Where the Wild Things Work:Capturing Shared Physical Design Workspaces

W endy Ju, Arna Ionescu, Lawrence Neeley and Terry W inogradStanford University

353 Serra Street, Rm. 388Stanford California 94305 USA

+1.650.723.2780{wendyju, arna, wlneeley, winograd}@stanford.edu

ABSTRACTWe have built and tested WorkspaceNavigator, which supportsknowledge capture and reuse for teams engaged inunstructured, dispersed, and prolonged collaborative designactivity in a dedicated physical workspace. It provides acoherent unified interface for post-facto retrieval of multiplestreams of data from the work environment, includingoverview snapshots of the workspace, screenshots of in-spacecomputers, whiteboard images, and digital photos of physicalobjects . This paper describes the design ofWorkspaceNavigator and identifies key considerations forknowledge capture tools for design workspaces, which differfrom those of more structured meeting or classroomenvironments. Iterative field tests in workspace environmentsfor student teams in two graduate Mechanical Engineeringdesign courses helped to identify features that augment thework of both course participants and design researchers.

Categories and Subject DescriptorsH.5.3 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: Group andOrganization Interfaces—evaluation and methodology

General TermsDesign, Documentation, Experimentation, Management,Measurement, Performance

KeywordsCollaborative Design, Knowledge Capture/Reuse, MemoryAugmentation, Physical Environments, Workspaces

1. INTRODUCTIONWhat kind of environment best supports design? The answersto this question are as varied and vast as the objects and ideasthat are created by designers. For all this diversity, however,design workspaces—from the dining room table where thefamily assembles jig-saw puzzles to the staging area in an

automotive design studio—share many features and needs.The environment, as the locus for activity, must be easilyaccessible to all participants, must support communicationamong design team members, and must have affordances forphysical tools and artifacts. While the physical aspects ofthese shared workspaces are generally persistent, the activityand ideas generated in these environments are often ephemeral.There is broad agreement that effective capture and reuse ofgenerated information can improve team collaboration, reducethe effort expended, and improve the design product, processand documentation [27]. However, prior work in this area, suchas that of Baya [3] and Tang [26], primarily examined thecapture and reuse of data for design teams working on designexercises that were specially formulated for the sake ofexperimentation or of limited duration. This paperinvestigates the larger issues and design requirementsassociated with using such tools “in the wild.”

Our project, WorkspaceNavigator, explores how knowledgecapture and access tools can enhance work in real-worldphysical design environments. WorkspaceNavigator wasdesigned to enhance a class of collaborative environments,where:

design activity takes place in a dedicated physicalsetting.

products evolve over the course of multiple iterativedesign cycles.

collaboration occurs in both structured and unstructuredmeetings.

designers use a variety of informal visual and physicalartifacts, such as sketches, tools and prototypes.

The information captured in the design environment i sintended to serve two constituencies: the team using thephysical design workspace, and those in an oversight role,such as instructors, clients, managers, and design researchers.

The WorkspaceNavigator system was initially developed foruse in an interactive room [12], and was subsequently field-tested in the work environments of fourteen student designteams in two year-long graduate mechanical engineeringcourses. Its usage was assessed through various meansthroughout the course of its design and deployment.

These WorkspaceNavigator deployments illustrate howknowledge capture and access tools can help design teamsdocument their process, improve flow of information fromiteration to iteration of the design process, combat loss ofcritical knowledge artifacts and improve group interaction.These deployments also suggest ways to ease the difficulty of

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work forpersonal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copiesare not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and thatcopies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copyotherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists,requires prior specific permission and/or a fee.

CSCW’04, November 6–10, 2004, Chicago, Illinois, USA.

Copyright 2004 ACM 1-58113-810-5/04/0011…$5.00.

getting design teams to adopt these new tools so that theymight enjoy such benefits in the long-term. Finally, our testdeployments empirically indicate that such knowledge capturetools can help design teams to retrieve critical documents anddata artifacts generated in their shared physical designworkspaces even with a fairly low data-capture rate.

2. DESIGN WORKSPACE NEEDSOne of the key challenges in any extended design task is therecall of the information produced and used during the designprocess. Although the problem of recall is common acrossmany computer-supported cooperative domains outside ofphysical design workspaces, the challenges of knowledgecapture and reuse in such an area are unique.

