Do you know what I know? Situational Awareness and Scientific Teamwork in Collaborative Environments

Scientific experimentation in the molecular biology domain is highly dynamic and requires expertise from diverse disciplines, such as molecular biology, statistics, bioinformatics and mathematics. Scientists are confronted with new technological developments and bioinformatics tools when analyzing and interpreting vast amounts of data from their experiments. In our project, we investigate the face-to-face collaboration of multidisciplinary scientific teams. Our aim is to identify requirements and to design and evaluate new interaction concepts to support scientific teams in future collaborative environments. This paper presents an on-going work on the support of co-located scientific team collaboration in a real world context. In particular, we focus on situational awareness: being aware of what is happening around you, and on group creativity. These are essential for successful team collaboration. After presenting an overview of the studies on team creativity and situational awareness support, we describe the collaborative environment for scientific teams in a molecular biology context. We also report our results of an empirical case study translated into user requirements for support of multidisciplinary collaboration of scientific teams, as well as our findings on the situational awareness support in collaborative environments. Finally, we present our multi-level approach for practical case studies with multidisciplinary scientific teams. These studies bring new insights into how the new computing technology affects teamwork and contribute to the development of novel concepts for collaborative environments.