Lutz Gericke

Tele-Board: Enabling efficient collaboration in digital design spaces

Remote collaboration among geographically dispersed team members has become standard practice for many companies and research teams. A number of computer supported collaborative work systems exist, but there still lacks acceptable support for teams working in creative settings, where traditionally numerous physical and analog tools are used. We have created an environment for teams applying creative methods that allows them to work together efficiently across distances, without having to change their working modes. We present the Tele-Board system, which combines video conferencing with a synchronous transparent whiteboard overlay. This setup enables regionally separated team members to simultaneously manipulate artifacts while seeing each others gestures and facial expressions. Our systems flexible architecture maximizes hardware independence by supporting a diverse selection of input devices.

Supporting creative collaboration in globally distributed companies

Creative ways of working with whiteboards and sticky notes are growing in popularity even in global companies. However, digital tools for enabling these ways of working, especially for geographically distributed teams, have still not been adopted in these companies. We present Tele-Board, a web-based digital whiteboard and sticky note system and describe how it was used in a large company at three locations. From system log data and interviews recorded after three months of use, we found that idea generation and feedback collection can be facilitated if a system offers real-time synchronous editing as well as asynchronous input. Interestingly, the users who were not located at the companys headquarters regarded the tool as very beneficial and used it more than their colleagues at the headquarters. We provide a detailed analysis of the study and important points for fostering the adoption of creative tools in large companies.

Tele-Board: Follow the Traces of Your Design Process History

Introducing digital tools to creative work settings is challenging; capturing creative work and conveying design ideas to absent team-members is even harder. In this article we show a new way of saving and presenting creative work data that enables users to browse through past design activities. We extended our existing Tele-Board system – previously intended for real-time design work at different locations – with functionalities for time-delayed interaction. The “Tele-Board history browser” is a web-based user interface offering functionality to go back and forth in the timeline of a whiteboard. Additionally, it is possible to view the whiteboard’s usage statistics to gain insights on creative work. With our tool we can support design teams in fulfilling their common tasks more efficiently in dispersed teams and we can also assist design researchers to understand how designers work in an all-digital setting.

Tele-Board: Enabling Efficient Collaboration In Digital Design Spaces Across Time and Distance

Design Thinking is an approach for innovative problem solving. A typical characteristic of this approach involves multidisciplinary teams and the extensive use of tangible tools such as sticky notes, whiteboards and all kinds of prototyping materials. When team members try to collaborate from separate locations their traditional way of working becomes nearly impossible. A number of computer supported collaborative work systems exist, but there still lacks acceptable support for teams applying methods like Design Thinking. We have created an environment that allows these teams to work together efficiently across distances, without having to change their working modes. The Tele-Board prototype combines video conferencing with a synchronized whiteboard transparent overlay. This unique setup enables regionally separated team members to simultaneously manipulate artifacts while seeing each other s gestures and facial expressions. Our system s flexible architecture maximizes hardware independence by supporting a diverse selection of input devices. User feedback has confirmed that the Tele-Board system is a good basis to further enable collaborative creativity across distances while retaining the essential feeling of working together.

Towards cross-platform collaboration - Transferring real-time groupware to the browser

Mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets play an increasing role in todays working environment. The variety of computer platforms increased in the same way, which makes the development of cross-platform applications even more challenging. Tele-Board is a real-time remote collaboration system based on the Java programming language. Therefore, it cannot be run on most mobile devices. In order to overcome this limitation, we redeveloped the system on the basis of HTML5 technology. We present an approach for combining web based networking and rendering in a single application for real-time collaboration based on SVG, HTML5 Canvas, Websockets, and Web workers. In our prototype we implemented optimization mechanisms leveraging the Canvas APIs rendering flexibility. This way, our canvas based rendering performs better than a respective SVG version. Moreover, our solution integrates server communication effectively so that the rendering performance is hardly influenced by user input.

Tele-Board in Use: Applying a Digital Whiteboard System in Different Situations and Setups

Tele-Board is a digital whiteboard system that helps creative teams working together over geographical and temporal distances. The nature of Tele-Board’s synchronized setup allows every connected partner from anywhere in the world to join in the action. Tele-Board is rooted in traditional metaphors, which are easy to implement and come naturally to the user. Additionally, it is possible to follow a common thread in the development of ideas from their inception to conclusion. With the History Browser, the path of creative development can be retraced, reiterated and resumed – from any point in time – a huge benefit in ordering work and reaching conclusions. In this article, we report on several situations and setups in which Tele-Board was used by different teams. We demonstrate how our software suite can be used with various hardware setups and show how well the tools work in practical application. Furthermore, we illustrate Tele-Board use by globally distributed student teams, in remote test settings, during a sustainability conference, and by teams who are primarily used to traditional whiteboards and pen and paper.

Globalized Design Thinking: Bridging the Gap Between Analog and Digital for Browser-Based Remote Collaboration

Remote collaboration processes require digital tools supporting work over distances. Transferring physical artifacts to the digital world and facilitating their flexible usage are common cases in remote settings.

Asynchronous understanding of creative sessions using archived collaboration artifacts

To a large extend, collaboration and communication consists of the understanding of extrinsic activity. This task is especially hard to achieve in remote settings or also locally when people cannot take part in meetings. In this paper we are addressing the question, if understanding of the essential decisions, facts, and processes can be achieved by just consuming collaboration data afterwards. Therefore, we take existing experiment recordings and make them explorable by the Tele-Board History Browser. Participants had a given time frame to answer content-related questions for a design thinking session. We found out that people are able to review those creative sessions and grasp the essential key points in the past work processes. Still, people are approaching the data differently depending on their personal preferences and their general process knowledge. It turns out that our approach can help distributed teams in working closer together beyond conference calls or shared documents. From our perspective, traceability of past interactions can substantially ease remote collaboration, especially in creative settings.

Creative Collaboration in Real World Settings

Tele-Board was designed and implemented for use in Design Thinking teams. From the development of simple prototypes, we came up with a reliable software system for a wide range of users. There is a growing interest in the system by companies who seek to ease their day-to-day collaboration activities worldwide. In this article, we present the results of a study, which we conducted with a company and its implications on the development and adjustments on the system. With the help of usage data, interviews, and observations, we could study the requirements of a global company. It shows how important the flexibility of our system is for a multitude of use cases. Different levels of knowledge, room configurations, as well as different hardware configurations are possible and well supported. The feedback and statistics we got from the study are evidence of a large level of acceptance and successful adoption by the users. We reflect and abstract the lessons we learned from that specific user group into future developments and research opportunities.

Handwriting recognition for a digital whiteboard collaboration platform

The research presented in this paper addresses challenges at the intersection of two disciplines: web based collaboration using digital whiteboards and handwriting recognition. The main focus is on the handwriting recognition in order to enable asynchronous usage of the whiteboard content beyond the existing web portal. We present a way to analyze unstructured whiteboard content including drawings, sketches and handwritten text. Our approach uses a recursive extension of the DBSCAN algorithm in order to transfer smaller portions of content to the recognition engine and achieve an appropriate spatial clustering of the content. The adjustment of the configuration parameters, as well as the development of a break condition for the recursion, are shown in detail. We show that it is possible to use an online handwriting recognition engine with offline data and still achieve meaningful results. The presented architecture on the one hand, and the combination of online and offline recognition on the other, ease asynchronous modes of interaction using digital whiteboards.