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!
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.”
Since one of our customers would like to experiment with close collaboration across organizational boundaries (discussing information), I am currently comparing a series of tools. The table below represents my findings from testing the different alternatives. The information in the row “User friendliness” is subjective: it indicates how easy I could find my way around the tool. If you see information in the table that you consider to be not correct, please let me know or post a comment. (more…)
This week we started to experiment with the Combine & Create application for the MS Surface table. The application allows two people to combine slides from two personal folders into one new presentation and subsequently receive the result in their inbox. It illustrates some of the possibilities of the Surface table: for instance, as you drag slides from the folders on the shared working area you can “staple” them (i.e., connect them) using a black pawn. This interplay of virtual and physical objects is an interesting topic for further research.
While much of the existing applications for the MS Surface table focus on communication with customers, Combine & Create provides an example of how the table can support knowledge work as well. Especially for working with visuals, or visual information, from different perspectives such an application could prove useful.
The coming weeks we will experiment with the application at the Rabobank, gather user feedback and evaluate this application. We’ll keep you posted on the results.
Kenniswerkers gebruiken middelen voor samenwerking die vaak ingaan tegen het beveiligingsbeleid van de bedrijven waar zij werken. De methoden en middelen die kenniswerkers gebruiken voor samenwerking (collaboration) sluiten lang niet altijd aan op het beveiligingsbeleid van ondernemingen. De ‘overtreders’ van de security-regels doen dit echter lang niet altijd bewust. Zij willen snel en efficiënt samenwerken, maar hebben dan onvoldoende blik op de gevolgen. Dit blijkt uit een onderzoek door marktmonitor Forrester onder drieduizend kenniswerkers in Europa. (Volledig artikel: Webwereld, 12 februari 2009)
Last year, an experiment was conducted at the VU University to determine what the role of virtual worlds could be in geographically distributed decision making processes. Virtual worlds have been receiving a lot of media attention over the past year, and people in organizations increasingly have experience in various virtual environments. Still, we are in the dark about the potential value of these environments for organizations. Combined with the fact that people in organizations increasingly work geographically dispersed, and independent of time and location, this triggered us to consider the possibilities of virtual worlds as group decision support systems.Our aim was to study the contribution of virtual worlds to geographically dispersed team decision making in terms of both facilitating (and improving) the interaction between participants, and improving the quality of the decision being reached. Not that important now, but I think we could better frame this in terms of communication/interaction and information gathering/processing. Improving the decision being reached is an outcome, while facilitating interaction concerns the process (see presentation) In order to be able to do this, we compared decision making in virtual worlds (we used Second Life for our experiment) to decision making that was supported by a purely text-based chat functionality. This would enable us to determine the added value of the visualization that virtual worlds offer in terms of both interaction and decision making.
The decision process that was central in the experiment focused on a spatial decision problem. A team had to make a decision on the use of a vacant piece of land situated in an urban area. The virtual world of Second Life was used to create a virtual image of an urban area.
Vanaf 6 oktober is de netwerk- en collaboratiedienst Bluehouse van IBM online beschikbaar. De bètaversie van deze zakelijke Facebook-variant is tijdelijk gratis te gebruiken.
(full text article: Webwereld, 6 oktober 2008)
At the moment Sun is experimenting with Project Wonderland, a virtual workspace where employees can accomplish their real work, share documents, and meet with colleagues using voice communication. Fortunately, they recognize that knowledge workers frequently collaborate over shared objects (presentations, drawings, documents). Unlike for instance the Second Life environment, Project Wonderland allows knowledge workers to share their applications, although it now only allows sharing Java and X applications.
Within Future Workspaces, a team of researchers from the Free University in Amsterdam is investigating decision making processes in virtual environments. Keep an eye on their publications!
A typical brainstorming session produces a handful of flipover sheets with tons of sticky notes on them, that is, until they all start to come loose! Ideal as this may be for storming your mind and structuring your ideas, it is certainly not a good format to keep your results until a follow-up session. Transcribing the results is cumbersome and, like taking a picture, it freezes the results instead of making them accessible for future sessions. (more…)
Jotting a simple list is a great way to brainstorm, but when you want to visualize, organize, and untangle a deep set of ideas, you want a mind map. (Source: Lifehacker, July 14, 2008)
The workload indicator signals to yourself and to others how busy you are.
The workload indicator calculates how busy you are based on user input (self-score) and available data such as the number of appointments in your schedule, the lenght of your to-do list, the change in number of unread e-mails, etc. The result is presented to yourself and, in an aggregated way, to others you have authorized. (more…)
RSS
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.
This week we started to experiment with the Combine & Create application for the 
