Physical-virtual workspaces

Connecting Physical and Virtual mediums From a product design standpoint, we are encountering demands for solutions that exist between hard and soft mediums, and there is a need for workspaces that can support and connect both the physical and virtual development of such ideas. These hybrid products are bridging a gap between our physical and virtual experiences and creating new challenges as well as new solutions. In essence, they are serving to connect the tangible and the intangible aspects of our lives. My thesis is focused on the connection between the physical and virtual mediums of information and experience. I hope to explore the workspace as a stage for composing such creative content that includes aspects which are both tangible and intangible. The design explorations will consider the balanced relationship of user experience and social interaction within the working space where intangible ideas are transformed into a tangible reality. The goal is to develop a creative workspace that can be used to form and develop new ideas. The supportive stage would provide the space and means for accessing and manipulating both physical and virtual content, serving as an integrated interface allowing users the ability to fluidly express their ideas in both digital and material mediums. Interfaces between Physical and Virtual mediums As an example, technology represents a body of intangible knowledge that is applied in the physical world. This process transforms information into three dimensional representations which people can interact with. Most importantly, these objects have the ability to represent more than just knowledge alone. They have the potential to incorporate human concepts of thoughts, dreams, emotions, and memory that collectively reinforce the human experience. For these reasons, it is worthwhile to investigate the spatial form and visual representation of such ethereal aspects of information and experience to take the science of technology beyond the impersonal \u27black box\u27 of wires and circuitry. Such product solutions require the successful development of their applications and context sensitive scenarios as well as the form and packaging of their overall embodiment. As technology becomes an ever-increasing part of our lives, a growing challenge for humankind will be to preserve its essential role of expressing and acting out the very nature of what it means to be human in tandem with the developments of design. In order to sustain a prosperous quality of life, our progress in technology and design must preserve humanity by preserving the human experience. To address such concerns, my thesis exploration will focus on investigating applications of technology that connect the physical and virtual experience through a tangible interface which encourages human interaction. The idea is to create a human-centered design rather than one focused on technology alone. With the growing level of connectedness within a networked world, there is an increasing need for the development of product solutions that aid humans in making and maintaining a more beneficial, productive, and enjoyable connectedness with each other and the world around them. Such hybrid products of the future will be challenged to integrate both hard and soft mediums in connecting tangible and intangible forms of information and experience. This will involve the parallel development of product systems which include three-dimensional material structures with integrated interfaces to components of digital multimedia content. The focus of this study views all technology, to some degree, as being purely tacit knowledge until it is applied through a physical manifestation or application. This process of transformation moves information from one medium to another and requires a fluid interface at the point of transition. Although transparent technology can be viewed as an appealing notion to avoid clutter and information overload within such a setting, there is an essential need for real, physical human interaction. An important question is: How can humanness be preserved within such a designed experience? One of the problems which emphasizes the lack of such qualities is evident in today\u27s information workers who are \u27losing touch\u27 with the human intangibles of creative thought, dreams, emotions, memories, and sensations. To improve the design of such interfaces, we must ask, How do objects or environments represent these ideas in a physical way to reinforce, confirm, acknowledge and draw us closer to our sense of what it means to be human? . These issues can be explored in the context of a creative workspace. This point of interaction and exchange is basically an information interface where ideas are transformed from one medium to another. The scenario describes a situation where a user needs to access and interact with intangible information in a tangible way. Several problems which arise include virtual isolation, information overload, and a general disconnected separation of the physical and non-physical worlds. Potential solutions could offer improvement through the evolution of tangible interfaces for intangible experiences. Such concepts would attempt to connect users with dynamic and transparent technology through an integrated physical interface. My proposal is to develop a creative workspace that connects the physical and virtual aspects of information and experience. The proposed design will address the needs of middle-aged people interacting with each other, information, and technology. The creative workspace would act as an interface where information is transformed between physical and digital mediums. Such a design would be used in creative applications at any given moment when there is a need to access, transfer, or transform information. The setting of the design would be placed in an office, studio environment, or point of interaction and exchange for both private and group collaborations. Its purpose would be to support the need to connect to an intangible experience or access intangible information to be applied in a physical way. The design will attempt to create a hybrid, tactile-physical interface that combines aspects of both hard and soft mediums to assist in the organization and transformation of information. The argument of this thesis suggests that the integration of both physical and virtual space within creative workspace environments serves to ultimately improve the meaningful connections between humans, their work, and their interactive experiences

