Appendix 1
Local Workshop
Problem
The distributed local teams need to form a global virtual team to engage in social and work activities. There is a need to help team members to find an effective role for themselves in a group.
Scenario
In the beginning of a collaborative project between different cultures, members might be highly motivated but also uncertain about their partners, the collaboration process and outcome. In collaborative learning and design situations, a vague theme or direction might be given but no concrete collaboration topic. The team is asked to explore and define a team topic as part of the educational and creative exercise. This initial forming phase is important because members discover shared interests and understandings, which can encourage working together. While the project progresses the team members slowly develop a sense for some cultural differences, which might influence the collaboration more intensively as it progresses. Therefore it is essential that the international team members get to know each other, gain trust and initial understanding for the project.
Solution
Organize a meeting with all stakeholders in the beginning of the collaboration project between two or more different cultures. Encourage community and team building between the local teams in a preferably collocated intensive project workshop. If a collocated meeting is not possible, organize several initial video-conferencing or instant messaging sessions. The goal of this exercise is to let a global virtual team evolve.
These initial intensive synchronous communication sessions should be used in combination with the Online Collaboration andCommunity Portal.
Encourage the members to set up their Team Blog Spacetogether to record the daily synchronous activities in order to build shared understanding and record the process and outcome of the collocated workshop. An individual team space supports the emergence of trust, a sense of belonging and eventually a team culture. This sense of belonging animates the distributed team members to come back, intensively use and personalize their space and build a Global Virtual Team.
Community and team building exercises primarily aim at getting to know the team members and determine a common goal. Discussions about project expectations, own contributions and abilities help the team to assign a role to each member according to interests, skills and abilities. A list of personal information should be collaboratively developed and published in the Personal Profile. One member should be assigned a role as Mediator. The mediator writes a daily log of the team progress, which can be linked to Shared Documents.Documents likehand written, transcribed or scanned notes, drawings, pictures and videos, are developed in collaborative brainstorming or individual work-sessions. These documents are stored and shared in an online database, which is linked with the shared team space.
Aim of the community-building workshop is to negotiate a common collaboration topic and goal. Once all members agreed on a common goal, which is captured in the GROUP PROFILE, the team develops a preliminary collaboration schedule and assign responsibilities to the team members comparing the tasks and the skill and ability list.
Related Patterns
Provide everyone with the same knowledge, course framework and goal. Group Profile, Personal Profile.
Appendix 2
Grand Opening **
Cultural Context
The pattern supports Collectivist Community Orientationand Hierarchical Authority Orientation cultures. It bridges High and Low Contextual Communication Orientation cultures.
This pattern was observed to work well in Hong Kong/Korean and Hong Kong/Taiwanese collaborations in design education.
Context
Kim, from Korea and Kwan from Hong Kong joined a design subject that is offered at their Universities in Korea and Hong Kong respectively. The project involves international teamwork and will run for about 2 months. For both students, this course is the first experience to collaborate with students from other nations and over a distance. They are exited about this opportunity, but they are also nervous about how they will perform.
Problem
How can you initiate the contact between students from universities around the world, who will work on a common design project?
Forces
The international distributed design project is about to start. The organizers formed local teams and remote teams were assigned to each local team. Although all participants know the project brief, it is difficult for the distributed groups to approach the design problem because they are unaware of each other’s personal and professional backgrounds, culture, expectations and goals. In addition, course organizers aim at establishing a learning community where students learn not only from the interactions between their team members but also from international and local tutors and other teams.
Collaborators with aCollectivist Community Orientation, such as Hong Kong and Korean students, need to develop a sense of belonging to the learning community and remote team members in order to trust each other and take responsibility for the project outcome. It is difficult to establish such conditions in a short-term design project over a distance, because teams do not share a common history. In order to facilitate the emergence of common ground and reduce breakdowns in communication,Collectivist Community Orientation cultures need to have close contact over a period of time. Intensive collocated work is ideal in this case. However, holding the international project entirely face-to-face is not viable.
