The group task I did was to create a brochure on Adobe Illustrator with my boss, and coworkers. We were all in the same location and working on the same computer. Since Adobe Illustrator is not designed to be an application that supports collaboration, there were quite a few problems.
The first issue arose with the fact that this task was tightly coupled. Since that was the case, each person's work depended on what others were doing. This made it quite hard to have more than one person using the application at a time. Also since there was only one mouse and one keyboard, there was constant fighting for control as disagreements arose on what exactly to do. One person wanted to place a picture on the right hand side, another on the left.
The second issue arose when we tried to allow one of my coworkers to take the document and work on it by himself on another computer that was within viewing distance. This made for in-group efforts (as talked about by Bos et al) to occur. The rest of the group forgot he was there since we were so concentrated on the brochure and he would have to force us to look at his ideas. The group of colocated members also tended to discuss each aspect of the brochure thoroughly and left out the slightly remote coworker. This supports Bos et al's statement that co-located group members “enjoy more interaction and share more information with each other than they do with remote partners".
The third issue arose with trying to relate everyone's ideas onto the screen. Often times when someone had an idea, their descriptions of it fell flat and they had to take over control on the mouse and show the rest of the group. This meant that for the same function, each idea had to be designed, shown, discussed and then approved or discarded. This made the project take a lot longer than it should have.
The problem with this task was the usage of an application that isn't inherently collaborative. However, even though that was the underlying problem, problems also arose with just having a group work simultaneously on one monitor. Adobe is trying to improve its collaborative ideas through the use of InCopy, but I don't know how successful that is. If I had to improve the experience, I would do something along the lines of GoogleDocs. Allow people to simultaneously work on a document that updated automatically and locked the area of work that someone else might be working on to prevent cross editing.
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There's a lot of value in having multiple inputs for an art program, and you bring up a good point about pulling in aspects of Google Docs. I'd say that it would probably work well if everyone worked on the same project, but in different layers so that their individual brush strokes did not interfere with each other. Overlapping work by different group members could be easily modified and individuals could change only what they themselves created.
ReplyDeleteWorking in parallel but in the same environment would be good for helping to prevent the formation of any ingroups or outgroups. Make sure to have a really big screen, though!
Sometimes, I feel like being remotely located helps in efficiently creating a document. When one person is responsible for compiling the document and a team of people is responsible for coming up with the individual pieces of real content, all actors can operate asynchronously and more efficiently. And properly delegating tasks will ensure that there is no redundant work that is being done, like when one forgets about a remote member in a collocated environment. When completing tasks like this, I prefer to work remotely, and my own post this week, which refers to a similar task to the one you describe, corroborates this view.
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