Degrees of Engagement in Interactive Workspaces - CiteSeerX

Proceedings 2 nd Social Intelligence Design Workshop, July 2003

Degrees of Engagement in Interactive Workspaces Renate Fruchter Director of Project Based Learning Laboratory, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Stanford University Stanford, CA 94305-4020, [email protected] Abstract. This paper presents a new perspective of the impact of collaboration technology on the degrees of engagement and specific interaction zones in interactive workspaces. The study is at the intersection of the design of physical work spaces, i.e., bricks, rich electronic content such as video, audio, sketching, CAD, i.e., bits, and new ways people behave in communicative events, i.e., interaction. The study presents: (1) an innovative multimodal collaboration technology, called RECALLTM , that supports the seamless, realtime capture of concept generation during project brainstorming and project review sessions, (2) the deployment of RECALLTM in an interactive workspace that supports real project review sessions called Fishbowl, and (3) the observations of the impact of RECALLTM and the interactive workspace on degrees of engagement and interaction zones as it is deployed in the specific Fishbowl sessions.

Introduction

requirements, specifications, and design decisions, often the contextual or tacit knowledge of the design group is lost. Concept generation and development occur most frequently in informal media where design capture tools are the weakest. This statement has strong implications for the capture and reuse of design knowledge because conceptual design generates the majority of initial ideas and directions that guide the course of the project. Sketching is a natural mode for designers, instructors, or students to communicate in highly informal activities such as brainstorming sessions, project reviews, lectures, or Q&A sessions. Often, the sketch itself is merely the vehicle that spawns discussion about a particular design issue. Thus, from a knowledge capture and reuse perspective, capture and retrieval of both the sketch itself and the discussion that provides the context behind the sketch are important. It is interesting to note that today’s state-of-practice or best practices are not captured and knowledge is lost when the whiteboard is erased or the paper napkin sketch is tossed away.

The former chief executive of HP, Lew Platt, was quoted saying, “If HP would know what HP knows, we would be 3 times more profitable.” [Davenport and Prusak, 1998] Managing and reusing knowledge can lead to greater competitive advantage, improved designs, and more effective facility management. However reuse often fails, since knowledge is not captured, it is captured out of context rendering it not reusable, or there are no formal mechanisms from both the information technology and organizational viewpoints for finding and retrieving reusable knowledge. The digital age holds great promise to assist in knowledge capture and re-use. Nevertheless, most digital content management today offers few solutions to capitalize on the core corporate competence, i.e., to capture, share, and re-use business critical knowledge. They are limited to digital archives of formal documents (CAD, Word, Excel, etc.), and support only search by keyword, date, and originator. These ignore the highly contextual and interlinked modes of communication in which people generate and develop concepts, and reuse knowledge through verbal discourse and sketching. We argue that in order for knowledge to be reusable, the user should be able to see and understand the context in which this knowledge was originally created and interact with this rich content, i.e., interlinked discourse and sketches. While traditional captures explicit

Current tools to index and publish rich media content (e.g., sketch, Power Point slide, CAD image) and audio: • require a production stage in which a user must manually go through and set up indexes and links into the digital documents. This is a very time consuming task that takes 3-4 times the length of the original event.

product documentation knowledge such as

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i.e., bits, and new ways people behave in communicative events using the affordances of IT augmented spaces and content, i.e., interaction.

produce published material that is static and the consumer of the content can not interact it. require very high cost and special expertise to publish multimedia material on the Web.

The paper briefly presents the multimodal collaboration technology, called RECALLTM, developed in the PBL Lab at Stanford that supports the ubiquitous, seamless, real-time capture of concept generation during project brainstorming and project review sessions, (2) the deployment of RECALLTM in an interactive workspace that supports real project review sessions called Fishbowl, and (3) the observations of the impact of RECALLTM on degrees of engagement and interaction zones as it is deployed in a specific interactive workspace for Fishbowl sessions.