Solution
At the beginning of the project, organize a short, intensive, collocated workshop to which all participants are invited. Help students to gain common ground by introducing the design topic in lectures, by scheduling collaborative activities to let the team establish a common goal, and by organizing social events for the participants to get to know each other.
A memorable beginning of the design project helps students to connect emotionally to the community and team. For this purpose, interweave onand off task activities in this collocated short workshop. Give an opening lecture to establish a shared understanding of the project goals and communicate all necessary project information. Set up a collaboration goal or several milestones that should be reached during the collocated workshop. Thereafter let the local and remote team members introduce each other informally and allow time for social events. At the same time, encourage the participants to explore the design topic to discover similarities and differences among the team members’ expectations and visions. Especially in design projects, stimulate multi-modal discussions using mind mapping, sketching, playing games or telling stories to convey design ideas among culturally diverse members. Encourage the emergence of team roles, which each member takes up according to skills and interests. A plan for accomplishing project milestones is aligned to the curriculum given by the course leaders.
Positive Consequences
A grand opening conveys a feeling of importance forCollectivist Community OrientationandHierarchical Authority Orientation cultures, due to which students will feel obliged to take the project seriously and take responsibility. In an intensive and inclusive workshop where formal and informal meetings are intertwined, Collective Community Orientationcultures establish a friendly relationship, which is important fuel to a successful collaboration beyond this workshop.
High and Low Contextual Communication Orientationsare bridged in a shared context. In case of misunderstanding verbal communication, ideas can be written down, drawn or acted out immediately, which balances Low and High Contextual Communication Orientation. The workshop mixes task and off-task activities. Students negotiate a shared understanding by exploring and explaining their design ideas within a shared physical contexts from which meaning can be inferred.
Applicability and Drawbacks
The success of this solution in Hong Kong/Taiwanese teamwork can be explained by a comparatively similar collaboration context to Hong Kong/Korea. In both cases, Collective Community and Hierarchical Authority Orientations prevail. Grand Opening was not utilized in Hong Kong/Austrian collaboration. A mixed Individual and Collective Community and Equal and Hierarchical Authority Orientations in students might have contributed to disregarding this solution. Nevertheless, geographical or temporal dispersion and monetary limitations might have been the predominant reason for not using the pattern in this case.
Resulting Context
Due to restrictions in time and funds not all students might be able to join the collocated workshop, therefore useReady Steady Go, a remote link to partner unable to join the workshop locally, and make sure that all collaborative technologies are set up and ready to use before the participants converge in the local workshop.
In case the workshop opening cannot be hold face-to-face, start the design project with a distributed collaborative task that connects sharing and comparing information about the participants backgrounds and visions about the joined design project. Use the patternKnow Me Betterfor this activity.
ExamplesandRelated Work
Researchers who look into intercultural computer-supported collaboration mentioned the effectiveness of collocated workshops as openers for distributed collaboration among heterogeneous groups (Rutkowski et al., 2002), (Paasivaara and Lassenius, 2004). These researchers observed effectiveness of face-to-face opening meetings in distributed collaboration in other cultural context than mentioned in this pattern. Design pattern Welcome Area (Schümmer and Lukosch, 2006) is also related to this solutions.
References
Rutkowski, A., Vogel, D., Bemelmans, T., and van Genuchten, M. (2002). Group support systems and virtual collaboration, the hknet project. Journal of Group Decision and Negotiation, (2).
Paasivaara, M. and Lassenius, C. (2004). Using iterative and incremental process in global software development. In Int’l Workshop on Global Software Development, International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2004), pages 42–47, Edinburgh, Scotland: IEE.
Lukosch, S. and Schümmer, T. (2006). Groupware development support with technology patterns. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 64(7):599–610.
Appendix 3
Annotated Design Gallery ***
Culture Context
SupportsCollectivist Community Orientationcultures. BridgesHigh and Low Contextual Communication Orientations,Universal and Particular Standard Orientations,Monochronic and Polychronic Time Orientations,andHigh and Low Uncertainty Avoidance Orientationcultures.
