At MIT I was fortunate to have Hiroshi Ishii as one of my most esteemed colleagues at the Media Lab. Professor Ishii is a giant in a field called CSCW, or “Computer Supported Cooperative Work” which has existed as a subfield of the Computer Human Interface (CHI) world since the 80s. There’s a great overview over on Wikipedia of CSCW that I’ve adapted below.
Let’s start with the 3 As:
- Awareness: Knowing what others are doing.
On Slack that might be a status message. - Articulation: Partitioning the work to be done.
On Trello that might be a discrete card. - Appropriation: How a technology gets used/reused.
I have 6 tips for distributed teamwork here.
Another way to look at it distributed work is with the CSCW (“Timespace Groupware”) Matrix :
| Same Time SYNC | Different Time ASYNC | |
| Same Place COLOCATED | Face to face interaction | Continuous task |
| Different Place DISTRIBUTED | Remote interaction | Communicate + coordination |
Note that when you consider the high-speed and ubiquitous videoconference tech available to us today, our experiences today are blurred with respect to the SYNC axis wrt distributed vs colocated. And there’s a gazillion ways to address ASYNC communication ranging from whiteboards to messaging apps that let us work across all timezones with fluidity.