The study proposes the following hypotheses. The first hypothesis asserts that a primary source of information behind design decisions is embedded within the verbal conversation among designers. Capturing these conversations is difficult because the information exchange is unstructured and spontaneous. In addition, discourse is often multimodal. It is common to augment speech with sketching and gesturing. Audio/video media can record these activities, but do not provide an efficient means to index the captured information. The second hypothesis asserts that any collaboration technology that engages multiple participants in communicative events and tasks in an interactive work space will determine specific interaction zones and degrees of engagement of the participants.

High Fidelity Ubiquitous Knowledge Capture and Reuse To test the first hypothesis, we designed, developed, deployed and tested a tool called RECALLTM.

The objective of this research is to improve and support the process of knowledge capture and reuse in the architecture, engineering, construction industry, and provide corporations with a leverage to capitalize on their core competence.

The issue of how to capture knowledge in project design teams has received extensive attention from researchers in design theory and methodology. The value of contextual design knowledge (process, evolution, rationale) has been repeatedly recognized, but so has the additional overhead required of the designer in order to capture it. This research focuses on the informal, unstructured knowledge captured through informal multimodal channels such as sketching, audio for the verbal discourse, video for the gesture language and artifacts that support the discourse. The RECALLTM system builds on Donald Schon’s concept of the reflective practitioner paradigm [Schon 1983]. Research studies of design have focused on either the sketch activity, i.e., learning from sketched accounts of design [Tversky 1999, Stiedel and Henderson 1983, Olszweski 1981, Kosslyn '81, Goel '95] or verbal accounts of design [Cross 1996, Cross 1992, Dorst 1996]. Some researchers have studied the relation between sketching and talking [Eastman 1969, Goldschmidt 1991].

The study focuses on: • how one can capture with high fidelity, and least overhead to the team members, the knowledge experience that constitutes conceptual design generated during informal events such as brainstorming or project review sessions? • what are these interaction zones and degrees of engagement and how they are supported and impacted by the affordances of a specific collaboration technology, RECALLTM [Fruchter and Yen, 2000] and the configuration of the interactive workspace. The study builds on the Brick & Bits & Interaction (BBI) principle and findings presented at the SID2001 workshop [Fruchter 2001]. The BBI principle states that there is a bidirectional relationship between design of physical spaces, i.e., bricks, rich electronic content such as video, audio, sketching, CAD,

RECALLTM is a drawing application written in Java that captures and indexes each individual action on the drawing surface. The drawing

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RECALLTM automatically indexes the sketch, verbal discourse and video. This session can be posted on the RECALLTM server for future interactive replay, sharing with geographically distributed team members, or knowledge re-use in other future projects.

application synchronizes with audio/video capture and encoding through a client-server architecture. Once the session is complete, the drawing and video information is automatically indexed and published on a Web server that allows for distributed and synchronized playback of the drawing session and audio/video from anywhere at anytime. In addition, the user is able to navigate through the session by selecting individual drawing elements as an index into the audio/video and jump to the part of interest. Figure 1 illustrates the different devices, encoders, and services of RECALLTM such as: video / audio capture, media encoding module, sketch capture device such as Tablet PC or SmartBoard, sketch encoding module, sketch and media storage, and RECALLTM serving web media applet that runs of the RECALLTM server.

Figure 2: RECALLTM Producer User Interface

Audio/Video Capture

Figure 3 illustrates the interactive replay of a RECALLTM session. The user can interactively select any portion of the sketch and RECALLTM will replay from that point on.

Media Encoding

Sketch and Media Storage Recall Serving web,media,applet

Sketch Capture

Sketch Encoding

Figure 1: RECALLTM Production and Service Modules Figure 3: RECALLTM Interactive Replay TM

Figure 2 illustrates the RECALL user interface during real-time production that is during a communicative session. The participants can create free hand sketches or import CAD images and annotate them during their discourse. They have a color pallet, and a “tracing paper” metaphor that enables them to re-use the CAD image and create multiple sketches on top of it. The right side bar contains the existing digital sketch pad pages that enable quick flipping or navigation through these pages. At the end o the brainstorming session the participants exit and

The RECALLTM technology invention is aimed to improve the performance and cost of knowledge capture, sharing and re-use. It provides the following benefits : • Transparent Graphical, Audio/Video indexing. • Zero overhead and cost for production i.e., editing/indexing.

