Future Workspaces » concept lab

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.”

Future Workspaces booklet series

Ruud Janssen — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 13:38:52 +0000

We are proud to present the Future Workspaces booklet series!

The booklets illustrate insights, best practices, and lessons learned during two years of research, concept development, case studies, and special interest sessions with experts and industry. We plan to regularly update the series with new booklets.

Currently, the series contains the following four titles:

Connecting professionals: How to stimulate corporate conversations through social media by Robert Slagter
Lab: New tools for new ways of working by Geke Ludden
Generations@work: Embracing young talent by Ellen Szwajcer
Four challenges for knowledge workers: Effects of working anytime, anywhere by Ruud Janssen

We hope you like the booklets and we welcome any feedback.