The COMIC Project was a three year initiative on Computer Supported Cooperative Work funded by the European Commission. The COMIC project began in September 1992 and ran until August 1995. During this time the project gathered together CSCW researchers from twelve institutions spread across nine European countries. In line with the multi-disciplinary nature of CSCW these researchers came from many different backgrounds and traditions and each of them sought to contribute to the broad set of issues and problems that constitute CSCW.
To reflect the diversity and pluralism of the participants and the nature of the subject area itself the project from the outset interpreted and examined CSCW from a broad perspective. Much of the motivation for bringing together the different researchers involved in the project was to further define and crystallise the field of CSCW itself and what each of the different contributions brought to the subject area. These ambitions were reflected in the overall aims set at the outset of the project.
As this broad objective reflects, from the outset the intent of the project was to consider the fundamental nature of CSCW and the lessons needed to allow future developers of cooperative systems to construct systems that better support the nature of work. Potential contributions to these lessons could be drawn from existing theoretical perspectives on the nature of work and organisations, empirical studies of work, the design of information systems and the nature of software systems to name but a few. While seeking to bring these different areas of work together, the problems inherent in combining radically different views were also recognised at the outset. A strategic decision was taken that different views and perspectives would be brought together in the practical development of CSCW systems rather than attempting an abstract theoretical or methodological synthesis of techniques or approaches. The explicit recognition of pluralism was reflected in the decision to adopt a constructional philosophy to the project as stated in its initial description.
From the outset the COMIC project focused on a collection of well defined and bounded areas of work rather than a grand synthesis of approaches. In other words, rather than proposing some abstract integrative principles, points of integration between approaches and methods were allowed to emerge as a consequence of the research itself. In this deliverable we wish to outline the nature of the project in more detail and highlight the particular points of integration that have emerged during the project's lifetime.
The COMIC consortium has brought together researchers from a broad spectrum of research traditions. These traditions reflected both technical, organisational and human issues in the development of cooperative systems. To each member of the community of researchers constituting the COMIC project, both the nature of research and the product of research vary tremendously. For example, for those from a software development tradition the construction of a software artefact constitutes a research result. For those from a background based on organisational theory the refinement of a theory to model or explain different aspects of work represents a research result. An equally valid research result for those from an ethnographic tradition is a rich description of the work taking place within an organisation.
In this section we wish to briefly outline some of the research traditions and backgrounds that have contributed to the COMIC research project. The intent of examining these different traditions is to outline the particular perspectives the researchers brought to the project. In outline, the following areas contributed to the work of the COMIC project:
This characterisation of the results expected from the COMIC project is key to understanding the nature of integration across the project. Given that it was never the intention of the project to develop a single product or theory it is no surprise that integration is not evident in the production of a single theory, concept or set of software. Rather, the project has produced a collection of contributions to the CSCW community. The set of contributions emerging from the project have attempted to clarify the problems and lay the ground work for a more thoroughgoing integration of CSCW approaches and techniques as these may emerge in the future. Integration in the COMIC project takes place in practice through the production of a number of research results. The concerted application of research methods and techniques from a disparate community of scholars on focused applications has seen the migration and integrated application of different research tradition and the integration of many different approaches and traditions in practice.
The COMIC research results have emerged within a project structure intended to support the cooperative application of research approaches on a number of focused areas of research. The problems selected to constitute the detailed research agenda for the COMIC project were drawn from examples of real world cooperation and the problems this cooperation faces. The overall project structure exploited four major themes. These themes were selected to represent distinct but related theoretical issues central to CSCW systems development.
Although presenting the project as a set of separate themes this approach fostered integration through the research process. The process based integration used in the project replaced the more traditional 'product' as focus for cooperation and coordination. The integration that has occurred during the project has taken place between research groups in the project in the development of particular approaches and techniques within the strands. In addition, a number particular approaches and techniques have migrated across the strands with results from one area being directly applied in another. In the rest of this deliverable we wish to focus on accounts of the nature of integration demonstrated in the project and the ways in which this integration is manifest in the project.