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Engineering, Construction Global Teamwork course (A/E/C) I teach at Stanford [Fruchter 1999]. This course is a project-based, geographically distributed, collaborative teamwork experience. Each year there are 6 to 12 A/E/C teams in the class. Each team: (1) has an architect, an engineer, and a construction manager; (2) is geographically distributed, and (3) has an owner/client with a building program, a location, a budget, and a time line.

Zero overhead and cost for publishing, sharing and streaming rich web content Interactive and immediate access and retrieval of knowledge and information, i.e., sketch, audio/video on demand.

The RECALLTM has been tested and deployed in different user scenarios, such as • individual brainstorming, where a project team member has a “conversation with the evolving artifact” enacting Schon’s “reflective practitioner” and using a TabletPC augmented with RECALLTM and then sharing his/her thoughts with the rest of the team by publishing the session on the RECALLTM server. • team brainstorming and project review sessions, using a SmartBoard augmented with RECALLTM • best practice capture, where senior experts, such as designer, engineers, builders, capture their expertise for the benefit of the corporation.

The Fishbowl session takes place after the teams have worked on their concepts for three months and face some key challenges. Each student team prepares for a Fishbowl session in which they present in 10 min the status of their project and their key 3-5 challenges. They then hand over their project to a full team of A/E/C industry mentors who work on the challenges in front of the students for an hour. The actors and their roles are the following: (1) “the A/E/C team Fish that brings the patient that is their project” This is a geographically distributed team of students, e.g., composed of an architect at Georgia Tech, a structural engineer at Stanford in the US and a second one at Bauhaus University in Germany, and a construction manager who can be at Stanford and a second one at KTH in Sweden; (2) the industry mentors who are the “mentor Fish”, composed of an architect, an engineer, and a construction manager from companies in the Bay Area. (3) The rest of the students in the A/E/C class. These are the spectators watching the “fish” in the project review Fishbowl session interactions. They are from all the partner universities in the A/E/C class that are distributed worldwide. Consequently, there are collocated spectators who are in the PBL Lab, and geographically distributed spectators. Figure 4 illustrates a Fishbowl session in the PBL Lab.

The following scenario illustrates in action during a special project review session called the Fishbowl.

The Fishbowl Scenario The Fishbowl project review scenario is inspired from the Medical School learning environment, where it is typical to see special operation rooms with glass walls where world expert surgeons operate on patients (e.g., open heart surgery) and medical students watch. This learning experience brought to mind the fishbowl metaphor. More importantly, my goal was to emulate this learning experience in the school of engineering, specifically in project-based design teamwork that I teach in the Project Based Learning Laboratory (PBL Lab), at Stanford. In addition, my goal was to capture the activity during the project-based review session for future re-use, either by the student team in the Fishbowl session or by future generations as a learning opportunity. RECALLTM was a perfect fit for this knowledge capture and reuse purpose. The result was what is now known as the Fishbowl session. The Fishbowl session is a project review session that is intended to act as a role modeling, mentoring and apprenticeship opportunity. It takes place in the Architecture,

Figure 4: Fishbowl Session in PBL Lab Stanford

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Slovenia

Berkeley

Projection Screens

Kansas Univ.