Digital, material and networked: some emerging themes for SET education

Boundaries between the digital and material worlds are becoming blurred as the internet increasingly connects us to things as well as people and information. This is increasingly relevant to education as initiatives which significantly combine digital and material elements in networks are becoming a reality for Science, Engineering and Technology (SET) learning. Our paper reports on the initial findings of a project to carry out a ‘state of the art’ review of literature to establish the key themes, opportunities and obstacles that are emerging from the development and use of these ‘hybrid’ systems in learning. We wanted to explore the extent to which this new domain of study is being reported in the literature and to identify work representative of this area. Our aim was to investigate the depth of research in this area by going beyond the technologically descriptive to focus on pedagogical and organisational issues raised in the literature. To identify the state of current research in the area we carried out a systematic search of databases of Science, Engineering and Technology education literature. We found 808 papers relating to the hybrid learning initiatives we are interested in, of which the majority, 81%, involved the Engineering and Technology disciplines while 6.8% related to Science. The vast majority of papers referred to remote laboratories and most of these were concerned with describing the technologies involved. In order to explore issues emerging from the research, we carried out an in-depth text review of a particular subset of the papers found that focussed on pedagogical issues. The three main themes that emerged were: the importance of real data and authenticity in learning; the importance of a sense of presence (e.g. telepresence, social presence and/or immersion) and the locus of control in, and responsiveness of, a hybrid system. We conclude that these new digital ‘hybrid’ pedagogies offer a lens with which to view both the more traditional material pedagogies, e.g. laboratory-based learning, and purely digital pedagogies, e.g. virtual labs. Finally, issues of authenticity, presence and control/responsiveness will be of increasing pedagogical importance to other ‘hybrid’ systems, such as those involving ubiquitous computing

What did the Romans ever do for us? ‘Next generation’ networks and hybrid learning resources

Networked learning is fundamentally concerned with the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) to link people to people and resources, to support the process of learning. This paper explores some current and forthcoming changes in ICT and some potential implications of these developments for networked learning. Whilst we aim to avoid taking a technologically determinist stance, we explore the potential for future practice and how some educational and pedagogic practices are evolving to exploit and shape the digital environment. We argue that we can change both the ways in which connections between people (learners and other learners; learners and tutors) are made and the nature of the resources that learning communities (particularly distributed communities) can engage with. In doing this we draw on two strands of work. Firstly, we draw on the ‘IBZL Education’ a UK Open University initiative to develop new scholarship in the context of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) through which educators are encouraged to think about technological change in the next five to ten years and ways in which we can intervene and shape these developments. We use problem-based learning as an example of a learning experience that can be difficult to implement in a networked learning environment. IBZL identified two broad strands of significant technological development. 'Superfast' broadband networks that are capable of supporting novel applications are being rolled in the UK (and elsewhere). Also, boundaries between the real and virtual worlds are becoming blurred as in the ‘internet of things’ where, for example, RFID tags enable information about the real world to be brought into the virtual one. We use the term ‘artefact’ to describe designed components, whether entirely digital, such as a computer forum, or material, such as a tablet PC. Networked ‘hybrid’ technologies of virtual and material components have may great potential for use in education. Secondly, we illustrate how these changes may be beginning to happen in distance education using the example of TU100 My Digital Life, a new introductory Open University. . TU100 Students use an electronics board in their own homes to work on a programming problem in collaboration other students through a tutor-led tutorial in a web conferencing system. We also note some of the evident complexity that establishing such resources as part of wider infrastructures of networked learning would be likely to involve

DIY networking as a facilitator for interdisciplinary research on the hybrid city

DIY networking is a technology with special characteristics compared to the public Internet, which holds a unique potential for empowering citizens to shape their hybrid urban space toward conviviality and collective awareness. It can also play the role of a “boundary object” for facilitating interdisciplinary interactions and participatory processes between different actors: researchers, engineers, practitioners, artists, designers, local authorities, and activists. This position paper presents a social learning framework, the DIY networking paradigm, that we aim to put in the centre of the hybrid space design process. We first introduce our individual views on the role of design as discussed in the fields of engineering, urban planning, urban interaction design, design research, and community informatics. We then introduce a simple methodology for combining these diverse perspectives into a meaningful interdisciplinary collaboration, through a series of related events with different structure and framing. We conclude with a short summary of a selection of these events, which serves also as an introduction to the CONTACT workshop on facilitating information sharing between strangers, in the context of the Hybrid City III conference

Community space in complex learning communities : lessons learnt

Highly complex learning communities where diverse participants collaborate to achieve multiple aims through synergy have the potential to be highly creative and productive. However the diversity and multiple aims can also mean the advantages of a community - share understand, trust and direction - are difficult to achieve, resulting in few if any of the aims being realised. We review two case studies, where the learning community is trying to achieve multiple aims, in order to explore how virtual and physical space are employed to support collaborative learning and enhance synergistic potential. The analysis shows that high levels of diversity have influenced these spaces and trends towards differentiation and holistically designed hybrid, virtual and physical, collaboration space. The characteristics of theses cases are sufficiently general to lead us to draw insights for the building of collaborative space in multi-purpose complex learning communities. These are equably applicable to learning communities which share features such as heterogeneity, multiple locations or a mixture of spaces

A first approach to understanding and measuring naturalness in driver-car interaction

With technology changing the nature of the driving task, qualitative methods can help designers understand and measure driver-car interaction naturalness. Fifteen drivers were interviewed at length in their own parked cars using ethnographically-inspired questions probing issues of interaction salience, expectation, feelings, desires and meanings. Thematic analysis and content analysis found five distinct components relating to 'rich physical' aspects of natural feeling interaction typified by richer physical, analogue, tactile styles of interaction and control. Further components relate to humanlike, intelligent, assistive, socially-aware 'perceived behaviours' of the car. The advantages and challenges of a naturalness-based approach are discussed and ten cognitive component constructs of driver-car naturalness are proposed. These may eventually be applied as a checklist in automotive interaction design.This research was fully funded by a research grant from Jaguar Land Rover, and partially funded by project n.220050/F11 granted by Research Council of Norway