A Design Pattern for Representing Workspace Awareness

Similarly to what happens when designing a single-user system, designers and developers will probably have to address some design problems that have often appeared previously in some other developments. This kind of recurrent problem can be identified, documented and captured in a design pattern that provides a reusable solution to a common problem. The main aim of this work is to provide a design pattern that can be applied to the design of CSCW applications supporting Workspace Awareness (WA). The object-oriented pattern presented answers all WA questions by means of a class structure representing the typical entities and behaviors available in collaborative applications (e.g. users, artifacts, collaborative actions). Moreover, a proof of concept is presented, thus assessing the feasibility of this pattern for a concrete technology, namely C# and Visual Studio 2012.