Congratulations to Magdalena Mateescu on the successful defense of your dissertation!
How can collaborative work be better supported in the digital age?
Magdalena’s dissertation explores how workspace choice is shaped by collaborative activities and how digital technologies should be conceptualized to support collaboration. By integrating insights from organizational psychology, HCI, distributed cognition, and workspace research, she argues that effective collaboration depends not on technology alone, but on the fit between tasks, collaborative processes, and technological affordances.
Key insights:
- Collaborative work comprises distinct activity types.
Three distinct types of collaborative work were validated: deep collaboration, coordination, and spontaneous communication. Each activity type is assessed along two dimensions: how frequently it is performed and where people prefer to perform it. Together, types and dimensions provide a nuanced understanding of workspace choice, explaining behavior beyond age, job role, or commuting time. They also help identify potential mismatches between collaborative work activities and the work environments intended to support them. - Digital technologies should be designed around affordances, not media.
The effectiveness of Large Interactive Displays (LIDs) depends less on the medium itself than on the affordances it provides. It introduces a conceptual distinction between structural tools, which primarily support teamwork (how collaboration is organized and regulated), and representational tools, which primarily support taskwork (how teams work on the task). Structural tools bundle affordances that shape who can interact, when, and in what way. Representational tools bundle affordances that determine what can be externalized - The effectiveness of collaborative technologies depends on the fit between task type, collaborative processes, and technological affordances. The findings suggest that design tasks benefit from close collaboration to develop a shared solution, whereas brainstorming may benefit less from a strong focus on the collaborative process.
All findings highlight the importance of designing task-sensitive workspaces and technologies rather than relying on generic collaboration solutions. Magdalena argues for moving beyond "one-size-fits-all" spaces and tools toward specialized environments that support taskwork and teamwork by helping teams to structure and regulate their collaboration.
A big thank you to the examination committee: Prof. Mark Vollrath (Technische Universität Braunschweig) and Prof. Sandra Ohly (Universität Kassel)