A research project as large and diverse as COMIC would be constrained by a search for a single 'result' or product. Many related lines of investigation were followed by the researchers involved. Each of the different parties contributing to the COMIC project was involved with different aspects of the project to differing degrees. The problems of presenting the results of the COMIC project are amplified by the overall productivity of the participants. This is perhaps best illustrated by the summary table of publications shown in the following table
Internal External
Year Papers and Reports Journal Conference Other
1992-93 79 13 52 9
1993-94 75 9 56 19
1994-95 80 30 70 26
Totals 234 52 178 54
This
extensive set of publications is also testimony of COMIC's contribution to the
establishment of CSCW as a research community. Members of the project have
supported the development of journals and conferences and the project has
provided a considerable impetus to the formation of an identifiable European
CSCW research programme. Each of the following sections presents the key results of the project as seen from the perspective of different project sites. Some of these are social and some technical, some focus on methodological issues others on prototyping. However, each of these different perspectives on the COMIC project has equal validity and in line with the general acceptance and support of pluralism in the project they are presented here prior to the more general consideration of the project developed in future sections.
The CSCW group at Lancaster consists of sociologists and computer scientists who have worked together on a number of projects. This collaboration has mainly been focused on developing ethnographic methods for the study of work settings and relating these to system development and design. In other words, a principal focus of the Lancaster team, in conjunction with colleagues at Manchester University, has been methodological and developing means of integrating and organising fieldwork results for the purposes of CSCW design.
The methodological aspects of the work of Lancaster have contributed to all parts of the project with studies of work being used to motivate large parts of the project and Lancaster contributing to all strands of the project. Studies of air traffic controllers, the police use of information technology, software engineering, banking services, and the technology centre of a large corporation have been brought to the COMIC project and used in the development of a framework for characterising the features of the 'real world' social organisation of work. Summary versions of these and other studies of work have been made available on WWW.
In addition, the Lancaster and Manchester teams have collaborated on the use of the Designer's Note Pad, a tool for supporting the integration of work studies into system design. The designers notepad has been developed at Lancaster and has been significantly amended as part of the COMIC project. The system exploits a viewpoint perspective for organising field study materials and embedding these within more graphical design tools. This has been supported by the development of a general framework for the analysis and presentation of fieldwork material.
The computational elements of Lancaster's involvement has focused on the construction of the shared object service and the development of cooperative virtual environments. This has involved the development of the shared object service and the supporting architecture, a prototype realisation of the SOS. The outlining of the shared interface service and the development of a toolkit that realised it. The construction of tools to develop virtual environment and the development of extension of the spatial model of interaction that makes it applicable in non-spatial domains.
The work of the project has also allowed for the exchange of researchers for significant periods of time. During the project, John Mariani from the computing department spent six months at GMD on the development of the awareness event mechanisms. This was complemented by a number of months spent at Nottingham developing the work on populated information terrains.
For UPC, this project has contributed to a greater understanding of many aspects of Large Scale cooperative arrangements coming from disciplines which are new to UPC. This work, initiated in the COST14 CO-TECH action, has helped to evolve our viewpoint on difficult problems of large scale computer based cooperative environments. It has helped us consider the problem from new and enlightening perspectives. This has materialised on contributions to conferences and workshops (ECSCW'93, ICDCS'94, Pirineos'94, JENC6, ECSCW'95) and on internal and external COMIC documents. The principal focus of our work has been the development of the Aleph system. Aleph has been strongly influenced by work in the organisational context of interaction, on languages and interaction, and on user interaction in CSCW.
The design of Aleph to support the organisational context of large scale cooperative arrangements has led to the realisation of an ethnographic study of I*EARN, an organisational learning network, in order to evaluate the applicability of Aleph to that environment. This work has opened a line of work to observe and design support systems for these emerging forms of organisation based more on the idea of "network learning organisations" rather than on "bureaucratic controlled workplaces".
