Surveying the scene: technologies for everyday awareness and monitoring in control rooms

Recent technologies to support collaborative work have sought, in various ways, to enhance an individual's awareness of another's activities. Through a range of diverse technologies developers have endeavoured to provide users with capabilities that allow them to monitor, either passively or actively, what others are doing. In this paper we aim to examine awareness by analysing a setting where one of the responsibilities of the staff is to oversee, through a set of technologies, a complex environment in order to monitor the various spaces and locations in the local domain, the individuals who move through these spaces, and the events that occur in it. We outline the resources they utilise to make sense of what personnel see on the screens and to initiate collaborative action with colleagues. We conclude by discussing how such analyses can inform the design of novel systems which aim to support awareness and monitoring of environments. More critically we draw on this study to reconsider the conception of awareness utilised within Computer Supported Cooperative Work and other fields where technological solutions are being proposed to support individuals to monitor, whether peripherally or not, locations, activities and other individuals in digital environments.