Category Archives: Students

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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Also posted in Future of Work, Rafael Vargas | Comments closed

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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Also posted in Future of Work, Gerda Antanaityte | Comments closed

Meety!

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

Before-The-Meeting

Furqan and me worked on the ‘before the meeting phase’. We identified these issues:

  1. Schedule
  2. Organize / prepare
  3. Alert / Drive
  4. Setting up (putting up files, send files in advance,

The product

A tool for organizing and setting up a meetings.

  • Keep everything related and easy to understand like people, topics & contents.

  • Use an innovative semantic zoom to navigate between various contents.

  • levels: an overview of all meetings, a detailed view of each meeting, and finally down to the different topics and files that were discussed in a meeting.

    First Demo

Our starting point was a wireframe that allowed people to look at information from different angles:

  1. Tasks: an overview of what had to be done during the meeting; the agenda if you will. Here’s where you add new tasks and set an optional time-limit for them. Files can be added by drag-and-dropping them onto tasks, and the same goes for people. The right sidebar has a smart listing of people. It knows who you’re regularly having meetings with, and gives these a high ranking. People you’ve recently exchanged email with also get a high ranking.
  2. Schedule: this is a screen to schedule a meeting. Here we were inspired by the Doodle like interface. The people invited for the meeting can indicate when they are available.
  3. Conversation: this would be a chronological overview of all communication on this project (email, chat messages, …). Some actions would also create messages automatically, for example “John has added financial_report.xls”, and people could comment on these.
  4. Files: an overview with all documents linked to this meeting.
  5. People: the same information as in the other views, but here we see everything from the point of view of the people involved.

After experimenting with this lo-fi wireframe, we decided to experiment with the metaphor of the table in a more high fidelity prototype. The idea was to move a bit away from the rigidness of the interface in the wireframe and see if the idea of the meeting table would make the application more useful.

So we prototyped in prezi which is a Platform using zooming as a navigation tool to make presentation. Here link to our prototype .

An overview of the table with Topics and Files marked as circles.

In this interface, the table is in the center with the people in the meeting surrounding it. Tasks, files, and other elements related to the meeting are on the table.

The interface is a prezi or jef Raskin’s idea of the Zoom World inspired. Which draws it’s straight from ZOOMING. So the our all contain is clear to you but by zooming in specific area you start getting more and more information about it.

So WHAT NEXT!!

It would be nice the bring the experience closer to real world as possible.

Using folders inset of circles gives it more closer to life appearance.

This is how it looks when you zoom on it.

Many times before the meeting you would like to communicate few thoughts or remind your fellow works of something important. So in order to do that we used stick post. On stick posts you can posts and put reminder or comments.

So you select on the folder and just in real live case you will find all the contains that the person would present in the meeting

When you open the folder

Contain inside the folders

The next steps are:

  1. Exploring how far we get with this combination of skeuomorphism and zoom interface to navigate. We might have to use real life objects in some places.
  2. Since we rely on zooming, it wasn’t that easy to find a quick way to prototype this kind of interaction. We use Prezi, which was helpful but has its limitations. We should switch and explore other mediums like Flash or Processing to get a better feel of for how this works.
  3. Adding some  functionality: eg setting reminders, notification, interface to setup.
Also posted in Bert Balcaen, Furqan Habib, Future of Work | Comments closed

Oblong Mezzanine

Oblong Mezzanine from Oblong Industries on Vimeo.

Also posted in Bert Balcaen | Comments closed