Supporting Collaboration with Augmented Environments

 

Design of augmented furniture should address interaction with and between people, as devices that simply satisfy technical requirements are not enough. Often, good practice does not emerge spontaneously, especially during activities which require some extra individual effort to bring collective benefits and the artefacts themselves should then be the catalysts for good practice.

Our design approach is to provide affordances which support collaborative activity and foster good practices in individual and collaborative work, by making good practice easier than poor practice. Our design process is based on observing actual interaction in the workplace, and gradually develops, with users, new solutions to problems encountered in actual use.

Our studies of real work meetings show that participants often lose awareness of common goals, are easily sidetracked by technical failures, need many common large display surfaces (whiteboards etc.), prefer seeing distant participants than simply hearing them, and that many meeting outcomes may be lost when, as is often the case, no proper recording of decisions is done.

We describe here how we implemented affordances for augmented collaboration in meeting rooms. This includes shared interactive boards, video-conferencing systems (embedded in walls or on mobile trolleys). We are not using “augmented furniture” per se. Rather, we integrate off-the-shelf components to make the meeting room as a whole an augmented system, enabling interaction with the information infrastructure and distant locations. This integration will be described in some detail.

We also provide details about our practice of interaction design and techniques for dissemination of augmented environments inside large corporations.