future of “physical” meetings.

What is my product and what are my inspirations?

This exercise intends to thrive into the physical part of meetings. What technologies do we have already that may help us have a more suitable meeting space. How should be that meeting space? The future of meetings will compose of two big players. The physical player and the remote player. What else can we add or arrange (besides computers, laptops and screens) to have a seamless integration of team players in a physical meeting. My product incorporates new office pieces to make a new kind of meeting room. One where the most important piece are the people that are meeting. The circular walls  provide the spatial condition to have a broad view of what’s happening in the meeting. It integrates physical with virtual services to provide a seamless experience for meetings. It does not necessarily need a native software because it focuses on the arrangement of available hardware. A laptop computer and mobile devices (already accessible) work. The center piece of a table is removed. Although a small table is provided as a personal additive to your chair, our product promotes that the tables should be virtual.
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Posted in Future of Work, Rafael Vargas, Students | Comments closed

Workshop structure

A few lines here to review how we structured the workshop:

Day 1: We’ve set the conceptual part of the workshop (Vision, Ideas, Execution). I also showcased my work so you could all get to know me, what I was working on, what I was struggling with, etc. The idea was to get some practical day-to-day info  but also understand how I can help you and where I can’t…

Day 2: We generated ideas. We’ve seen that a quite productive way of generating ideas is to list problems and trends. But also in this case we talked about the “Consumerization of IT” and how we could think of ideas that may come from the consumer world to organizations (i.e.  a Whatsapp for companies, an IFTTT for employees).

Day 3: We reduced the scope of the exercise and we decided to focus exclusively in one problem: Meetings. Focus help us start the execution part. Now we only had one small problem to solve…

Day 4: We thought reducing the scope was going to simplify the work but we’ve ended up with lots of angles and ideas for solving meeting problems. So we splited the work as follows:

  1. Rafael worked on the real real stuff, like walls, table (or non tables), displays, etc.
  2. Gerda took care of the information that will be displayed in that room  and the interaction of the onsite participants with it.
  3. Nazaret looked at way to introduce Feng- Shui principles to online or onsite participants seats.
  4. Lucas worked focused on the recording and transcript of the audio.
  5. Moushira and Martin worked on the interaction for remote assistants.
  6. Furqan and Bert started focusing on the meeting preparation but ended-up discovering a very innovative way to “navigate” meeting information.

Day 5: Time to stitch all the pieces together and wrap up the exercise. We’ve realized some funny outputs. For example, the team that focused in the physical space removed the table from the meeting room and the guys working on its digital representation took the table as the primary focus and used it as a  UI metaphor. Also after showcasing some typical prototyping tools, one team decided that the best tool for them was Prezi… That’s interaction design!

Personally I’ve discovered day after day an amazing group of talented people that loaded me with a good dose of creative energy.

Thanks everyone for this really interesting week and keep up the good work. YOU are awesome!

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physical interface for work place

what was I working in?

physical interface used in meeting space. It includes pre-screen, on going mode and remote controller from user’s mobile phones.

what I came up with?

Interactive mode contained from three parts: pre-meeting, meeting mode and remote controller. Interface could be projection on the wall controlled by motions and mobile devices.

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Posted in Future of Work, Gerda Antanaityte | Comments closed

Meetmory

Possible Names: Meet.log, Elephant.hub, The Turk Secretary, Meet.recorder, Keep Your Word (KYW!).

This is an application to easily record, transcript and organize the workflow of a meeting. The idea here is to improve the efficiency of meetings by storing what was said, allowing all to access and pinpointing the commitments and responsibilities of all. Create a common memory for the participants, as a summary of important decisions and tasks in a very fast and natural platform. It can be used as group tool, or just as personal meeting organizer.

The mechanism is:

1. Setup the meeting
Before or after, set what, who, where and when. The e-mail of participants, topics, alerts, and so on;

2. Record the meeting audio
Use your device’s mic, or external wi-fi 360 mic, or using all the applications at the same time, that also uses the volumes to predict who’s talking at that moment;

3. Highlight what’s important
Use the ‘highlight’ button (hit or long press) to create fast access marks at important points;

4. The audio is automatically transcripted
The audio is in real time streamed for a transcription from audio to text with a service like Google Voice, some keywords are tagged by the system, like the names, “task”, “important”, etc….;

5. Edit the text and transform it in ‘objects’
In a very light text platform, the users can simultaneously select words or sentences and put some signs as @ or # to transform it into dynamic text, creating the object list of this meeting, such as tasks and agreements;

6. Send a report
When the meeting ends, an automatic report is sent to the participants, all the tasks synched with the selected personal agenda and a link with the attachments included;

7. Keep your word!
All your meetings are saved and protected on the server, as the important documents they are. Also, according to the automation setup on the meeting (or meeting group), the transcriptions can be stored on the website or synched on Dropbox, Google Driver, or even sent by e-mail. The same can be applied to all the used files used on meeting.

A sketch interface was created to illustrate the functionalities, simulate how the data can be handled.

The next steps are:
1. Create a smooth interface (humanize it, put photos, etc…);
2. Optimize the data organization and audio waveform markers;
3. Research about voice transcription possible services.

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Meety!

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Posted in Future of Work, Martin Lukac, Moushira Elamrawy | Comments closed