Computation for the Corridor: Experiments and Experiences with augmenting public spaces

Public areas within the workplace are settings for day-to-day social activities that people may not associate with work, but which nonetheless have been found to contribute to the well-being of individual workers, and to the overall health of the organization. Paper bulletin boards, located on walls in public lounges, hallways, and foyers, have remained important even as e-mail and the web have become accessible nearly everywhere. These bulletin boards help to build an organizational sense of community, by serving as a valuable social and informal communications channel outside of one’s work context. These settings are also locations where workers most frequently chat with colleagues who are organizationally outside their immediate workgroups. These short, unplanned informal meetings have been shown to play an important role in forming collaborations, making social connections, and discovering and exchanging expertise. The increased attention to public spaces has led architects and workplace designers to re-think the allocation of space in the workplace, from the officeblock layouts that maximized private office space in the 1960’s (visible in the notorious ’cubicle farms’ of today), to those of open, common areas emphasizing shared space. Yet despite this, little information technology has come into common use in these public spaces, and the spaces have changed little compared to the modern office desk. The OK-net project was conceived in 2002 to study how to design systems that could be integrated with the various types of public spaces in the workplace, and which would complement the activities that took place therein. We wanted OKnet applications to help build community within our organization by providing information dissemination capabilities for informal communications, and to foster greater social awareness and connectedness within the organization. Simultaneously, we had the goal of examining how user interface challenges inherent in building such systems could be solved with emerging user interaction technologies such as vision, gestural, and speech based user interfaces. Finally, we wished to design a software architecture which would facilitate developing