Work on architecture for CSCW systems has contributed to the definition of the SOS/SIS architecture for cooperative systems. The concept of resource management and federation has been our main contribution. Resource Management has proven to be a useful functionality with its ability to take into account the organisational context of work (policies, actors, resources, responsibilities, etc.) and the articulation of distributed activities (organising and adapting the relationships between objects (OAW)). Federation of disjoint environments has also been an area of research and prototyping. The mechanisms for working in large inter-organisational environments is a promising topic of research on our fast emerging information society.
The requirements for interaction raised in strand 3 has lead to the refinement of the Aleph notation. This notation is based on the architecture for malleable and linkable mechanisms of interaction developed in this strand of work. It is an extensible notation with primitives for cooperative work developed from the Tcl interpreter.
Therefore, the Aleph system demonstrates how the Architecture for malleable and linkable Computational Mechanisms of Interaction, and the Architecture for Collaborative Shared Object Systems can be practically integrated and materialised in the Aleph demonstrator.
The Stockholm group consists of computer scientists from SICS, Swedish Institute for Computer Science, and computer and behavioural scientists from IPLab, Interaction and Presentation Laboratory, at KTH, Royal Institute of Technology. The group as a whole has a tradition of work in distributed collaborative environments, computer networks, user centred design methods and object oriented design and construction of user interfaces and multimedia applications. During the whole of the COMIC project the group at SICS has stayed in very close contact with the corresponding COMIC research group at IPLAB/NADA department at the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm. In many cases so much so that it is hard to see where the SICS efforts stop and the IPLABs begins, so in COMIC terms this should be seen as a joint effort.
In COMIC the main contributions from Stockholm have been made to Strand 4, both to the shared virtual environments and to the shared objects work. In Strand 3 SICS has contributed with mechanisms for adaptable support for cooperative work with examples expressed in pi-calculus notation.
CoDesk, the Collaborative Desktop, is a shared, enhanced conventional 2D environment, mainly developed at the IPLab, KTH. The CoDesk environment is based on rooms, where tools, documents and other objects can be shared with other users present. In the development and evaluation of the CoDesk, its user interface and usability, user centred methods both from our own tradition and from Strand 2 have been used. Discussions on organisational issues in Strand 1 have also been fruitful for the CoDesk development.
The requirements for SOS, the Shared Object Server, have been developed in close cooperation with Lancaster, GMD and Barcelona, and informed by ethnographic studies undertaken by Lancaster and Manchester. At KTH some of the mechanisms have been implemented and evaluated in CoDesk and, more extensively, in MultiGossip, a package extending Smalltalk/Visual Works with powerful tools for making single-user applications distributed, multi-user and cooperative.
The Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SICS) involvement in COMIC has very much concentrated on strand 4 and the development of distributed multi-user virtual environments (i.e. VR- systems) and the research into spatial metaphors and the possible integration of those into such computer generated habitats.
At the start of the COMIC project SICS already had an early version of what today is known as the DIVE (Distributed Interactive Virtual Environment) VR system running together with some ideas and early work on spatial interaction models. At the first COMIC meetings it become apparent that more or less the same kinds of concepts were being explored by researchers at the University of Nottingham. Our concepts were pooled with those of Nottingham (and later with researchers from Univ. of Manchester and Lancaster) and the work to develop a more consistent model started together with actual implementations of concept demonstrators in existing VR systems.
SICS have had extensive and fruitful contacts with the other partners in the COMIC taking the form of extended site visits, joint authoring of research papers, exchange of actual application code and multiple site distributed VR experiments and so on. In particular we have collaborated with
Some of the major results and insights coming from our involvement in COMIC include:
The GMD project group joined the COMIC project with a background on organisational modelling with the X.500 Directory Service, office procedure systems , and message based group communication. During the project we have focused our contributions in the area of organisations and shared object systems. A broad range of results were produced which are reflected in the COMIC deliverables and papers. However, beside these technical results which are documented by the working papers, deliverables and many publications, it is important to reflect on other aspects that were inherent to COMIC and that distinguish this project from many other projects we were involved in. Two of these are worth mentioning explicitly:
Manchester has participated across all of the COMIC project with the work on the systems development process being predominantly the product of close collaboration between Manchester and Lancaster.
