whiteboards and handwriting recognition. The main focus is on the handwriting recognition in order to enable asynchronous usage of the whiteboard content beyond the existing web portal. We present a way to analyze unstructured whiteboard content including drawings, sketches and handwritten text. Our approach uses a recursive extension of the DBSCAN algorithm in order to transfer smaller portions of content to the recognition engine and achieve an appropriate spatial clustering of the content. The adjustment of the configuration parameters, as well as the development of a break condition for the recursion, are shown in detail. We show that it is possible to use an online handwriting recognition engine with offline data and still achieve meaningful results. The presented architecture on the one hand, and the combination of online and offline recognition on the other, ease asynchronous modes of interaction using digital whiteboards.

Simulating Additional Area on Tele-Board’s Large Shared Display

Digital whiteboard systems can simulate an infinite amount of surface area on a single display; however the hardware’s limited size necessitates supplementary virtual tools to navigate the area. In what ways does this less convenient setup hinder established collaborative workflows? Participants in our pilot study were asked to synthesize data on either a traditional whiteboard setup with multiple touch displays or a single display that had to be navigated virtually. Results show that working under the restrictions of a single display required slightly more time, yet workflows could continue. Users accepted the visual restriction as a condition of working with a digital system. Team members were also impelled to work more closely together, which both helped and hurt collaboration.

COLLABORATECOM SPECIAL ISSUE ANALYZING DISTRIBUTED WHITEBOARD INTERACTIONS

We present the digital whiteboard system Tele-Board, which automatically captures all interactions made on the all-digital whiteboard and thus offers possibilities for a fast interpretation of usage characteristics. Analyzing team work at whiteboards is a time-consuming and error-prone process if manual interpretation techniques are applied. In a case study, we demonstrate how to conduct and analyze whiteboard experiments with the help of our system. The study investigates the role of video compared to an audio-only connection for distributed work settings. With the simplified analysis of communication data, we can prove that the video teams were more active than the audio teams and the distribution of whiteboard interaction between team members was more balanced. This way, an automatic analysis can not only support manual observations and codings, but also give insights that cannot be achieved with other systems. Beyond the overall view on one sessions focusing on key figures, it is also possible to find...