INTRODUCTION
The process of designing in a personal design environment (PDE) often encounters interruption. Due to the lack of an automatic reconfigurable framework, such interruption often shifts the designer’s focus from designing to dealing with new situations. In this paper, we propose a novel interface framework for the instant and easy switching of PDE into an appropriate state to support encountered situations without much user intervention. The research background, problem, goals, methods and scope, and the thesis structures are presented in this chapter.
1.1 BACKGROUND
The background of this research originates from the joint aspects of PDE and ambient technology. Ambient function has played a crucial part in aiding personal design practice. Due to the advances of ambient technology, ambient has become a way for designing creative environments that help work and foster communication.
In this section we have a glimpse of how PDE has evolved to Ambient PDE.
1.1.1 Personal Design Environment
Traditional design setting is often comprised of different purposeful spaces/rooms for different activities. It is common to carry out a design activity in a specific environment. For example, designer would do design work in a private PDE, and
have a group discussion in a conference room. PDE, also called personal
workspace (Firlik, 2005) has been for decades an essential type of space which is
commonly seen in a typical design studio.Personal is a general term. When referring to PDE, we often indicate a static
physical space comprised of elements such as partitions, desks, or chairs, for an individual design practice for working. It is not unusual for designers to do their designing in their PDE, for designing is a highly attentive task and needs to be dealt with full concentration. Even after group collaborations, the designer returns to his office cubicle (i.e. PDE). Though there is no one uniform pattern of work practice in a PDE, it is evident that there is a dialectical relation between the designer and his PDE (Dave, 2003).Fig 1-1: Traditional studio with PDEs (after Dave, 2003).
In their PDE, designers tend to customize their ambient setting and strategically arrange spatial elements in different proximities or in easily accessible ways to better help their designs. For example, the designer would put a material book aside in case he might need to choose materials, so when needed, he can reach for them quickly. Separated designers would also seat themselves closer to form a social awareness and foster collaboration, and, when needed, it is would be easier for them to initiate a discussion without looking for each other or setting up any facilities. It is also common to see designers augment their partitions with notes, documents, or sketches for easier managing information. It is a fact that ambient settings, when appropriately arranged, could provide designers with significant design support or benefits. A great amount of different types of PDEs were
developed under such an urge to increase variations of design fashion, such as Steelcase’s Personal Harbor (Hamilton et al., 1996), Dilbert’s Ultimate Cubicle (Adams, 2001), and IBM’s BlueSpace (Chou et al., 2001). All these new PDEs exploit spatial elements to better support work and emphasize on personalization as well as flexible customizability.
1.1.2 Ambient Environment
One of the above trends regarding designing spaces to be more user-centric and flexible is the urge to have an ambient environment. Ambient environment is a kind of architectural space that exploits ambient functionality and human spatial perception to help human activity. As information technologies were introduced into the architectural environment, ambient functionality was enhanced and extended. It is believed that the future spaces are likely to be filled with interactive surfaces and interact with human via foreground/background awareness and other natural, multiple modalities (Norman, 1999; Weiser, 1991).
Various works were developed with similar ambient approaches by integrating digital mechanisms into spatial physical elements. Examples of such are Media Spaces (Bly et al., 1993), a system that integrates multiple media and connects distant places and groups of people together, Ambient Displays (Wisneski et al., 1998), an artifact that displays information for background awareness (Fig 1-3),
1 IDEO, http://www.ideo.com
Fig 1-2: Dilbert’s Ultimate Cubicle (after IDEO1).
Tangible Interfaces (Ishii and Ullmer, 1997), which projects digital information on the physical environment for intuitive interaction with users, and Roomware, which sees room as modular spaces for docking digital components (Fig 1-4) (Streitz et al., 1999). These technologies transform spatial elements into interactive spaces, and aids designers in different aspects, such as providing social awareness (Gross, 2003; Prante et al., 2003) or providing instant design media (Chen and Chang, 2005). Furthermore, they can be customized or arranged freely to fit personal usage or preferences.
Fig 1-3: A PDE with a customized ambient display aside (after Ambient Device2).
These environmentally-integrated ambient elements, though designed for different purposes, embrace a shared characteristic, which Weiser and Brown noted as Calm Technology (Weiser and Brown, 1996), “What is in the periphery at one moment
may in the next moment come to be at the center of our attention and so be crucial.” The aim of Calm Technology is to provide information in the periphery
which can be easily perceived by moving one’s attention from the center to the periphery, and back, without overburdening.2 Ambient Devices , http://www.ambientdevices.com
Fig 1-4: Roomware components (after fraunhofer IPSI3).
1.1.3 Ambient Personal Design Environment
Properly arranging and integrating ambient media into a space creates a newly ambient PDE which helps design activity to be carried out more fluently and seamlessly with the aid of ambient functions (Chen and Chang, 2005; Chou et al., 2001). Each spatial element, such as a building block, contributes to the whole construct of ambient support, and designer uses his multiple sensors and modalities freely to interact with the digital information that surrounds the environment as a way to advance a design activity (Fig 1-5).
Based on the study of precedents, we can summarize key ideas that form the basis of the ambient personal design environment, which can also be viewed in general design guidelines as:
Foreground and Background: Ambient mediated environments attune the
designer’s perception, and can be divided into foreground and background (Wisneski et al., 1998), or, say, periphery and center (Weiser and Brown, 1996).Foreground channel is where designer’s focus is on, and the background is where the designer’s awareness is, without disturbing the foreground tasks.
Calm: Interactive media are embedded or integrated into the environment, which is
blended into user’s background unobtrusively.3 Fraunhofer IPSI, http://www.ipsi.fraunhofer.de
Cooperative: Each ambient element provides partial functional support for an
activity. They work cooperatively to form an ambient support as a whole, and do not interfere with each other.Context Specific: The ambient elements are targeted at a particular design context
or activity.Customization: Ambient elements can be tailored towards the user’s need, in terms
of what functions or forms they provide, and how they can be easily managed and used as environmental resources.These characteristics make the ambient environment more personalized in the way of environment interaction, and proactively serve the user’s needs. An example of Ambient PDE is shown in Figure 1-5. In Figure 1-5, the user is having a collaborative sketch over a projection on the table, while at background he is aware of the remote status via a light matrix display aside. This customized calm setting is arranged for a remote collaboration context, and the display as well as the table projection act cooperatively to form remote collaboration support.
Fig 1-5: An example of an Ambient PDE Awareness display
interface switch
Remote collaborative design interface