ABSTRACT
The changes we are seeing in the ways that work systems are designed and organised and in how people work have great implications for ergonomics approaches, methods, models and techniques. A notable example of this is the trend towards collaborative and distributed collaborative working, and the consequent need to determine how ergonomists will examine the strategies and performance of collaborative work teams, how they will apply these methods, and any emergent guidance for design. Advances made to help facilitate the work of distributed collaborative teams have focused on introducing new technologies into the workplace, and thus much research has concentrated on the design of computer and communication systems and their respective interfaces, but wemust be careful not to neglect the design of operating procedures, job and team structures and notions related to performance such as distributed team situation awareness, mental workload and mental models. This paper concerns two interacting aspects of the human factors work on
a major European project (CoSpaces) in collaborative work environments. First is the development of user requirements, feeding these through into system specifications. This is of interest for three reasons: the need to ensure that requirements embrace both system usability and the support of collaboration; the focus on a large “messy” distributed work system rather than the usual ergonomics of a single interface or product development (Wilson et al, 2003); and the dearth of literature which makes explicit how to define, construct and implement user scenarios, use cases and systems requirements in the context of collaborative systems. The second aspect is the development of a descriptive model of collaboration and
collaborative working. For a notion which has been explored thoroughly within the world of computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) for many years we were surprised by the lack of a universal understanding of what collaboration comprises and therefore how to measure it. Our model has linked with project work such as: the generation of user requirements, development of evaluation frameworks and profiling tools for collaboration readiness.