PBL Lab Stanford SmartBoa rd

KTH Sweden

Georgia Tech

ZONE 1 ZONE 2 ZONE 3 Bauhaus Univ. Germany

WebCam

VideoCam Legend Zone 1 Zone 2 Zone 3 Architecture Student Fish Engineering Student Fish Construction Student Fish Architecture Mentor Fish Engineering Mentor Fish Construction Mentor Fish Spectator Student Figure 5: The Fishbowl Configuration in the PBL Lab and the Global Teamwork Partner Universities

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The collaboration technology and knowledge capture used consists of (Figure 5): (1) a SmartBoard in the PBL Lab at Stanford for direct manipulation and sketching through the RECALLTM application, (2) a Webcam that enables the remote students to see the interactive workspace in the PBL Lab that covers the Fishbowl area, i.e., the SmartBoard, the mentor Fish and team Fish; (3) projectors and projection screens for the virtual auditorium video streams that enable the mentor Fish in PBL Lab to see all the remote students; (4) RECALLTM that runs on the SmartBoard and enables the sketching and capture in real-time of the Fishbowl session, (5) NetMeeting Videoconference for application sharing, i.e., RECALLTM, with all the remote sites, (6) a teleconference bridge for high quality audio, and (7) a microphone for audio capture that feeds into the SmartBoard computer that runs RECALLTM.

data analysis observations. This data analysis enabled us to observe and understand how the relationship between the spatial configuration and technology in the PBL Lab, i.e., bricks, the effectiveness of the RECALLTM collaboration technology as a natural idiom to explore and share design ideas seamlessly, i.e., bits, and the interaction mediated by the space and technology, i.e., movement, sharing of workspace, discourse, attention retention of remote participants, and their engagement in the communicative event. The following section describes one of the key findings related to degrees of engagement and corresponding zones of interaction.

Degrees of Engagement and Zones of Interaction The aim of the analysis was to better understand the nature of engagement in a specific interactive workspace during Fishbowl communicative events, the sharing of these workspaces, and the impact of the collaboration technologies. The analysis resulted in the definition of three interaction zones and degrees of engagement, as well as and how the participants are using the collaboration technology and other artifacts to best explore and convey their ideas. The three interaction zones and corresponding degrees of engagement are (Figure 5):

Data Collection and Analysis The data for this study was collected in the following way: • indexed and synchronized sketch and discourse activities were captured through RECALLTM •

interactions, movement and use of collaboration technology within the PBL Lab workspace was captured with the video camera (Figure 5).

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interaction and engagement of remote students was captured through a screen capture application that recorded all the virtual auditorium video streams concurrently for future parallel analysis.

We performed a temporal analysis of the data by integrating the information about the speechacts, discourse, movements, use of collaboration technologies and workspace in the PBL Lab. The result was a temporal spreadsheet with the following rubrics: (1) time stamp, (2) verbal discourse used to identify the speech-acts, (3) video snapshots of the PBL Lab configuration showing the participants movements, (4) RECALLTM snapshots of key sketch actions, (5) screen snapshots of concurrent Virtual Auditorium streams of remote sites showing the participants movements, (6) screen layout of applications on remote PCs, (7) field notes, (8)

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Zone 1 – is defined as the action zone, since it is in this zone that most speechacts, interactions among participants and the digital content, i.e., the bits, takes place, as the participants annotate, sketch, explore, explain, propose ideas.

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Zone 2 – is defined as the reflection zone, since it is in this zone that the participants in the Fishbowl reflect on proposed ides that are presented in zone 1. In this zone questions are asked, clarifications are requested, and negotiation and what-if scenarios are brought up. As Donald Schon so well defines in the reflective practitioner, we see an interplay between zone 1 and zone 2 as the participants become reflective practitioners across disciplines building common ground and understanding of the artifact and its potential evolutions.


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Zone 3 – is defined as the observation zone, since the spectators either collocated in PBL Lab or remote participants observe the activities and discourse in the Fishbowl. Rarely did we observe that participants from zone 3 moved into zone 2 or zone 1 with a proposal or question.

• The temporal spatial and movement analysis indicated the effect of the location of the collaboration technologies, more specifically the SmartBoard and RECALLTM in the use of the workspace watching carefully the disposition of the participants in the space. In the 20 Fishbowl sessions studied, the presence of the SmartBoard and RECALLTM determines a circular disposition of the participants during most of the interaction with back an forth movement between the mentor fish and student fish participants between zone 1 and zone 2.