Though not entirely so, Manchester's participation has mainly been in terms of its social science emphasis, with input relating to the issues of organisational modelling and the role of ethnographic studies in requirements capture, though it has also played a part in the development of VR environments. On the work on organisations, Manchester's specific contribution was with respect to the formulation of models of organisation, the exploration of the reasons for and the meaning of plurality in such modelling, and the initial development of a performative model of organisation. Manchester also contributed the results of its field studies of networking organisations. Manchester also provide a case study and some methodological suggestions on the development of the concept of Mechanisms of Interaction. In terms of the work on systems development the main developments were with regard to defining a (possible) role for fieldstudies in requirements capture. This involved the elaboration of an understanding of ethnography's nature and the problems involved in making the products of fieldwork accessible to designers through supporting/studying the development of the DNP. In terms of the work on spatial interaction and virtual environments Manchester has made significant input to the consideration of social issues. This work has involved an examination of previous work on the sociality of space and emerging work on artificial life and societies.
Manchester's principle achievements during the COMIC project have included:
The University of Milan has worked in a number of areas of the COMIC project. Most notably it has worked in the development of new organisational concepts and on the realisation of computational mechanisms of interaction. Much of this work has been undertaken jointly with other sites. The work on Mechanisms of interaction and the relation between Milan and RISØ is outlined in the section provided by RISØ. In this section we shall focus on Milan's relationship with GMD.
Milan initiated in autumn 1992 its work on the organisational context of CSCW systems within COMIC on the basis of its experience in developing the integration of a workflow management system and a conversation handler (Woorks + UTUCS) in the ITHACA Esprit Project. The resulting work process(wp) model was an attempt to further exploit the language/action perspective (Win Flo) in order to take into account the critiques it had received by various CSCW scholars and to enrich it with concepts and categories from other disciplines (including economics, industrial organisation, strategic management). A first experiment using the wp model in a real work setting was performed in the first few months of COMIC, developing a prototype application of Milan's Woorks+UTUCS environment within a BPR project in an Italian bank (Agostini, 94).
Also at the beginning of COMIC, the GMD group working within the Strand 1, had worked in the CSCW field paying attention to the architectural aspects of CSCW systems on the basis of the X.500 standard, and was developing TOSCA, a system for the representation of knowledge about organisations and their resources which are relevant for communication and cooperation. The development of the TOSCA prototype provided an occasion to exploit some relevant requirements that effective systems should satisfy. These included the provision of organisational information and openness with respect to external resources, scalability and tailorability.
From the Milan perspective joint work started at Bonn, where a first seminar was dedicated to share the experiences and approaches of the participating partners and to define what they meant with "organisational context of cooperative work" and with "awareness of the organisational context" (COMIC-GMD 1.5). At the Bonn meeting it was decided to have a focused workshop on organisational context in Barcelona in May 1993.
The Barcelona workshop was very important in the joint work of Milan and GMD. GMD presented a paper on "Organisational Context and", that formulated in a very rich manner the lessons learned from the development of the prototype In particular, the relevance of the organisational context with respect to the issue of awareness, and the requirements for supporting it were clearly analysed.
At the same workshop the University of Milan presented a paper on the organisational context of work processes, in which the organisational context issues were discussed from the point of view of the wp model. Its main contribution was a clear formulation of the distinction between the "inner" (related to the history of the work process itself) and "outer" (related to features (roles, structures, procedures, etc..) defined outside of the work process) organisational context of a work process.
