Including Remote Participants and Artifacts: Visual, Audio, and Tactile Modalities in an Ethnographic Study of Globally Distributed Engineers: Workshop on Transnational HCI at ACM CHI 2011 conference

In this paper we study how globally distributed Danish and Indian engineers co-construct and reconfigure a shared socio-technical collaborative place for global collaborative interaction: War Room meetings. We investigate the empirical case of War Room meetings based on three modalities in which the partially shared environment exposes itself towards the individual participants: The visual, aural, and tactile modalities. We let the analysis be guided by a situated space model that attempts to determine what can be perceived and acted on physically at the two locations as well as virtually in digital (virtual) places. We find that the model's distinction between perception space and action space is crucial when examining the transformation of physical local artifacts into globally remote artifacts. In this paper, we try to find a terminology, which allows us to identify in more details what makes the manifestation of physical artifacts different from the local participants’ perspective and the global participants’ perspective when they are mutually engaged in a collaborative situation.