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Recent Comments
- Re: Responsive Buildings and Social Networks
By: LBI
Date: Nov 5, 2009 9:37 PM - Re: Responsive Buildings and Social Networks
By: Ben Waber
Date: Oct 22, 2009 10:03 PM - Re: Responsive Buildings and Social Networks
By: robert
Date: Oct 22, 2009 6:43 PM
Notification
« You Lie 2.0 | Main | Report on online townhalls... »
21 October 2009
Responsive Buildings and Social Networks
In a blog entry about a year ago I talked about using sensor data to change architecture into a changeable force for altering social networks. I recently analyzed the office layout data from 4 of our sociometric badge studies, and found that the probability of interaction between two people degraded greatly as the distance between their desks (as well as the physical barriers such as walls) increased.
I got fairly intrigued by the idea of dynamically modifying office layout to help deal with this situation, and recently for the Media Lab fall sponsor week my UROP Alex Speltz and I built a prototype of an augmented cubicle wall that changes based on the social context. Here's a picture:
The wall is a little over 2 meters tall and made of two plexiglass sheets with a wood frame. Inside the plexiglass sheets are window blinds that can be raised and lowered by an actuator mounted on the bottom of the wall.
The idea is that by detecting the stage of work for a worker (exploring vs. exploiting) we can determine if they need more face-to-face interaction or less for a certain period of time (probably at least a week). If someone needs to talk more with people around them, at night the actuator will pull down the blinds to create a window, making serendipitous interaction easier. If, on the other hand, the person is more in an exploit mode and needs to sit at their desk and work, the blinds are pulled up at night, and when they come in the next day it will give them more privacy. People can also specify their interaction preferences through a web-based system that my other UROPs Tim Kaler, Ernie Park, and Margaret Ding made, which allows us to further tailor the system output.
It's important to imagine an entire office outfitted with these, so if you knew that two groups were starting to work on a project together the barriers between those groups would disappear, while if someone was monopolizing the time of another group the barriers between them would increase. In effect, the augmented cubicle would become a social signal for availability. While people can control the blinds manually, in practice people stick with the defaults (I pulled down the blinds in my office two months ago and haven't gotten around to pulling them back up).
We're planning on deploying this in a real organization in the next few months as the design gets finalized to see if we can have a positive effect on the work environment, as well as productivity and job satisfaction. We're also currently making a demonstration video of the wall, which I'll post here as soon as it's ready.
Posted by Ben Waber at October 21, 2009 3:35 PM
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Comments
This is very interesting but if someone needs more interaction, is the mere sight of someone else going to help facilitate that? Doesn't the wall, although made of glass, still act as a barrier to that interaction? Or is it designed more as a symbol. If someone sees into your office, your door is open so speak and if the blinds are down then you are basically putting up a do not disturb sign?
Posted by: robert at October 22, 2009 6:43 PM
It's true that the wall is still a barrier, but we've found in our experiments that glass walls make interaction much more likely than opaque walls (about 2x more likely). Also, if you imagine that someone's entire cubicle is composed of these walls, then you really just won't be able to see if they're even in their cubicle or not if the blinds are up. I think that eventually this would morph into a cultural signal, though, that I'm in a certain stage in my work and would like to talk to people or would prefer to keep to myself for a few days.
Posted by: Ben Waber at October 22, 2009 10:03 PM
Very interesting project. I don't work in a cubicle so I can't relate, however I am interested in your results keep us posted.
Posted by: LBI at November 5, 2009 9:37 PM