The outcomes of the discussion at Barcelona were added to by many other partners and made a significant contribution to deliverable D1.1. This meeting also had a deep influence on the work on organisations in the subsequent years. On the basis of the communication started at Barcelona, GMD and University of Milan began a collaboration that was based, on the one hand, on the assessment that was a good candidate to provide the basis for a system supporting the awareness of organisational context within work processes, and, on the other hand, on the assumption that the distinction between inner and outer context was useful to shape an organisational context awareness support system.
During 1994, the collaboration became more concrete, and ended up into the common development of an extension of, W-TOSCA, modelling the organisational context of work processes and in a joint paper in deliverable D1.2. In this deliverable a common conceptual framework was adopted to present two extensions of. The joint paper was later presented at COOP 1995 in Antibes and it is currently under publication in the CSCW Journal.
The experience of developing W-TOSCA has been very important for the University of Milan group. During 1993-4 the design of a newly conceived conversation handler was started. This became one of the main components of a new ambitious prototype, the Milano System, aiming at embedding the wp model in order to support cooperation within work processes. W- has been, in fact, adopted as the basis for developing the Organisational Handbook component of Milano, and the wp model adopted in it has served as the main guideline to design the integration between the workflow management model and the conversation handler of Milano. Similarly, the collaboration on the extensions of, has been widely influential at GMD within the Politeam project, guiding the way in which awareness of the organisational context could be supported in that project.
The Department of Information Processing Science at the University of Oulu was drawn into the COMIC project because of its expertise in system design and organisational change. Correspondingly, while the main emphasis within COMIC towards design has been at the microlevel, in the exploration of the potential of ethnographic studies on work to inform design, the role of the Oulu group has been to attempt to bridge the gap between this microlevel perspective and broader vistas of system design and work and organisational development. The work in Oulu has progressed at two interlinked levels: on one hand at a level of theories, concepts and methods; on the other hand at a level of particular applications as examples of the field and testbeds for ideas.
At the theoretical level, Oulu has been studying the relationship between systems and the transformation of work processes towards a "post-Fordist" work organisation, trying to find theories, concepts and frameworks that would enable a better understanding and description of the transformation process for design purposes. Based on this work and a critique of old methodologies of system design, the goal of methodological studies has been to find suitable concepts and methods to design support for non-prescribed, "emergent" work tasks and to combine ethnography with a systematic approach to change some work process. In these studies the cooperation with the University of Limerick has been especially lively and fruitful.
At the application level, Oulu has been studying both synchronous and asynchronous cases of cooperative work to get a better coverage of the field. Teleradiology -- cooperative interpretation of X-ray images over a local network -- has served as an example of synchronous cooperation. The cooperating partner in the studies has been the radiological department in the Oulu university hospital. From asynchronous cooperation two different cases have been studied. An example of asynchronous communication with an emphasis on coordination has been an error management system for a programming team. This area has been studied in close contact with the Risø Research Center and their cooperation with Foss Electric. Another example from asynchronous cooperation, but emphasising mutual understanding and sense-making has been an "organisational memory" system used by a team of labour protection inspectors. This area has been studied in a close cooperation with the Administrative Development Agency of Finland and Uusimaa Labour Protection District.
In terms of results Oulu has been able to meet its major targets and thus to contribute to the success of the whole project. Oulu has developed a set of propositions about the relationship between systems and changes in work processes and organisations and presented a set of concepts that can be used in understanding organisations as a shapeshifting network of locally-defined, self-reconstructing work activities embedded in broader cultures and traditions that influence them. It is found that for designing systems for such work activities a work process-oriented design approach is necessary, and current developments towards such approach are analyzed, criticized and remedies suggested. An outline of a work design method where ethnographic studies can be embedded has been suggested, and "scenarios" are found to be a potentially useful link between them and more formal parts of system design. Additionally, a tool to facilitate the construction of scenarios in participatory design situations has been developed.
