Using Group Drawing to Facilitate Self-expression and thus Improve Positive Affect Among Team Members

Socio-emotional content is vital for building trusting, productive relationships that go beyond task-oriented communication in teams. But for distributed collaborators, it is challenging to communicate emotional status because of working over a distance. We propose to use non-work-related, non-competitive, and playful drawing online to encourage nonverbal expressions of emotions and interactions. We describe our research and preliminary results from a recent study where we demonstrated that it was effective to use freeform drawing to help distributed teams to enhance individual positive emotions. We also outline future research that could shed light on design opportunities for supporting affective expressions and sharing in distributed software engineering teams.