This pattern was observed to work well in Hong Kong/Korean, Hong Kong/Taiwanese and Hong Kong/Austrian contexts. It might be considered a universal solution.
Context
The remote team use theInternational Homeas a central resource to manage all design project related contents. This group environment facilitates the storage, creation and communication of design ideas and design variations that were implemented inLocal Variations. Although the distributed teams share locally produced design representations online, remote partners might not understand the intention and meaning.
Problem
How can you facilitate the unambiguous interpretation of visual design representation?
Forces
The design processes of local and remote teams can vary due to cultural differences in the orientation towardsUncertainty Avoidance,Standards,Contextual CommunicationandTiming.Universal Standard,High Uncertainty Avoidance Orientation,Low Contextual CommunicationandMonochronic TimeOrientationcultures tend to develop a strong concept before they begin the implementation of the design. Those teams move fromLowtoHigh Contextual Communicationin the design process quite linearly. Low Uncertainty Avoidance,Particular Standard,High Contextual Communication andPolychronic TimeOrientationcultures tend to implement and frequently test design ideas and evolve design through trial and error. Moreover, design representations offer implicit,highly contextualinformation that carry rich but ambiguous contents and ideas. Hence, misinterpretations of a representation can occur especially if participants with above-outlined opposite cultural dimensions collaborate.
Solution
Offer a file and picture sharing facility to visually communicate design ideas among distributed design learning teams and motivate students to annotate those design examples, concepts, or representations of artefacts with textual summaries of the contents.Such a picture gallery can be part of the International Home, which is used as a resource and reference to discuss possible design ideas, solutions synchronously or asynchronously.Having a visual overview of global design directions helps making decisions on local processes and ideas. Being able to view a textual summary of a visual design representation allows for a more precise interpretation of the design. Annotation is also helpful in communicating the level of completion of a design representation.
Positive Consequences
Collecting and displaying a diverse range of design activity in a central place supports users with culturally varying time perception to be aware of and interpret variations in local design processes. Being able to follow the local processes not only sparks discussions about the differences but also encourages the more liner working members to pay more effort in implementing their design ideas as early as possible, which is usually a problem for such cultures. Especially inUniversal Standard Orientationcultures, design students have problems in moving from a diligent worked out concept to particular design implementations.Low Uncertainty Avoidance,Polychronic TimeandParticular Standard Orientationcultures put forward a multiplicity of ideas and helpHigh Uncertainty Avoidance,Monochronic TimeandUniversal Standard Orientationcultures to reduce their insecurity in moving forward in the design process.Particular Standard Orientationcultures pick a few representative ideas displayed in the gallery to develop the designs.Universal Standard Orientationcultures have an overview of the entire solution space and interpret a coherent picture from several design representations.
An annotated design presentation bridges the communication preferences ofHigh and Low Contextual Communication Orientationcultures. Summaries of the meaning of design representations or ideas in textual annotations can help in dealing with breakdowns in interpreting local design processes and ideas. This merged communication strategy offers a flexible way how information the design representation is interpreted.High Contextual Communication Orientationcultures will take the sum of both kinds of information to construct a meaning.Low Contextual Communication Orientationcultures might invest more effort in reading or composing the textual description to clearly understand or convey the meaning of the visual representation.
Resulting Context
The design gallery shows the entire design space. However sometimes users just want to see a part of it or want to organize and display representations in different ways. Employing the patternWho When Whatallows users to structure the design space according to their needs and questions.
ExamplesandRelated Work
Tidwell (1997) proposed a pattern entitled Overview and Detail that could be used in the design gallery to show a thumbnail of the representation in an overview and on go to the detail display on demand. Schümmer (2003) proposed two patterns that identify an Artefact Repositoryand Shared Annotationsin computer-supported collaboration.
References
Schümmer, T. (2003). Evolving a groupware pattern language. In ECSCW
2003, the 8th European Conference on Computer Supported CooperativeWork, in Helsinki.
Tidwell, J. (1997). Common ground: A pattern language for humancomputerinterface design. URL: jtidwell.
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