Collaboration is a
social practice,
not a feature set

Before we can design AI that supports collaboration, we need to understand the social practices that constitute it.

People talk collaboration into being: negotiate attention, manage speaking turns, signal engagement, and express relational bonds.

Across 30+ papers on meetings, hybrid work, and telepresence, the same patterns recur:

• Embrace asymmetry in collaboration technologies. In Hybridge (CSCW 2024), giving remote and in-room participants different interfaces (individual displays around the table for in-room, a 3D digital twin with seat-and-viewpoint agency for remotes) closed the co-presence and agency gap that conventional symmetric video calls cannot. Inclusivity comes from tailoring to each endpoint's needs, not from forcing visual sameness.
• The meeting is not a neutral container. In Meeting (the) Pandemic (CSCW 2022), videoconferencing fatigue was found to arise because tools were designed around steady-state assumptions and a taken-for-granted balance of task and social work. When the rest of the workday collapsed into the meeting, the container broke. Designs must support sociality as well as effectiveness, not assume one is a side-effect of the other.
• Make space for social time. In Making Space for Social Time (CHIWORK 2022), we showed that traditional videoconferencing skips the conversational transitions (the small talk before, after, and around meetings) that carry collegiality and productivity. The CT-Space prototype used spatial and temporal metaphors, spatial audio, and visible group clustering to restore these transitions without requiring all-day connection. Conversational transitions should be a standard requirement for videoconferencing.
• Telepresence is as much a social problem as a technical one. A ten-paper program on mobile robotic telepresence at MSR found that workplace adoption fails when robot affordances mismatch workplace social practices. VROOM (CHI 2020) showed that asymmetric mobile robotic telepresence capabilities can enhance the sense of a remote person's belonging to a space.

Design takeaway: meeting design is an ecology problem, not a UX problem. Fix the interplay of tools, spaces, and practices — not individual interfaces.

Realism is not the only axis that matters.

Three studies on avatars and 3D video in meetings show that representation choices shape mood perception, evaluation, and inclusion in ways that pure fidelity does not predict.

• Cartoon faces can outperform realistic ones over time. In a two-week HoloLens 2 field study (IJHCS 2025), realistic avatars raised expectations their animation could not meet, producing more mood-perception errors than cartoon avatars; words, tone, and movement mattered more than rendering style.
• Avatar evaluation depends on ecological validity. In AR experiments with simulated facial-animation noise (ANIVAE 2024), higher ecological validity shifted judgement away from noise parameters and toward empathy and gender biases — so "acceptable" avatar quality cannot be claimed without controlling for Context, Culture, and Character (the Triple C).
• Spatial 3D video wins attention, loses comfort. An Equal Seat at the Table (CHI EA 2024) placed webcam-derived 3D video of participants in a shared virtual meeting room: attention and co-presence improved over the grid, but the grid still felt more comfortable and professional — familiarity is itself a design constraint.