Daniela Alina Plewe

Ambient Displays and Mobile Devices for the Creation of Social Architectural Spaces

In this paper, we address three major issues, look at their interaction and combination and present our results on how to arrive at solutions for these issues. The issues are: 1) supporting informal communication and atmosphere in organisations, 2) the role and potential of ambient displays in future work environments, and 3) the combination of mostly static artefacts that are integrated in the architectural environment with mobile devices carried by people. Our results can be considered as steps towards the design and realization of what we call “social architectural spaces” in the context of future work environments. These environments will be populated with a range of different smart artefacts that are designed to facilitate awareness and notification as well as informal communication. We address a range of spaces in office buildings including public spaces, e.g., in the hallway, the foyer, and the cafeteria that have not been the focus of research so far. In particular, we present two artefacts: the Hello.Wall, a wall-size large ambient display, and the ViewPort, a mobile handheld device. They are interacting with each other via wireless networks and different types of sensing technology. The artefacts and the software were developed in the EU-funded “Disappearing Computer”- project “Ambient Agoras: Dynamic Information Clouds in a Hybrid Worlds”.

Smart artefacts as affordances for awareness in distributed teams

The manifolds of spaces and places we are entering, populating, transiently crossing and eventually leaving (only to immerse in another subsequent context) as part of our daily activities in our personal, public and professional lives are undergoing a dramatic change. Although this change is taking place we are aware of it only in a limited fashion due to its unobtrusive character as illustrated in the statement by Streitz and Nixon (2005): “It seems like a paradox but it will soon become reality: The rate at which computers disappear will be matched by the rate at which information technology will increasingly permeate our environment and our lives”.

Aesthetic intelligence: designing smart and beautiful architectural spaces

This paper reports on the first international workshop on Aesthetic Intelligence. The focus of the workshop is on the relevance of beauty and aesthetic values for Ambient Intelligence and the meaning of aesthetically pleasing design for usability, technology acceptance, and well-being in technology-enhanced spaces.

Aesthetic Intelligence: The Role of Design in Ambient Intelligence

This paper illustrates the rationale behind the second international workshop on Aesthetic Intelligence. The workshop addresses the multiple facets of aesthetics in the design process of Ambient Intelligence technologies, especially in the fields of architecture, industrial and interface design as well as human-computer interaction.

Aesthetic Intelligence – Concepts, Technologies and Applications

This paper reports on the ideas and results of the First International Workshop on Aesthetic Intelligence (AxI’11) held as a satellite workshop during the International Joint Conference on Ambient Intelligence (AmI’11).

Assistance Systems in Manufacturing: A Systematic Review

With this paper we provide an overview of current trends and approaches related to assistance systems in industrial manufacturing contexts. We systematically reviewed publications relevant to the domain in order to extract and describe recent developments and application scenarios. Further, we took account of current use cases, technologies, and design strategies. Having laid out the state of the art we proceeded to identify current challenges for assistive technology in the realm of industrial production. We concluded with discussing the findings and giving an outlook regarding future research questions and possible developments.

A Visual Interface for Deal Making

We assume that smart environments in combination with mobile devices will increasingly appear in contexts where interactions become transactions. Since most deal-making activities involve at least two parties and a process of negotiation, we propose a generic interface focusing on pre-negotiation, negotiation and contracting within one system. We present two prototypes based on the visual metaphor of a marketplace allowing for simple drag and drop actions. This combination of functionalities aims to bridge the gap between deal-making and its legal representation. Visualized interactive contracts introduced as a general convention may improve transparency of legal texts increasing the overall understanding and legal literacy of consumers and professionals alike. An intuitive visualization can differentiate between repetitive elements of standardized contracts, variables and amendments. The proposed platform is applicable to legal contractual contexts including b2b portals, ecommerce, online licensing agreements, financial instruments etc., and may help to transform social networks into transactional ones.

Towards Strategic Media

We assume that visualizations will increasingly not only display data, but allow for actions and the execution of strategies within visualized environments. With the term strategic media we refer to media applications supporting the activities related to the design and implementation of strategies in business or personal contexts. Inspired by so called strategic dash boards for the business context we ask, what could be useful design heuristics supporting such strategic media applications in general. As a starting point we propose, that strategic media integrate aspirational, executional/transactional and epic aspects representing intentions, functionalities critical to implementation and long term monitoring and feedback. Three conceptual prototypes developed by the author illustrate the concepts.

Simulating the Outcomes of Contracts: A Visual Interface Supporting Start-Up Financing

The potential of visualizations for negotiating and representing contracts has been explored in current research around the innovation of law. Visualizations help to increase transparency of legal matters and contribute not only to a better understanding of agreements, but to the overall deal-design. We propose a visualized simulation displaying the outcomes of complex start-up investment agreements at various points in the future. By capturing the standard variables of start-up financing term-sheets, the system supports the pre-negotiation phase between entrepreneurs and investors. Relying on the agent-based modeling framework NetLogo, we facilitate dynamic simulations with parties entering their own priorities and assumptions about the other side. We believe such a tool could prove useful on crowd-funding platforms with their increase of investor-founder relationships. In further research, specific contracts may be tested with populations of entrepreneurs and investors, yielding insights on the desirability of various deal structures.

Contract Visualisation: Sketches for Generic Interfaces

Our aim is to develop general heuristics for the visualization of contracts, which may serve as guidelines for interface developments of legal technology software. We introduce three approaches to interactive contract visualisations and discuss their strengths and weaknesses. They all address the negotiation phase preceding an agreement. We believe the nature of contracts is to capture and organise potential future events and therefore introduce the concept of “possibility spaces” as a starting point for the first two visualizations. Focusing on the “modalities” of contracts seems to us the most promising approach and is explored in the third example. From a methodological point of view, we develop visualisations through abstraction and focus on the common characteristics of all contracts. In that sense, we do not “illustrate” contracts. Through these visualisations we hope to make contracts easier to understand, be it on paper or via legal technology.