Capturing the capture concepts: a case study in the design of computer-supported meeting environments

Designing interactive interfaces for individual usage is a significantly hard task that is being surmounted by evolving theory and hours of trial and error. The task of designing interactive interfaces for cooperative work is even more difficult. Not only is it necessary to deal with the individual's cognitive processes and model of the computer aided task, but also to build software to support human - human communication with all the underlying socialization and group dynamics that this communication implies. In the development of the Capture Lab environment, guesswork was coupled with a study of human behavior in meetings both electronic and conventional, an extrapolation of existing research and a series of mini-experiments to test out various ideas about the design. These approaches are described in the body of the paper along with the design considerations at issue and the meeting behaviors we have since observed as a result of our design choices.