Future Workspaces » Under Development

Multitouch brainstorming in Edinburgh

Ruud Janssen — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 15:35:58 +0000

As part of their design case project, four User System Interaction students from Eindhoven University of Technology (Sophia Atzeni, Annemiek van Drunen, Aljosja Jacobs, and Dirk Verhagen) have designed a multitouch brainstorming application for Future Workspaces. See this earlier post. They have written a paper about their project that has been accepted for the Create10 conference, June 30th – July 2nd in Edinburgh, UK. A PDF copy of the paper is available here.

Sophia, Annemiek, Aljosha, and Dirk: congratulations and good luck in Edinburgh!

A brainstorm application for a multi-touch wall

Ruud Janssen — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 13:31:24 +0000

During their design case project, four User System Interaction students from Eindhoven University of Technology (Sophia Atzeni, Annemiek van Drunen, Aljosja Jacobs, and Dirk Verhagen) have designed a brainstorming application for our multi-touch wall made by SOCO Amsterdam. Below they briefly describe their project and the results.

“On assignment for Future Workspaces we have looked into how to improve collaborative moments for knowledge workers using multi-touch technology. One of the most promising collaborative activities that could be improved was brainstorming. An interactive system already offers many advantages, and especially during the idea clustering phase the advantages of multi-touch can be leveraged. We have developed such a brainstorming application in collaboration with knowledge workers and validated the concept using focus groups.

With our application we try to bring a good deal more fun to the brainstorming process by providing brainstorm participants with interactive games. These games bring participants to the multi touch wall, and also release some of the tensions associated with selecting ‘winning’ ideas. Next to that, we also made large improvements on the clustering process. We feel it is important to be able to freely try different clusterings, and be able to play around during this phase. Using intuitive gestures, and using a ’bubble’ metaphor, brainstorm participants are able to create, move, remove, resize, rearrange, undo and relate clusters and ideas. During the entire brainstorm we support structuring the discussion with a ‘compare idea’ tool so participants can backtrack decisions and their rationale.

Are you curious to see how this all works together to support an entire brainstorming session, from creation of ideas to the selection of them? Then please, check out our movie prototype below. We welcome any comments you might have.”

Co-creation using multitouch surfaces

Geke Ludden — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 11:30:00 +0000

We are currently working on concepts in four concept areas, named ‘Nomadic Working’, ‘Decision Making’, ‘Have a break’ and ‘Co-creation’. This post is dedicated to the last area, Co-creation. Within this area we have generated ideas on how people can work together using multitouch surfaces. Part of this work is done in collaboration with SoCo. A large multi-touch wall is currently under development and we are eager to start developing the right tools that can help people to work together more efficiently. The scenarios (and comics) presented here illustrate our first ideas about how such tools could work.

Below we present two comics illustrating why using a multitouch surface can help people to work together more efficiently. Furthermore, two interaction scenarios are depicted:

Co-creation using multitouch

Co-creation using multitouch at a distance

An interactive display that can be used by multiple people can facilitate working together:

Co-creation using a multitouch wall – scenario for interaction

Harry and Sally have planned a brainstorm session together. To do so, they use the multitouch wall in their office. The Co-create application on the multitouch wall comprises a co-creation space as well as personal working spaces for current users. The personal working space contains links to e.g., flickr or delicious accounts, desktop, frequently used folders.

Interactive displays can also be used to work together at a distance:

Co-creation using a multitouch wall at a distance – scenario for interaction

Bob works at Novay Amsterdam, Anne works at Novay Enschede. Bob and Anne have scheduled a co-creation session. They plan to go over a document together and make some changes. At a set timeframe, Bob and Anne go to a multitouch table in their offices. They select the application that facilitates working together at a distance. The tables now show a video of the person in the other city, both their calenders and a personal working space.

At your earliest convenience

Robert Slagter — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 12:14:14 +0000

“Schedule and forget”

Imagine you would like to discuss an important matter with a specific colleague. You walk into her room only to discover that she is not in. You pick up your mobile phone, search for the phone number and call her. However, she rejects the phone call. You waste precious time walking to her room, your matter is not discussed and possibly you are annoyed by the fact that your colleague did not react. On the other hand your colleague is, due to your call, interrupted from her current activity. A major reason for such situations is that your context and the context of your colleague do not match. In the example above, the location and current activity of you and your colleague do not match. Nevertheless, you still would like to discuss the matter with her. You can either stay monitoring the room of your colleague or start a meeting scheduling process (for example using Outlook). Both processes require your attention and information to judge whether the right conditions exist for the meeting to take place.

We envision a system, which we call AYEC (‘At Your Earliest Convenience’), that facilitates ‘schedule and forget’’: A user can schedule a meeting and specify conditions under which this meeting can take place. He does not have to monitor these conditions (‘forget’), since the system evaluates when the specified conditions become true and subsequently notifies the intended participants. In this way, the system takes over the monitoring task.

For example, you would like to sit down and have a brief talk with two colleagues on a specific topic. You specify in the system which colleagues you would like to meet and specify that all of you should be in the same office, available for interruption and working on the same project. Currently, one of these colleagues is out of the building. When the system detects this colleague enters the building the specified meeting conditions become true and the system sends everybody a request to meet.

AYEC is enabled by evolutions in available sensory devices and the rise of ubiquitous communications. AYEC uses collected information to adapt to the situations of users. This paradigm is called context-awareness. This paradigm is currently being explored in the Future Workspaces project by Tom Broens, Cristian Hesselman and Maarten Wegdam of Novay.