ABSTRACT: The concept of awareness has become of increasing importance to both social and technical research in CSCW. The concept remains however relatively unexplored, and we still have little understanding of the ways in which people produce and sustain `awareness' in and through social interaction with others. In this paper, we focus on a particular aspect of awareness, the ways in which participants design activities to have others unobtrusively notice and discover, actions and events, which might otherwise pass unnoticed. We consider for example how participants render visible selective aspects of their activities, how they encourage others to notice features of the local milieu, and how they encourage others to become sensitive to particular events. We draw examples from different workplaces, primarily centres of coordination; organisational environments which rest upon the participants' abilities to delicately interweave a complex array of highly contingent, yet interdependent activities.

Paper for 10.26.05