The influence of an activity awareness display on distributed multi-team systems

Abstract

Motivation -- Both multi-team systems and awareness displays have been studied more often in the past years, but there hasn't been much focus on the combination of these two subjects. Apart from doing so, we are particularly interested in the difficulties encountered when multi-team systems are distributed among different locations and how interface technology plays a role in overcoming these. We hypothesise that an activity awareness display will positively effect the performance of teams that are collaborating at a distance. Research approach -- During an experiment we look at two teams of two persons each working together on a complex task. In total 20 multi-teams are tested. Half of them is provided with a display containing information about the other team in order to raise their activity awareness. Performance, time, communication and back-up behaviour are measured. After the task participants are questioned about their perceived performance, workload and inter-team coordination. Design -- An activity awareness display should communicate the current activity being executed, the status of that activity, and the workload of the remote team. Originality/Value -- The goal of this project is to lay out a theoretical base for designing tools to improve the performance of remotely collaborating teams such as Urban Search And Rescue teams missions. Take away message -- An awareness display hypothetically improves multi-team performance through more back-up behaviour and less communication.