Exploring Community Building with an Awareness Display

In this paper, we present a field trial of a pervasive system called Panorama that is aimed at supporting social awareness in work environments. Panorama is an intelligent situated display in the staff room of an academic department. It artistically represents non-critical user generated content such as images from holidays, conferences and other social gatherings, as well as textual messages on its display. It also captures images and videos from different public spaces of the department and streams them onto the Panorama screen, using appropriate abstraction techniques. We studied the use of Panorama for two weeks and observed how Panorama affected staff members’ social awareness and community building. We report that Panorama simulated curiosity and learning, initiated new interactions and provided a mechanism for cherishing old memories

Organizational Probes:Exploring Playful Interactions in Work Environment

Playfulness, with non-intrusive elements, can be considered a useful resource for enhancing social awareness and community building within work organizations. Taking inspirations from the cultural probes approach, we developed organizational probes as a set of investigation tools that could provide useful information about employees’ everyday playful experiences within their work organizations. In an academic work environment, we applied our organizational probes over a period of three weeks. Based on the collected data we developed two design concepts for playful technologies in work environments

Doing the right thing; gamification as a means to tuning human behavior

This chapter discusses how gamification, the use of game mechanics, game dynamics and game technology within the practice of our everyday lives is both the result of and a driving force in the convergence of physical and virtual worlds, in order to evaluate the promises and risks of gamification. First, we look at the difference between everyday life and games. We’ll examine what virtualization is, and how human perception structures space in order to try and grasp (virtual) reality. We’ll see how the world that we experience is amap of possible actions, and that our relation to the world is a feedback loop. We examine how in the process of gamification, learning for individuals and groups is fueled by personalization of this feedback loop to allow for faster learning, and how this gamification in turn powers personal guidance in everyday life contexts. It is of particular interest to us to carefully analyze how the process of gamification is intertwined with the human perception and construction of space, how this perception and construction of space determine our collective behavior, and how gamification can lead to more freedom and creativity, but also to more monitoring and restrictions (less freedom and less creativity)

Déplacements et effets de la distance ou du temps : pour une prise en compte des surdéterminants sociaux

This book chapter is from Mobilités et temporalités: La question des relations entre mobilités et temporalités conjugue deux préoccupations contemporaines qui semblent s'alimenter l'une l'autre. D'une part la question des mobilités - et particulièrement des congestions liées aux mobilités - est inscrite à l'agenda politique depuis plus de vingt ans. D'autre part, la question du temps - du discours sur son «accélération» à celui sur son individualisation, semble émerger timidement depuis le début de ce siècle dans la sphère politique. La question des relations entre mobilités et temporalités apparaît d'une extrême complexité car elle suppose, pour l'éclairer, d'interroger tout aussi bien la transformation des temps sociaux, les effets des dynamiques temporelles sur les structures (socio)-spatiales, l'organisation des modes de transports ou encore les attitudes temporelles propres à l'usage des divers modes de transport. Cet ouvrage reprend dix contributions issues du colloque Mobilités et temporalités organisé aux Facultés universitaires Saint-Louis à Bruxelles en mars 2004. Cette réunion s'inscrivait dans le cadre des travaux du groupe de travail «Mobilités spatiales et fluidités sociales» de l'Association internationale des sociologues de langue française (AISLF).</p

Engineering social awareness in work environments

A growing interest is seen for designing intelligent environments that support personally meaningful, sociable and rich everyday experiences. In this paper we describe an intelligent, large screen display called Panorama that is aimed at supporting and enhancing social awareness within an academic work environment. Panorama is not intended to provide instrumental or other productivity related information. Rather, the goal of Panorama is to enhance social awareness by providing interpersonal and rich information related to co-workers and their everyday interactions in the department. A two-phase assessment of Panorama showed to promote curiosity and interest in exploring different activities in the environment

Interactive Scenario Visualization for User-Based Service Development

Scenarios are commonly used to develop new systems in multidisciplinary projects. However, written scenarios are sequential, not dynamic and often too abstract or difficult to understand for end users. The goal of this paper hence is to extend the use of scenarios in design methodologies, using an interactive scenario visualization (ISV) approach. After discussing scenario-based design, we show that ISV can be used beneficially to develop a new ICT system and that ISV aids in reflection upon the design trajectory. Comparing two software platforms, we found it was possible to develop such ISVs inexpensively, rapidly and with good visual quality. As a case study, we demonstrate the use of a home care telemedicine system in 3D for discussion and development purposes. An evaluation among n=22 professionals illustrates that ISVs can prove useful in design, aid in clarification of new systems, are suitable to demonstrate system functionalities, and aid in articulating feedback. Finally, we discuss generalization of the use of ISVs

Interactive scenario visualization for user-based service development

Scenarios are commonly used to develop new systems in multidisciplinary projects. However, written scenarios are sequential, not dynamic and often too abstract or difficult to understand for end users. The goal of this paper hence is to extend the use of scenarios in design methodologies, using an interactive scenario visualization (ISV) approach. After discussing scenario-based design, we show that ISV can be used beneficially to develop a new ICT system and that ISV aids in reflection upon the design trajectory. Comparing two software platforms, we found it was possible to develop such ISVs inexpensively, rapidly and with good visual quality. As a case study, we demonstrate the use of a home care telemedicine system in 3D for discussion and development purposes. An evaluation among n=22 professionals illustrates that ISVs can prove useful in design, aid in clarification of new systems, are suitable to demonstrate system functionalities, and aid in articulating feedback. Finally, we discuss generalization of the use of ISVs

Being Social @ Work: Designing for Playfully Mediated Social Awareness in Work Environments

Awareness within work environments should not be seen limited to important work-related information, activities and relationships. Mediating somewhat casual and engaging encounters related to non-work issues could also lead to meaningful and pleasurable experiences. This paper explores a design approach to support playfully mediated social awareness within an academic environment. Using ethnographic exploration and understanding the current and aspired practices, we provide details of two broad (and some times overlapping) categories of interaction for supporting and enhancing playfully mediated social awareness amongst staff members: 1) Self-Reflections and 2) Casual Encounters. We implement these two categories of interaction in an intelligent, asynchronous, large screen display called Panorama, for the staff room of our computer science department. Panorama attempts to mediate non-critical, non-work related information about the staff-members in an engaging manner to enhance social awareness within the department. We particularly emphasize on the soft design issues like reflections, belonging, care, pleasure and playfulness utilized in our design approach. The result of a two-phase assessment study suggests that our conceptualization of social awareness and the Panorama application has the potential to be easily incorporated into our academic environment