Distant Collaborations: Designing for Australia, Ireland, Qatar, and the USA

This case study develops a dialogic think-aloud protocol capturing decision making during professional collaboration in high technology workplaces at four global sites. The authors developed a close working relationship in the Midwestern United States. One followed employment opportunities to Doha, Qatar where they continued collaborating on many projects. The case study focuses on designing an asynchronous multi-modal text to be remotely presented on a third continent, Australia, while simultaneously addressing a new audience of design professionals through this paper on a fourth continent, Ireland and Europe. We suggest methods for sustaining a transatlantic collaboration over several years as part of a small and temporary work team. Additionally, we describe unexpected challenges and advantages that we encountered across four continents. We argue that the challenges resulted less from the distance of collaboration and were rather placebound to the respective geographic locations of the authors, and were also related to the collaborative remediation of scholarly work from print to video.