Supporting Inter-Group Relationships in Human-Centered Chance Discovery

Human-centered chance discovery involves ad-hoc teams of experts who inspect the output of a chance discovery algorithm and develop scenarios for decision making. The team members typically are from different areas, such as product design or marketing, and have relationships to their own teams in these areas. Therefore the inter-team relationships affect the performance of the chance discovery team. The issue of how to support such relationships is addressed by reviewing an earlier team support system that supported intra-team relationships rather than inter-team relationships as well as the theoretical concept of relationality. It was found that both do not sufficiently consider inter-team relationships. Therefore an interview study with 10 practitioners in Japanese tea clubs has been conducted with the objective to enhance the relationality concept. The study equally focused on experience in the tea club and the life history of the interviewee. The result suggests five new characteristics of relationality. The paper concludes by describing a system that implements these characteristics and extends the previous system to inter-team relationships.