Research question

“How should artifacts and software be designed to support co-located work in computer dense environments?”

“How could awareness of physical and social context be used?”

A common idea is that technologies for mobile computing and communication enhances the possibilities for distributed work, meaning that collaboration could take place even though people are not co-located. I would like to stress the opposite, that such technologies decrease physical distribution of people by increasing the possibilities for enhanced co-located work. The personal artefacts are to a larger extent brought into a shared local and social context.

The problem is that artifacts and software are not designed to be part of a (local) social context. Instead artifacts is designed to be part of a personal context

Some people have tried to incorporate computers into a social context by stating that they are mediators or enablers of human-human communication [ref]. In a co-located scenario the role of the computer as a mediator of communication changes.

Ubiquitous Computing is also starting to become reality. The office and home environment of tomorrow will have a much higher density of computing devices. Presumably a lot of these devices will be public in the sense that they can share their services with other services or users. There is a trend of making technology “cooperate” in a technical sense, (Jini, Bluetooth) but not software and user interfaces, they need to become context aware.

Context sensitivity

One way of dealing with these problems is to make machines and software aware of its context. Context information includes properties of the physical surroundings as well as the virtual environment.

Using context information a public artifact could adapt to a person allowing personalization and access to personal information and services.

A private artifact could adapt to a local context by giving access to local resources and services such as printers and shared displays. The private artifact could also adapt to a social context, e.g. allowing access to shared (project) data, calendars etc.

One useful context property is proximity, e.g. what people or resources are in the same room at one point. Context sensitivity requires that computers are able to sense their environment. Different kinds of sensors are needed such as location and person sensors.

User GrouP

A specific user group will be examined: university students doing project based work. More specifically these students are students from the new IT-program in Kista where every student is equipped with a laptop. It should however be possible to generalize the results to other groups of people in situations like meetings or different group activities.

scenario

A group of students is working with a project. Most of the students have some mobile computing equipment such as laptops or handhelds that they use in their work.

They also have access to a room were they have regular meetings. This room is equipped with some public work terminals as, a large shared display, scanner, printer and video conferencing equipment. They use this room for a number of different activities, such as brainstorming, briefings, presentations and communication with external people.