Communication through Portholes

Portholes (Dourish and Bly, 1992) is a media-space-based awareness system developed jointly at
EuroPARC and PARC in 1990, and which was subsequently the basis for related designs at U. Toronto,
NYNEX and other sites. In Portholes, period “snapshots” of offices and public spaces are distributed across
a computer network and made available through “viewers”, which present a simple at-a-glance view of
activity within a distributed work group. The original Portholes system was originally introduced within a
small group in late 1990, expanded through 1991-2, and was in continual use until the technology on which
it was based became unavailable around 1994, although related systems continued to be used within the
same group. The adoption process was, then, relatively successful.
A number of specific examples of the use of the Portholes system within the PARC/EuroPARC media
space groups illustrate the “appropriation” process at work. One of the most striking was a the use of
Portholes to send messages. On one occasion in late December, the EuroPARC users arrived in the office
one morning to find that our colleagues in Palo Alto had left us “Christmas cards” in the form of visual
displays arranged in front of their video cameras, appearing in Portholes. Most of these involved cut-out
images of themselves with festive greetings and other traditional items. Portholes created a “space” that
could be used for indirect communication. On another occasion, the communication was more directed.
Those of us in Cambridge, including a visitor from PARC, noticed that S, one of our PARC colleagues,
was working at his desk at noon Cambridge time, which was 4am in Palo Alto. The reason for this late
night work was that he was completeing his PhD dissertation. Noting that he seemed both stressed and
lonely, we conspired to cause all the EuroPARC Portholes users to wave at him at once, at which point I
also took down the server so that the images would “stick” and S’s Portholes window would be filled with
Cambridge users waving at him.