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Embodied social proxy: mediating interpersonal connection in hub-and-satellite teams

Published: 10 April 2010 Publication History

Abstract

Current business conditions have given rise to distributed teams that are mostly collocated except for one remote member. These "hub-and-satellite" teams face the challenge of the satellite colleague being out-of-sight and out-of-mind. We developed a telepresence device, called an Embodied Social Proxy (ESP), which represents the satellite coworker 24x7. Beyond using ESPs in our own group, we deployed an ESP in four product teams within our company for six weeks. We studied how ESP was used through ethnographic observations, surveys, and usage log data. ESP not only increased the satellite worker's ability to fully participate in meetings, it also increased the hub's attention and affinity towards the satellite. The continuous physical presence of ESP in each team improved the interpersonal social connections between hub and satellite colleagues.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI '10: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 2010
    2690 pages
    ISBN:9781605589299
    DOI:10.1145/1753326
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 10 April 2010

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    Author Tags

    1. distributed collaboration
    2. embodied video conferencing
    3. empirical study
    4. telepresence

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