Towards Hybrid Collaboration Spaces - A Model of Support Requirements for Hybrid Collaboration

Triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic, the popularity of hybrid work and collaboration has increased drastically in recent years. This raises a need for diverse and flexible Hybrid Collaboration Spaces (i.e., the physical and virtual rooms in which hybrid collaborative interactions happen) tailored to the respective settings. So far, to the best of our knowledge, no general formal elicitation of requirements for such spaces has taken place. The elicitation and definition of (user or system) requirements is often a lengthy and costly process. This is even more true for novel settings which lack an established catalog of lessons learned. Moreover, requirements established for one scenario might be poorly generalizable to other scenarios. In this conceptual work, we first systematically compare existing CSCW models and frameworks, and then propose a novel two-view model of requirements for hybrid meetings and collaboration spaces. Our model builds upon and joins the descriptive power of two existing instruments: the Domino framework and its hybrid collaborative coupling styles of Neumayr et al., and Bill Buxton's Media Spaces (i.e., Person, Task, and Reference Space). It is intended to allow for the a priori estimation of which support mechanisms might be beneficial in a certain hybrid collaboration scenario.