Colab

Summary

Colab is a foundational exploration of how computers can enhance collaborative problem solving in face-to-face meetings — a domain where traditional computing tools have often proven ineffective. Despite the widespread adoption of computers for individual work, most meetings still rely on passive media like chalkboards or flip charts, which excel at externalizing ideas and supporting shared memory and interaction. Computers, by contrast, were frequently left aside in favor of these analog surfaces, even though they could offer far greater flexibility, persistence, and retrievability of shared information.

To investigate how digital tools might better support collaboration, the researchers built an experimental environment called Colab at Xerox PARC. In Colab, participants gathered around a table using networked workstations connected to a shared display system, enabling coordinated drawing, sketching, and simultaneous interaction. A key innovation was the concept of WYSIWIS (What You See Is What I See), an extension of WYSIWYG that ensures all collaborators view the same shared workspace in real time, preserving shared attention and facilitating mutual understanding.

Through early prototypes and collaborative tools developed within the Colab room, the project explored how computational support could make meetings feel less like committee labor and more like joint problem solving. Rather than forcing participants to switch between individual and group work, Colab sought to combine shared space, real-time coordination, and digitally enhanced tools to support conversation, externalized memory, and coordinated reasoning — ultimately making collaborative problem solving more fluid, powerful, and human-centered.

Crafting tools that actually help collaboration is a very subtle enterprise. There are two parts to our thesis. The first is that creative genius lies in the social substrate itself. Secondly, the interaction of ideas properly externalized and appreciated leads to wonderful combinations and results. Some of this synergy and exposure can be enhanced by tools in the social infrastructure. There is a streak of genius and creativity in each of us. That streak can be tapped by creating a medium in which ideas can rub productively against each other. Mark Stefik

Key concepts

• Computing for face-to-face collaboration Colab shifts computing from an individual activity to a group one, focusing on how computers can actively support people working together in the same physical space.
• Shared work surfaces By combining networked computers with a shared display, Colab enables participants to draw, sketch, and manipulate ideas collectively, preserving shared focus and group memory.
• WYSIWIS (What You See Is What I See) A core principle ensuring all participants view the same shared workspace in real time, supporting mutual understanding, coordination, and joint attention.
• Externalized group memory Like a chalkboard, Colab’s digital surfaces allow ideas to persist, be revisited, rearranged, and built upon, enhancing collective reasoning during meetings.
• Meetings as joint problem solving Colab reframes meetings from procedural coordination into active, collaborative problem solving by tightly integrating conversation, shared artifacts, and real-time interaction.

Colab reframes collaboration not as a series of individual tasks but as a collective, spatially grounded activity needing tools that support co-presence, shared memory, and coordinated action. By investigating how computers and shared surfaces can integrate social interaction with digital work, it laid early groundwork for collaborative user interfaces and groupware that dissolve the boundaries between people and their tools.

This idea was originally published as Beyond the Chalkboard: Computer Support for Collaboration and Problem Solving in Meetings. This was further explored in Toward Portable Ideas, proposing persistent workspaces that let groups resume and share meetings anywhere.