Designing an Augmented Writing Surface

55 A t Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), we're investigating strategies for augmenting the individual office environment. In making this distinction, we envision the principally private space of an individual employee. Despite experiments with " hoteling " and other depersonalized environments , the use of personal spaces remains the norm for many cultures. Our goal is to blur the boundaries between the physical and virtual realms by augmenting common office tools with computational capabilities. One design goal underlying this approach is to retain the natural affordances of the existing tool, even if this constraint requires limiting the features or complexity of the augmented tool. We're currently focusing on extending the common office whiteboard—a ubiquitous writing surface typically hung on office walls. We envision replacing the whiteboard with a touch-sensitive surface, " colored " stylus makers, and video projection, but first we wanted to understand the typical uses and affordances of office whiteboards. Although whiteboard and wallboard use have been studied in other settings 1,2 such as meeting rooms, classrooms, and production environments, our initial observations indicated that whiteboard use in the office differed from its use in more public spaces: s In contrast to meeting room or production environments , office whiteboards tend to be used for a heterogeneous set of tasks in parallel. s Whiteboard content seems to group in natural clusters or segments. These segments may correspond to different tasks, different people, or writing at different points in time. s Personal whiteboard content in particular seems heavily context-dependent. Whether it is a seven-digit number or a list of items, the user must remember why and when it was written. Likewise the content may be incomplete, with just enough information present for the user to remember the missing data. These characteristics—thinking or preproduction tasks, everyday content, and clusters of persistent and short-lived content—underlie our model of informal whiteboard use in an individual office. This use of white-boards remains distinct from the use of desktop computers. Moreover, it still varies significantly from the use of personal, pen-input devices given a whiteboard's public role and large, continually visible surface. Using observational data and interviews, we collected information about personal whiteboard use in the research lab environment at Xerox PARC. We had a diversity of participants, ranging from senior managers to visiting researchers and support personnel. We took daily photographs of office whiteboards for approximately two weeks. The snapshots provided useful …