Future Workspaces » nomadic worker

Virtual Worlds to support the Nomadic Worker

external author — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 08:16:27 +0000

During the projectday one workshop was used to discuss the feasibility of virtual worlds for nomadic working. We see a growing group of nomadic workers, as work is not fixed solely to the office anymore. Increasingly people are working from home or the customer. Besides organizational problems, like planning of resources and projects also personal problems for nomadic workers arise. For example, keeping in touch and in sync with your colleauges and team members becomes more complex. One possible way to deal with these complexities is by using virtual worlds. This workshop was used to play with two virtual world demonstrations and to discuss the merits and drawbacks of this type of technology for nomadic workers.

The participants of the workshop were divided into two groups. One group played with the Virtual Media Office demonstration, prepared by Sefan Burgers from Ericsson. The second group played with the Second Life demonstration, prepared by Bart van den Hooff of the VU.

The result was a nice discussion from which the following elements struck me:

Staying in touch with colleagues can be facilitated using virtual worlds however currently it cannot complete replace face to face contact. For example, drinking coffee at a coffee corner is still very valuable. Maybe a good virtual coffee machine could be a way to go.
Choosing (remote) team members using virtual worlds could become more objective as politics and personal aspects play a lesser role.
Virtual worlds (including avatars) could become a intuitive graphical interface on top of the resources of a worker.
A lot of workers use tools with a lot of (unintuitive) features (e.g. email), virtual worlds could provide a intuitive interface that discloses all these features in a more natural way, after a learning curve has been taken.
Not all tasks of a knowledge worker may be suitable to perform in a virtual world (e.g. editing excel).
The more important decisions become, the more face to face contact is needed to also grasp indirect communication aspects (e.g. body language). Current virtual worlds are less suitable to grasp indirect communications and hence may be less suitable for very important/delicate decisions.

Mike from Jam visualized outcomes of the discussion. More of the results (also from the other workshops) can be found here.

Concept Game

Geke Ludden — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 11:01:17 +0000

To inspire knowledge workers and to gain more insight into what concepts or concept areas appeal to them, we have created The Concept Game. This game can be played individually or in a workshop with a group of people.

The game comes in a carton box that contains a set of 60 small cards that describe and visualize concepts aimed at future ways of working. The box also contains 6 sheets of paper and 6 paperclips. Players of the game are asked to go through the cards to find the 3 concepts that they like least and the 3 concepts that they like best. When these favourite and least favourite concepts are found they can be attached to the 6 sheets of paper using the paperclips. Finally, players can give their opinion about the chosen concepts.

We have handed out the first games to people of the Rabobank Unplugged team and are curious to find out what concepts they will choose. In the near future, more games will be handed out to employees of Future Workspaces partners. In the end, the input we get from knowledge workers that have played the game will assist us in focusing our concept development trajectories.

Communication is good, CommUnification is better

Ruud Janssen — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 21:20:51 +0000

CommUnification is a design concept conceived to address the In Sync and In Touch challenges faced by nomadic and highly mobile workers.

The project is an initiative by five User-System Interaction students at the Eindhoven University of Technology: Wil Rijnen, Brian Pagán, Ying Li, Zhihui Zhang, and Natalia Gredina. It is based on interview findings that nomadic and highly mobile workers are challenged by such problems as communication fragmentation (across multiple channels) and disregard for time zone differences.

These problems signal a disconnect between colleagues and peers, especially when in different geographic locations. After qualitative research, the team has generated a design concept (which can be seen in the video below) which they then evaluated with their target user group in a focus group and using an online survey.

The team’s final report, containing the design rationale for CommUnification and the results of the evaluation is available here.