Slow collaboration: Some uses of vagueness, hesitation and delay in design collaborations

This position paper points out some of the constructive roles vagueness, hesitation and delay play in the spoken interaction which takes place during collaboration in support of the early stages of design. These observations serve as a reminder that measures of the quality of a collaboration must be sensitive to the task-orientation (purpose) of the collaboration. Even aggregate measures (macro-level), such as duration, participation contribution distributions and frequencies, and so on, that we use to summarise the spoken interaction components of collaboration, derive from the micro-structure of the talk. Thus, in assessing collaboration quality, over-reliance on surface features without regard to the functions they play in their local context risks undervaluing some of the fundamental mechanisms that allow collaboration to take place.

Published in special issue: Workshop Proceedings of 9th International Conference on the Design of Cooperative Systems. Guest Editor Gunnar Stevens. The full text of this work is available from the official website link.