Serendipity at the workplace for future tacit workers

Serendipity at the workplace for future tacit workers

Hickmann, F.

De Jong, A. (mentor)
Keyson, D. (mentor)

Industrial Design Engineering

Industrial Design

Design for Interaction

2009-11-12

The workplace environment is changing; office buildings no longer have a desk for everyone, people work from different places at different times, people become tacit workers, people work more individualistic and work life and home life start blending together. The challenge is to understand more about the nature and value of informal and spontaneous communicative activity and seeing whether technology could be fruitfully employed to aid it. Research is conducted amongst consultants of Microsoft who work with ‘Het Nieuwe Werken’ at Microsoft Netherlands to understand what they miss when they don’t have informal encounters. The design vision is to use the serendipity of face-to-face ad hoc meetings and surprise employees with context information of others while they are not especially looking for it. The design is an interactive wall which recognizes a passer-by and together with the movement of the person other contexts are shown of people who might be interesting for the passer-by. More context information is revealed when the person touches a context. Connections of the context are shown When there are two people standing in front of the wall correlations are shown. The passer-by can make a coffee request or choose to be reminded later about this other person. Serendipity plays an important role and the concept doesn’t distract the employees too much from their work. A test is setup at Microsoft to see how people respond to this wall and to let them criticize the value. The test showed that it is a good way to improve the cohesion of employees physically instead of virtually. This concept does support general awareness and the possibility to get in touch with (new) people. Certain aspects which still need to be investigated; the graphical appearance, amount of information, more interactive elements to navigate through contexts and possibilities for immediate actions.

workplace
future
microsoft
interactive wall

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:297dbf34-df87-4198-89bf-f623303af3af

Campus only

Student theses

master thesis

(c) 2009 Hickmann, F.