A Room of Your Own: What Do We Learn about Support of Teamwork from Assessing Teams in Dedicated Project Rooms?

To inform the design of groupware technologies such as those for cooperative buildings, we investigated the work habits of teams that collaborate in dedicated project rooms. We conducted field work that included interviews of teams in 9 U.S. companies who had dedicated project rooms and a 6 week observation of one site. In our study, team members using dedicated project rooms reported clear advantages: increased learning, motivation, and coordination. Our findings suggest that cooperative buildings need to support important features of collocated teamwork such as flexible shared visual displays and awareness of team members’ activities.