ABSTRACT
A BNR-Europe Limited are designing and building integrated computer and telephone based support systems for a spectrum of formal and informal project–based group work – systems have termed ‘Collaboration Media’. Computer supported cooperative work systems, especially ‘synchronous’ shared window systems, should be designs to be flexible and cohesive ‘media’ upon which social action is plays out and expressed autonomously by those “diverse and competent practitioners” which are referred–to as its ‘users’ in the rest. The design philosophy is user–centric in two important ways: practically – through experiment, and theoretically – through application of Conversation Analysis, and the approach to the theory of organisations developed. Three independent variables were controls during the experimental sessions; the numbers of ‘conferees’, the type of session, and the task set. The results obtained from the two and four party sessions of the phase were very interesting in that the confirmed some of the above hypotheses and refuted others.
