Open audio/video links as means for coordination - two case studies

From the multitude of workplace studies that we have seen during the last decades, it has been shown that a common environment to a large extent supports coordination of work. The use of common artifacts and awareness of the co-workers activities effortlessly afford communication of the current state of work. Inevitably, a question arises: how can we get similar support for distributed groups? One idea has been to use a continuously open video and/or audio link, i.e. a media space, to support the informal coordination possibilities that are lacking in a distributed setting. In this paper, two cases from air traffic control are presented, where the long-term use of video and audio links plays an important role for communicating realtime updates of the state of work. The possibility to overhear and oversee what the colleagues are doing in remote positions reduces to a large extent the amount of obtrusive and time-consuming phone calls. The features and the successful use of these so-called focused media spaces are discussed in this paper.