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.
See Bert’s and Furqan’s post (http://legacy.iaacblog.com/mai-2012-2013-future-of-workplace/2013/04/before-the-meeting/). They are bringing  the table into software.

What does it include?

The basics of a meeting room but arranged in a different way.

Chairs physical-Which provide rotating angles. Minimal personal table space and capabilities of remote meetings.
If you are remote- You will have a physical space within the reunion. Others will have to look at your position to see at your face expressions. You can also rotate, move, zoom ext. Remote “meeters” will no longer belong to the same screen in which other important stuff is being projected or showed. You should be able to look at everyone.

Back Projections- No longer meetings will have a punctual focus point for presentations. Doublescreens with angled projections provide simultaneous wide views for everyone arranged the meeting. Two of these screens can be projecting the presentation interface and the other can have important information not directly related to the presentation. For example: weather conditions, information about team members in the meeting, space for presenter to drag and drop complementing information etc.

Nfc instant sign in-Recognition of mobile phones for profile integration when you arrive prior to meeting. It provides the correct identification, what group or team you belong to and what is your position. When someone enters the room, his/her mobile device sync your “meety” or social network profile into the meeting. Your business info is synced via near field communication. It’s like a sign in with your phone or mobile device. This is also alredy available.

The product should be of interest for new emerging companies that want to keep up with technology and that may have an open space that can be arranged in these ways for meetings. People that want the meetings to be concise and that want to bring the visual aspect onto people and not tables and computers. For these guys the meeting will be more of a work experience than a normal meeting. These is for great importance for the productiveness of a company or a group. The product bases it’s service in the correct mix of available software and hardware that may be already in an office. It is customized for every case. In every case every player can watch screens but everybody can watch you also. The decision of where to watch falls in the team player and not the limitations of hardware/software capabilities available.

A correct meeting place should provide the tools for the continuation of productive work and not the stoppage to “discuss” that often derails to other things that are not important, especially if everybody is looking at their own stuff and not paying attention. Correct concise, powerful meetings. This is something that we can steal from Jedis.

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!

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.

Main features:

Pre-meeting mode:

1. Headline presenting name of the meeting, moderator  and time left until start

2. Timeline of meeting. Contains of:

.

3. Map

.

Meeting mode:

1.Timeline with market notifications

2. Sidebar

3. Presentation space

4. Space to open notifications

Remote controller

1. presenting mode

2. meeting following mode

3. timeline

4. timer

5. tools

.

What would be next?

joining my work on digital information with Rafael’s physical space design.

Turning my work into a product. What is my product going to do?

Connecting multiple tools into solid and user-friendly platform that simplify communication, documentation, organization and content sharing among participants of a meeting.

Who will buy your product? Who will buy your company?

Organisations which have many meetings, uses multiple devices, has distant workers. Requires fast and fluent organizing and sharing of information.

Who are (or will be) your competitors?

http://oblong.com/mezzanine/

What will be your killer selling point?

It is intuitive tool to visualize and organize meetings. Replacing textual into visual.

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.

What we were working on?
We worked on a simple interface which would allow you to attend meetings remotely.
Before we started with the execution process we had identified activities, which were
important for any effective result of the meeting. These were following, talking or
chatting, taking notes or writing and sketching, taking decisions, assigning tasks,
cueing and recording the footage of the meeting which could be subsequently processed
and sent to the attendees.

What we came up with?
We defined two versions of Meety interface, which would contain digital tools providing
above mentioned actions. Simple version of Meety, named Meety Light, would have
basic features such as talking/chatting, writing notes and talking/voice recording.
This version would be suited for smart phones. Other version, with additional features
such as video live stream, presentation, talking and voice recording and writing and
sketching would be suited for tablets and laptops.

What would be the next step?
The next step would be further work on the prototype of the more advanced version
of Meety. Fully working prototype should include interactive things such as active
buttons, connection to the webcam in order to test the real video streaming and
recording.

The objective of this workshop was to help you navigate between this 3 different oceans (you know I like boats… so excuse my metaphor ): VISION, IDEAS, EXECUTION.

Vision: is about seeing the big picture. Identifying trends, changes in how people live, work, communicate, etc. It’s also about new things that technology will enable. Example: “Most employees will work from their mobile phone”. This is a vision.

Ideas: Most of the time ideas come from visions. But you can also have good ideas without any vision or “envisioning” skill. An idea is just a service, a tool or a physical space that doesn’t exist so far and may end-up existing. It’s an invention. Example: “A mobile app that will record a meeting activity and automatically create a summary for all participants”. This is an idea.

Execution: Is about putting visions and ideas to work. It’s about starting. It’s about prototyping, refining, building, testing. You get it…You don’t need examples here: just hands.

I’ve tried to prove you that:

1. Visions are important but they “expire”. You may have a vision today on how people will work in 5 years. It may be valuable today  but it won’t have any value in 5 years. At that time, if you were right your vision becomes an evidence (so no value). And if you were wrong your vision becomes absurd. So don’t focus only in visions because their value intrinsically diminishes.

2. Ideas are cool to have but we live in a world were there is definitely no ideas shortage. Even top venture capitalists are giving away ideas for free http://ycombinator.com/rfs.html . The idea guy doesn’t have a good reputation http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2188-theres-no-room-for-the-idea-guy . Plus you don’t really need an idea. If you don’t have an idea you can copy a good one. Yeah… I said COPY.

3. Execution is the only thing that really matters. It is the valuable part. It is what will make you end up not really copying but producing your own design (even if you started copying) . Investors only care about execution. Users only care about execution. While executing you’ll generate tons of fresh ideas. The only downside is that it takes time, effort, sweat, tears, focus and ultimately love.

So what are you executing with love today?

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.

Oblong Mezzanine from Oblong Industries on Vimeo.