Several people work on the same thing behind separate screens. Each can scroll to a different part — that relaxation is what makes the shared workspace usable at all — so the workspace shows everyone everything except each other. What a shared desk answered in a glance now costs an interruption to ask, and people who cannot glance step on each other’s work or stop trusting the shared copy.
Presence wears the others in the work as graded marks: an avatar stack says who is here, a named cursor and selection say where, an action signal says what, and the trail says who was here and did what. Each grade is added only where the surface’s tempo needs it — a live canvas wants the cursor, an asynchronous tracker wants the trail — and every grade is captured as a by-product of the work itself, never authored as a report.
Grades
- The stack — who has the document open now. The cheapest mark, and often enough.
- The cursor and selection — where each person is and what they hold, named and coloured. The grade that makes live co-editing feel occupied rather than haunted.
- The action signal — someone is typing here, someone is editing the same thing you are. The collision-prevention grade.
- The trail — who viewed, who changed what, when. The asynchronous face; on slow surfaces it is most of presence.
The directed forms — following another’s view, pulling everyone to yours — are the same marks turned into a channel, and they border on shared-view territory rather than pure awareness.
Consequences
- who is present, where they are working, and what they are doing reads in passing, at grades matched to the tempo — an avatar stack, a named cursor and selection, an action signal, an after-the-fact trail — and people self-partition around what they can see, so most collisions never happen
- the marks must be by-products of working, never authored reports: an authored report costs its provider and pays someone else, so it goes unfed
- visibility is also being watched: past some point the marks change what people dare explore, and the freedom to make mistakes moves to tools that cannot see
Resources & references
- Gutwin & Greenberg (2002) A descriptive framework of workspace awareness for real-time groupware — the who/where/what element structure and the mixed-focus setting
- Dourish & Bellotti (1992) Awareness and coordination in shared workspaces — passive awareness through the workspace vs separate reporting mechanisms
- Erickson & Kellogg (2000) Social translucence — visibility’s consequence chain, and translucence rather than transparence
- Figma: multiplayer editing — cursor and selection as shipped context
Appears in
Working on the same thing
- Seeing each other, step 1 — Show live presence
Related patterns
Enables
- Collaboration — presence supplies the moment-to-moment awareness sustained co-work runs on
Complements
- Selection — the shared selection highlight is selection's collaborative face — the treatment its own page defers
Preceded by
- Sharing — participants granted into one document behind separate screens can see everything except each other; the grant creates the awareness debt presence pays