TITLE OF PAPER: Designing Interactive Systems for Knowledge Sharing
PRESENTED BY: Jeffrey Huang, Design School, Harvard University

DATE: July, 15, 2004
LOCATION: I&C

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REAL-TIME NOTES:

Nowadays, it is not possible for a single person to have all the knoledge necessary for buyilding a skyscreaper. So there is a trend from Masterbuildres to Design Teams. There are lots of problems of knowledge sharing: the more distance there are between the specialists, the tranfer of knowledge cost.

The 3 dimensions over which this work develop is a) to reduce the costs of knowledge transfer, like making it more trnsparent; b) reducing the agency costs to make results more transparent; c) making the specialist and the architect closer (collocate participants virtually).

The background of this research is as follows:
– Design of Online Communities (Activity patterns, …) -> Eventspace [Urs Hirschberg]
– Visualising interaction history (visualise abstract data) [Eva Papadimitriou, 2002]
– Situational Instant Messaging System !!!!
– Physical Communication Interface [Surapong Lerthisichai, 1999-2003]

The focus of this presentation is on how to solve the bottleneck effect of the joint of the virtual system over the physical one. The approach is to turn the whole building as an interface. [Information Visualization, CSCW, Ubiquitous Computing] -> Mediaspace

A napkin idea!

Concept of “inhabitalbe interface”: the bought a building in cambridge as a testbed they installed lots of IT in it. Walls were transformed in displays so that a research could be projected on the walls for the viewer to navigate physically. Other functionalities could help the visitor to arrange for a meeting in which two walls coud be used for projecting distance places or people far away.

Later on the house was connceted with the Swiss embassy and with the EPF-Z.

An interesting point is the attempt to create a software to merge all sorts of different media to interoperate withe these e-walls: EWall Operating System [1]:
– Cards are handles for knowledge (containers of informations\
-Algorithms for detecting how people arrange cards
– Algorithms for analysing and extracting facts from interaction history

Flows:
1. User create cards
2. EWalls formulates probable relations amonng the cards
3. …

Principles:
1. Adaptation to rather than imposition of human work process
2. Interpretation of user activities through observation tather than user responses
3. Focus on ispiring rather than directing
4. Focus on context rather than content of information
5. Focus on modular rather than integrated solution

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Things to check:
– swisshouse: nodes of the swiss embassy around the world
– ewall[1]
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REFERENCES: {as documents / sites are referenced add them below}

[1] http://ewall.mit.edu/abstract/index.html/
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