Whereabouts Screens: Supporting social interaction and location awareness at the workplace

Sammanfattning: The Whereabouts Screens are a minimalistic publishing system offering location awareness at the workplace. The employees can share information with their colleagues, relevant mostly to their whereabouts, by publishing it on several situated displays located around the office space. The Whereabouts Screens have been installed with minimal changes since 2012 at the Mobile Life center and as a relatively new system, it has still not reached its full potential. Despite its “primitive” characteristics however, the employees show a continued interest in using them. Based on related research on situated displays the research questions to be answered are: What do the semi-public situated displays in the workplace have to offer to their users? How can they be augmented and better integrated in their environment using the existing technology? To investigate these questions, Human-Computer Interaction methods such as in-situ observations, interviews, a design workshop and prototyping were used. The result was a prototype of an augmented system, in the form of a notice board where the users can post notes of different types (text, images, etc.). The board is extended beyond the limits of the screen with LEDs. The intensity and colors of the LEDs are affected by the use of the system, and illuminate the area around the screen. The augmented Whereabouts Screens aim to promote social interaction and location awareness at the workplace. They were evaluated through user testing and the first results show a positive reception from the users.