Ambient displays
and mobile devices for the creation of social architectural spaces
Supporting informal communication and social awareness in organisations
Norbert Streitz, Thorsten Prante, Carsten Röcker, Daniel Van Alphen,
Carsten Magerkurth, Richard Stenzel, Daniela Plewe
AMBIENTE research division, Fraunhofer IPSI
Darmstadt, Germany
http://www.ipsi.fraunhofer.de/ambiente
{streitz, prante, roecker, magerkur, stenzel}@ipsi.fraunhofer.de
Abstract:
In this paper, we address three major issues, look at their interaction and
combination and present our results on how to arrive at solutions for these
issues. The issues are: 1) supporting informal communication and atmosphere
in organisations, 2) the role and potential of ambient displays in future
work environments, and 3) the combination of mostly static artefacts that
are integrated in the architectural environment with mobile devices carried
by people. Our results can be considered as steps towards the design and realization
of what we call “social architectural spaces” in the context of
future work environments. These environments will be populated with a range
of different smart artefacts that are designed to facilitate awareness and
notification as well as informal communication. We address a range of spaces
in office buildings including public spaces, e.g., in the hallway, the foyer,
and the cafeteria that have not been the focus of research so far. In particular,
we present two artefacts: the Hello.Wall, a wall-size large ambient display,
and the ViewPort, a mobile handheld device. They are interacting with each
other via wireless networks and different types of sensing technology. The
artefacts and the software were developed in the EU-funded “Disappearing
Computer”-project “Ambient Agoras: Dynamic Information Clouds
in a Hybrid Worlds”.
Key words: ambient displays, mobile devices, informal communication, atmosphere, social architectural space, ubiquitous computing