One promise of computing technology is to deliver information, anytime anywhere. Yet, even in the most computerized settings such as offices, this vision has yet to be fully realized. Instead, many workplaces suffer from an unfortunate irony: the very systems designed to solve workplace problems have created new difficulties. People are expert at seamlessly managing social and information flows, however, the technological substrate intended to support such collaboration is often brittle and slow to adapt. Interactions with this technological infrastructure become foregrounded, forcing users to attend to the technology itself rather than to the work at hand. This disconnect becomes all the more apparent in the face of highly dynamic, fluid forms of collaboration in which technological inertia slows the pace of interchange. Reconfiguring our technical infrastructure is rarely as easy or as natural as moving chairs together in a meeting room.
This proposed research aims to create, deploy, and evaluate a system of technical infrastructure that will help rather than hinder fluid collaboration. It will attempt to couple the digital infrastructure ? the services, applications, protocols, and devices in a space ? to the physical infrastructure of that space. This will make the digital infrastructure responsive to actions taken in the physical realm; likewise, it will make the physical infrastructure a medium for conveying affordances and feedback of the digital capabilities in a space to its users. This coupling will enable the fluid movement of information and collaborative artifacts from the physical domain to the digital, and vice versa. The results will be not only a set of digital services designed to enhance collaboration, but a deep integration of those services into the physical environment, along with a set of design guidelines, principles, and evaluation methodology for how to successfully blend the physical and the digital to better support fluid collaboration.
Broader Impact: This research has tremendous practical import to potentially improve the productivity of knowledge workers by decreasing the frustration and inefficiencies associated with on-the-fly use of collaborative technologies. The strong partnership with Steelcase and a commitment to public release of prototypes should facilitate rapid transfer of key findings to industry. The prototype design and evaluation activities will serve to engage students at all levels in Georgia Tech's new Human-Centered Computing program.