Nottingham's major involvement in COMIC has concentrated on the spatial aspect of strand 4; that is, on developing novel interaction techniques for cooperative work in shared electronic spaces. At the start of the project, we had already completed some preliminary work on the use of rooms metaphors to structure environments and had proposed some rudimentary interaction mechanism including primitive definitions of focus and nimbus, although these names were actually defined later on. Meeting the researchers from SICS at the first ever plenary meeting was an eye opener for us; interactive cooperative virtual reality was a real technical possibility! From that point on, exploring this possibility became our driving goal.
The major contributions of COMIC in this area have been to raise the issue of Collaborative Virtual Environments in the first place and to conduct an initial exploration of the topic. It is also significant that, in an area rife with short term technological fixes and hype, COMIC has tried to develop some underlying theory. Furthermore, this theory has emerged from an interdisciplinary perspective, strongly influenced by the involvement of Manchester, Lancaster and Sageforce. From our point of view, the major results arising from this work have been:
The group at Risø has been -- more or less evenly -- involved in a range of distinct activities across the project:
While the focal point of the group's work has been the concept of coordination mechanisms, the development of this conception has been deeply inspired and influenced by the issues raised in other strands and by the conceptual frameworks developed to deal with these issues.
For example, the crucial role of mutual awareness among participants in cooperative work which has been highlighted and explored in ethnographic field studies has been addressed as the focal issue in the work within strand 4. The architecture of the Shared Object Service is devised to provide effective support for mutual awareness among actors by making objects aware of the state of other objects. This approach, in turn, influenced the architecture of Ariadne, the notation for computational coordination mechanisms being developed in strand 3, in that the basic elements of the notation (the `objects of articulation work') were conceived of as objects which could be `aware' of other objects, so that -- eventually -- actors could be aware of activities occurring beyond their immediate sphere of work and have an overview of the state of affairs within the cooperative work arrangement at large.
Similarly, the issue of computational representations of organisational context addressed in strand 1 and the realisation that organisational context is `open ended' and cannot be assumed to be defined and managed top-down from a omniscient centre, made the Risø group re-analyze field study findings in order to examine whether organisational context, for the purpose of constructing computational representations of organisational context for applications, could be conceived of as a population of interacting coordination mechanisms. The conclusion of this study was that it did indeed make sense and furthermore a number of typical inoperation modes were identified. This result had important implications for the architecture of the Ariadne notation. Most notably, it was decided that not only should it be possible to link multiple coordination mechanisms by means of an `interoperability language' embodying the modalities identified in the re-analysis of the field studies, but in order to achieve a high degree of malleability and mutual awareness the basic elements of the notation (the `objects of articulation work') should be conceived of as software agents interacting through the very same interoperability language.
For the Risø group, the next step in the work commenced within COMIC will be to take the concept of coordination mechanisms and the Ariadne notation and explore how it can be used for coordination purposes in time- and safety-critical work settings.
While the University has not been a formal contract partner in the COMIC project, through the Director of the Centre at the University, Liam Bannon, we have been involved in the project on a consultancy basis with Risø in Denmark, for a period of approximately 9 months over the lifetime of the project. Due to the consultancy nature of the contract, contributions have concentrated on setting out parameters of the research focus of COMIC, and assisting in the coordination of research activities in order to achieve the project objectives. In the first year, we were heavily involved in the work on organisations, and in developing an agreed framework for future research work, while contributing via reports and critiques in helping to sharpen the concept of "organisational context". As part of this process we helped edit deliverable D1.1, which provided a much stronger base for the work on organisational context than had previously existed in the field. The contributions of Manchester, Milano, GMD and Risø were critical here, and we believe that the foundational work done in this period concerning "organisation" will significantly affect research work in a variety of areas, well beyond the confines of.
Also in the first year a major part of the work on the design process involved the collation, analysis and synthesis of earlier work, with a view to defining future work within COMIC. We contributed with analysis of various design methodologies, in particular participatory approaches. Again, we believe that this work is a significant contribution to the research field in the area of design methods.
One final piece of work has been in the evaluation of certain computational mechanisms of interaction developed at Risø.
