>		Candice Coh
>		Ron Hofer
>		Daisuke Taniuchi
Elisa Rubegni (+)

		Our main goal in the beginning was to identify a shared focus on the overall theme remote relations, tools for collaboration. Talking about our experiences of remote relation and collaboration and describing in detail our working environments at home we developed gradually a more accurate understanding of each other. In several brainstorming sessions we identified the issues and problems we could deduce from our personal and professional interests and experiences. The emerging common thread was relationships between people working in environments apart and their desire to communicate the atmosphere, mood and feelings of their respective work places. In general, we really want to communicate with each other in face-to-face conversations; remote collaboration can only be the second choice Telecommunication technology is developing faster and faster and has proven to be highly effective for communicating data, but is very poor when it comes to share gestures, facial expressions, intonation and so on; how could people which work in different locations convey a feel of their remote work environment or collaborators? We were all keen to design concepts for tools that would enable such communication. Once we agreed on a this unifying group vision, it was much easier to negotiate a common language, bridging our divers cultural backgrounds. In the following development process we repeatedly engaged in convergence phases, giving us the opportunity to clearly identify strenghts and weaknesses of each member's propositions; each concept was scrutinized for consistency and appropriateness in regards to the overall goal using methods of storytelling and scenario building. At each step the group had to decide which of the ideas to follow in more detail. Conclusion: We learned the potential of in-depth scenarios not only for the description of design issues but also as a means of evaluation; envisioning concrete circumstances engages storytellers to consider all possibilities explicitly and implicitly contained in their descriptions. The huge scope of the topic and the limited time available did not allow us to develop mock-ups and build prototypes of the ideas developed. We discussed however the importance of this step for the further refinement of our design concepts and their effective testing in real environments.