Preliminary Observations The data supports the hypothesis that concept generation and development occurs most frequently in informal design activities such as brainstorming sessions. While it is possible to record notes and sketches, often the contextual information that is conversed and debated verbally is lost. RECALLTM system provides a benefit for both the designer and the researcher since they can both use the same space (i.e., technology and knowledge archive). For the designer, the RECALLTM system is a tool that facilitates communication and improves productivity. For the researcher, RECALLTM is an instrument robust enough to collect and study the team interaction and designer behavior, rationale, and work habits. By capturing and indexing more of the informal media of design collaboration, important design decisions that capture not only the final product, but the context and design rationale behind the product can be documented, shared, and archived.

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From the temporal spatial and movement analysis in the context of the Fishbowl sessions a set of needs emerge for social intelligence design in the three dimensions - workspace, bricks, collaboration technology, bits, and communicative events, interaction, in order to best leverage their interplay. For instance:

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A capability to reconfigure the workspace on the fly for and dynamically during Fishbowl sessions as a function of the tasks and communication needs of the participants, as well as to facilitate a higher degree of engagement for instance of the zone 3 spectators. Improvement of visibility and awareness of remote and collocated participants. Visibility in this discussion is related to the affordance of the workspace configuration and communication technology to make all participants visible to all sites. In past years participants were not visible to all sites, which decreased the engagement and social interaction. This is why this year the PBL Lab was reconfigured to include a WebCam to make the Fishbowl activity visible to the remote participants, and the virtual auditorium prototype was used to make all the remote participants visible to the PBL Lab participants. This has increased the social and cognitive interactions. The awareness in this discussion is related to the viewing and direct manipulation of digital capabilities as well as viewing physical artifacts, such as building models that are used by architects. RECALLTM and WebCam address both needs. An interesting observation related to the degree of engagement in zone 3 indicates that participants who are in zone 3 of remote sites are virtually closer to the content than collocated participants in zone 3 in PBL Lab. This fact is dictated by the proximity to the hardware device, i.e., SmartBoard in PBL Lab, vs desktop PC in remote sites. This prompts an interesting question for future research how to increase the engagement of zone 3 participants both collocated and remote. Hybrid workspace and collaboration technology solutions provided a smoother transition between private and public workspaces that lead to more effective communication, interaction, and common ground building. More specifically, in the present PBL Lab configuration (Figure 5) the SmartBoard and RECALLTM provide


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direct manipulation of bits, for both collocated and remote participants. The project screens can be used to share ideas and content from private wireless Tablet PCs in zone 3 and zone 2, that each participant has, to the public space in zone 1. Finally as participants immerse into these interactive workspaces they need to acquire new social and behavioral skills, from interaction dynamics to use of collaboration technologies and sharing workspace both physical and digital. From the preliminary analysis of spatial and temporal movement between zone 1 and zone 2 and the sharing of the workspace in zone 1 a concept of “dance” emerged. And as with every dance the partners have to learn the steps, otherwise they step on each other’s toes, as we observed in many instances when multiple participants moved into zone 1 with the objective to perform specific un-coordinated actions on the shared digital artifact.

Fruchter, R. and Yen, S., (2000) “RECALL in Action,” Proc. of ASCE ICCCBE-VIII Conference, ed. R. Fruchter, K. Roddis, F. PenaMora, Stanford, August 14-16, CA. R. Fruchter, (2001)“Bricks & Bits & Interaction,” Special Issue on “Exploring New Frontiers on Artificial Intelligence,” Eds. Takao Terano, Toyoaki Nishida, Akira Namatame, Yukio Ohsawa, Shusaku Tsumoto, and Takashi Washio, in Lecture Notes on Artificial Intelligence (LNAI) 2253, Springer Verlag, December 2001. Goldschmidt, G., (1991) "The dialectics of sketching", Creativity Research Journal, v4.n2, pp 123-143, (1991). Goel, V., (1995). Sketches of Press.

Thought, MIT

Kosslyn, S. (1981) "The medium and the message in mental imagery: A theory", Psychological Review, 88, pp 46-66.

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