The work on COMIC has helped the Centre to maintain a close liaison with a wider community, and has significantly impacted the kinds of research questions that the UL Centre is currently researching, while we believe that we have managed to make a small but significant contribution to the COMIC effort at both a conceptual and pragmatic level in our work on concepts of organisation, process and practice on the one hand and in our evaluation work on the other.
Work at the University of Amsterdam has focused on developing concepts surrounding the notion of mechanisms of interaction and the work on spatial interaction. This has involved the development of a framework for analysing Social Mechanisms of Interaction and its application as a basis for the design and implementation of a tool (CPTOOL) for rapid construction of relatively small scale CSCW applications. This tool is described in Deliverable D3.4.
This work has been complement by work on the concept and applicability of the 'Populated Information terrains' developed in the COMIC project, and on the relation between the spatial model and populated information terrains. Generally, information is not clustered in relatively homogeneous spaces, but is clusred depending on the retrieval and use of information. This general phenomenon can also be found in scientific information terrains. A clarification of this effect in terms of empirical patterns in the links between elements information units may clarify this dimension of infomation terrains. A series of studies of the structure of information in research communities has been undertaken to consider this issue.
At the beginning of 1994 a young researcher Jolanda Tromp joined the UvA team. Her work in COMIC has concerned mainly the evaluation of CSCW environments, in particular with respect to cognitive factors. A particular focus has been MASSIVE, developed in Nottingham. This was evaluated with an evaluation tool developed in Amsterdam.
MASSIVE was successfully evaluated in two stages, while it was respectively in use by nine participants at four different sites, and seven participants at three different sites. The first stage of the evaluation concerned itself with experienced users of MASSIVE. The second stage concerned itself with new users. This was done to be able to find possible learning effects. The opinions of the experienced users were compared to an earlier evaluation of MASSIVE to be able to find possible changes in opinion over time.
To get a better insight in the way MASSIVE is used visits were made to Nottingham. The provided a good insight in the program, and to plan the experiments. We were also present at the organization of a virtual COMIC meeting using MASSIVE -the first stage of the evaluation.
MASSIVE was also shown to the public in Amsterdam at the Science Fair, July 12th, 1995, using a Silicon Graphics Indigo, which was on loan to the department for the duration of the fair from Silicon Graphics. MASSIVE was received with interest.
Sageforce acted as consultant to Amsterdam for the duration of the project. From the stance of Sageforce a broad objective within the COMIC project was to develop and refine a set of precepts and design concepts originating in the work of the COST-11 Working Group (IV) on Design -- e.g. Peripheral awareness, Implicit communication, Double level language, and Overview
A more specific objective was to test the scalability of these concepts (their applicability in large scale, and in organisational systems) and if possible, and where necessary, to develop additional precepts and design concepts.
Two important developments originated in the joint COMIC/EuroCODE workshop held in Aarhus in May `94.
First, an emphasis on the importance of assuming uneven and disparate infrastructures of communication. A host of technical problems in linking disparate systems are relatively well known. There are many additional social, organisational, and usability issues that have to be addressed, especially as the gap between bottom and top end systems is constantly expanding. The ability to project 2D, or "flatland" versions of DIVE are a useful start in exploring these issues.
Second, the central nature of the "boundary object" concept in analysing, designing, and supporting communication and interaction between disparate communities. The boundary object concept is able to take the initial concepts (peripheral awareness, etc.) which originated in small scale ethnographic studies of work process, and facilitate their deployment in design on the organisational and inter-organisational planes.
In addition, preliminary conceptualisations have been developed for evaluating the "novelty" of systems and applications, and thus the level at which they can be developed using existing know-how, and the degree to which they will call for new research efforts.
These ideas "spun off" into analyses of Governmental Work Processes in the POLITeam Project in Germany, into new ongoing work with the EU to support the development of Europe wide linkages between local employment initiatives, and with the World Heath Organisation to support 3D projections of its distributed Mortality Database, the International Classification of Diseases.