The DrawStream Station or the AVCs of Video Cocktail Napkins

The paper reports on the development of a multimedia system to support collaborative design processes. The DrawStream Station was developed through a cycle of observation of real work, identification of problem characteristics and system requirements, development of the technology, and observation of the technology in use. The system is a combination of a high quality multimedia infrastructure and a particular form of "Space Above/Space Below" interface merging real and virtual representations. The control interface mixes a variety of temporal and logical representations to display a threaded conversation. We report on the use of the system as a way to understand the dynamics of genre systems. Two nascent genres are identified: Asynchronous Video Conversations and Video Cocktail Napkins.