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April 18, 2007
Lit Review - Social Coordination around a Situated Display Appliance
Social Coordination around a Situated Display Appliance (O'Hara, Perry et al. 2003)This paper describes the deployment of the RoomWizard system. The RoomWizard (RW) is a system for managing conference room reservations. It consists of a web-based reservation management system, and a small Internet appliance with a touch screen display that is installed near the door of RW enabled conference rooms. The RW door mounted display provides information about the current user of the conference room, the current use of the room, the room’s daily schedule, and has peripheral LED lights that glow red or green based on the whether the conference room is available or not. RW users could reserve rooms in advance using a web-based room reservation system, and in situ for impromptu meetings using the RW’s touch screen.
The authors focus their discussion on how RW is different from other situated displays in that its use is highly tied to its location. For example, RW only displays information about room reservations for the room it is situated near. It does not provide information about other rooms that are available (though it would seem that some utility would be added by this functionality), or information about ongoing events. The design of the RW provides different levels of engagement, for example, peripheral LEDs let users determine if a room is available at a distance (unless the current reservation is not actually in use), closer inspection of the RW display lets users determine who is currently using the room, the time their reservation ends, and why the room is reserved. The authors note that by providing context information about ongoing meetings users of the system were able to determine whether a meeting was interruptible, and its general importance. The authors also spend a lot of time discussing how the system was flexible and did not force users to adhere to any specific rules. For example, when entering text fields into the system to specify meeting members and purpose, users were not forced to enter their name in a specific format, or choose a meeting purpose from a category. By letting users enter anything into these text boxes, users could use these fields to display information about the importance level of the meeting, whether it and its member’s were private (As opposed to just information about who was attending and the meeting’s purpose).
The authors do a wonderful job of providing insights into the usage of RW in the company they studied. Although most of their insight was into the deployment of RW situated in the specific company they observed, there were a few takeaways. First, it is essential to consider context of use and situation when deploying displays. Second, systems should be designed to be flexible like the social systems surrounding their use. Third, the nature of situated displays means that many users may encounter them at different distances with differing levels of engagement, it is important to design for these “zones” when building displays.
O'Hara, K., M. Perry and S. Lewis (2003). Social coordination around a situated display appliance. Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems. Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, USA, ACM Press.
I'd put this in the top tier of the display papers I have read so far.
Posted by bcx at April 18, 2007 04:51 PM