He received his PhD in 1997 from the University of Calgary, where he worked and developed the idea of workspace awareness as a design factor for distributed groupware systems.
[4] Gutwin's main research areas are in Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), groupware usability, interaction techniques, collaboration support, modelling human performance, information visualization and interface design.
[3] In 1999,[7] Gutwin developed a key phrase extraction algorithm along with Ian Witten, Gordon Paynter, Eibe Frank, and Craig Nevill-Manning called KEA.
[10] In 2004,[7] Gutwin, alongside Reagan Penner and Kevin Schneider, evaluated how distributed developers maintain group awareness (where in the code are they working, what are they doing, and what their plans are).
The findings suggested that developers maintain both a general awareness of the entire team and more detailed knowledge of people that they plan to work with.
[11] In 2008,[7] Gutwin along with Scott Bateman and Miguel Nacenta, explored the popular method of tag clouds which help visualize and link socially-organized information on websites.
[12] In 2012,[7] Gutwin along with Andy Cockburn and David Ahlstrom, studied the human factors of touch based interactions such as tapping and dragging.