Alice: design of a time-oriented collaboration service for design teams

This paper describes the design and implementation of Alice, an online collaboration system that integrates several commercial cloud storage services and reconfigures team member's interactions into a time-oriented visualization. Designers use social media and other general-purpose tools to collaborate across organizations due to their accessibility and ease of use and learning. However, such tools are cumbersome in covering the specific collaboration needs of design activities. Alice elicits ad hoc collaboration in design teams by facilitating team members to use their own set of tools in a seamless way. Participants highlighted that Alice serves as a central reference for the coordination of teamwork by providing an overview of rhythms and temporal relationships of design activities. Our work suggests that collaboration tools could be portrayed as technologies of time production. This reveals opportunities for future research on how the temporal agency embodied by the collaboration tools affects collaborative activities in design.