People’s activities at work often generate dynamic configurations of spaces, information, and people - within the office, but also beyond. Increasingly, both digital and physical materials are part of such configurations; and much of people’s work centres on making sense of one piece of information in relation to many others. For many professionals information comes in many different formats and often also needs to be made sense of in relation to features in the real world.
These practices pose great challenges to the computer as-we-know-it
today and open up a range of opportunities for innovative
design. Spatial computing environments respond to these
challenges. They exploit technical possibilities to support the
social and spatial organization of work.
WorkSPACE takes aesthetic design – in architecture, landscape architecture, and product design – as an inspirational test case. Through ethnographic studies, participatory design collaboration with professionals and aesthetic design strategies the project seeks to develop software components and hardware artefacts that may be combined and integrated into hybrid spatial computing environments in the office, on the move, and on site.