After two years working on my PhD, I though it was a good time to update my phd research mindmap. The previous one was here and there is the new version:

I only put on the map the topic I adress in the current research, that is why I removed some aspects, especially the whole part concerning the social functions of space/place. Awareness of others' whereabouts and the technology to do this as well as their impacts on small group-collaboration is the cornerstone of the project. What is interesting is to see how the project evolved in the last 2 years with some back and forth movements, the addition of new methods and how exploratory activities lead to new dimensions being tackled.

This investigation is mostly quantitative in the epistemological sense, which means that we followed an inductive reasoning, trying to benefit from hypotheses we had coming from virtual reality investigation (my masters thesis, see here). At the beginning of the project, the point was to replicate studies in VR to see if results held in the physical world: would people pay attention to others' location as we saw in VR projects? It's a curious way to do research though, but sometimes the insight to address a specific research question si weird. However it certainly makes sense to tackle the issue of how small groups pay attention to their members' location in real space since news technologies allow it. Maybe this weird circumvolution is due to the fact that this PhD is made in a human-computer interaction discipline and not in sociology, nor in psychology.

Finally, I would point that I tried to include some qualitative dimensions in my methodology, to get more details about the participants' experience as well as to deepen the understanding of the socio-cognitive processes involved. Some folks might find this not really valid from an epistemological perspective but hey that's a struggle out there between all the school of thoughts we have to deal with.