Understanding asynchronous design work - segmentation of digital whiteboard sessions

Asynchronous work settings demand for certain hand-over processes - often performed by documentation of the work. This task is challenging especially for creative work, because finding the right form of documentation - including decisions that have been made and explanations how people came to solutions - is non-trivial. Capturing the whole process and replay it afterwards to distributed team members could solve those problems, but is hardly realizable in terms of time consumption. Our approach uses the complete capturing of a session - exemplary implemented using a digital whiteboard system - in order to find out phases of work. This enables us to point out relations between different phases, which can tell us what part was more important than another. We found out that the definition of time slices consisting of certain parameters describing the process can be aggregated into segments. Those segments are classified using an SVM approach, which turns out to give promising results. The overall contribution is an approach, which can be generalized for a variety of captured parameters to allow a precise classification of segments related to the respective overall task.