Losing our Place: A Foray into the Attenuated Non-spaces of Groupware and Back Again

In 1986 four idealistic researchers at XEROX PARC, informally crossing organisational and spatial boundaries, spent two weeks working by video link. As this medium created a new space between them, they called it the Media Space. The field blossomed; within ten years researchers delineated place from space, and later work articulated principles for designing distributed place for collaborative creativity and recognised the Ba-Principle (場) of enabling contexts. In 2020 hundreds of millions of us find ourselves in a prolonged version of the same experiment, but rather than convivial workplaces we observe participants fatigued by bare virtual meeting rooms with ephemeral surfaces, void of boundary objects, only weakly affording ambient presence, staging, social signalling or situated action. By contrasting these observations with known design principles, we reveal which are most lacking in contemporary systems and propose a path back to constructing shared meaning in distributed place.