The Animated Work Environment: A Design-Research Exemplar Supporting Social and Virtual Collaboration in an Increasingly Digital Society

While single-user computing via the Internet has established a powerful global link between people, it offers little to individuals working intensively and collaboratively with an array of tools, documents and materials in one physical space. This shortcoming in the everyday employment of Information Technology (IT) has prompted the architect-author to assemble a team of researchers to develop a physical, programmable work environment supporting both social and virtual collaboration in an increasingly digital society. The transdisciplinary team – architect, robotics engineer, human factors psychologist, and sociologist – envision the work environment less as a design product and more as the locus of interaction between people, software, information, machines, furniture, and other physical surroundings – a complex manifestation demanding the expertise of all four disciplines. The Animated Work Environment (AWE) project involves the designing, prototyping, demonstrating and evaluating of an articulated, programmable robot-environment with embedded IT. The development of AWE follows a careful design science research methodology involving early prototyping, scenariogeneration, and three kinds of ethnographic investigation performed iteratively throughout the design process. This paper presents the developing full-scale, working AWE prototype and its programmable configurations. Such a design-research investigation redefines research in all four participating disciplines, here meeting to realize a complex, responsive, physical environment aimed at facilitating productivity, connectedness and innovation across fluid assemblages of people working in a variety of locations and settings.