An Historical Reflection of Awareness in Collaboration

Mutual awareness has been a focus point of research in Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) since the early 1990s. At its essence, mutual awareness refers to a fundamental quality of collaborative work, the ability of co-workers to perceive each others’ activities and expressions and relate them to a joint context. In this chapter, we explore the history of awareness concepts by analysing existing literature in order to identify trends, research questions, research approaches and classification schemes throughout different stages of research into awareness. We have adopted a historical angle in the hope that it will allow us to show how awareness research has progressed over time. We document this development using three different phases: (1) Early exploration of awareness (approximately 1990–1994), (2) Diversification and research prototypes (approximately 1995–1999) and (3) Extended models and specialisation (approximately 2000–now). While these phases are to some extent arbitrary and overlapping, they allow us to highlight differences in research focus at the time and understand research in context.