2.1 Problem Domain AnalysisBeyond the obvious challenges of the extended duration ofobservation and the increased quantity of informationgathered, there are challenges that result from the nature of thecommunication that takes place in the design workspace. Onekey aspect of design processes is that they are l oose lystructured, taking place in a dispersed fashion over a lengthyperiod of time. Unlike typical classroom activities, such asthose augmented in Classroom2000 [2] or NotePals [8], indesign it is difficult to anticipate what information will benecessary or useful later. In addition, the work sessions in aphysical design space are often fluid, impromptu and ad-hoc.The irregular episodic nature of this work that hinders recallalso differentiates it from the type of applications addressedby meeting capture tools such as Tivoli [19], NoteLook [5],and TeamSpace [22]. Finally, design processes are multi-threaded, dispersed across people with different tools atdifferent times, making it difficult for any single person toassemble a coherent narrative of the process as they might inpersonal memory augmentation applications, such as Forget-me-not [14], the Rememberance Agent [23], andMemoryGlasses [8]. These inherent characteristics of shareddesign processes not only drive the need for knowledgecapture and reuse tools, but also make the creation of newkinds of such tools necessary.

To illustrate the difference between the sort of information thatis generated in a design work session, and that presented in aclass presentation or in a meeting, Figure 1 shows “sketches”of a concept created in a design meeting and later presented in-

class. Whereas Figure 1(b) is detailed and explicit, the sketchin Figure 1(a) is spontaneous and loose. It is a lot moredifficult for a viewer to parse the key points presented in theoriginal sketch, and hence far more context and commentary i snecessary to make it useful. Such considerations drove thespecific knowledge capture and recall needs encapsulated inWorkspace Navigator.

2.2 Knowledge Capture NeedsTwo major concerns drive the knowledge capture requirementsof design workspaces. First, the data captured must be rich,rich enough to be worthwhile for future use. Second, the datacapture must be incredibly easy; otherwise, there is a risk thatdesign team members will not bother to capture information.These issues drive the following needs.

Multiple inputs: The activity in a physical design workspacecommonly takes place across a number of different media. Inorder to get a high-level view of the design, it is necessary tointegrate all these views of the design activity. The workspaceswe studied contained whiteboards, workbenches forassembling physical devices, dedicated computers, laptopsbrought in by the students, and additional devices such asdigital cameras.

Implicit and explicit capture: Since users may not know whatinformation will be valuable later, and because design work i sso often impromptu and ad-hoc, it is important that knowledgecapture and reuse systems for physical design spaces actwithout requiring explicit instruction. WorkspaceNavigator i sdesigned around the idea of implicit instruction—it respondsto an inferred need for information capture. In contrast toprevious systems [22] that require users to explicitly start andstop capture, WorkspaceNavigator monitors the environmentfor motion, delineating periods of activity. Users are able toplace annotations on already captured information they knowthey want to refer to later, but no information is lost if they donot annotate. The use of implicit and explicit capture bearssimilarity to the use of “invisibility with override” byCooperstock’s Reactive Room [6].

System integration: Not only must the initiation of designactivity capture require little effort, so must the task ofintegrating the multiple inputs and performing implicitactions be simple, inspectable, and robust. Previous researchinto meeting capture systems that make use of multiple tools,

Figure 1. Sketches generated by a design team(a) for the purposes of collaboration, left, and (b) for purposes of presentation, right.

Figure 2. (a) Interfaces of WSN Browser, left and (b) WSN Viz, right.

such as the Coral system [17], have drawn attention to the needto a good system infrastructure. By using the EventHeap, aflexible middleware technology for physical spaces [11],WorkspaceNavigator is able to integrate numerous datacapture devices in the timeline, to address the heterogeneity ofthe physical design process.

2.3 Knowledge Recall NeedsThe primary difficulty of knowledge capture for physicaldesign workspaces is one of a surplus rather than a paucity ofdata. The difficulty of extending traditional meeting capturesystems into physical design workspaces is one of scale.Reviewing weeks or months of continuous video or audio datais simply impractical—the task of recalling data must besignificantly easier than either recreating or proceedingwithout it.

Discrete level of detail: To help users focus only on relevantdata, one key system goal was to control the level of detail.WorkspaceNavigator’s capture and access model is based ondiscrete event-based data rather than media streams. Thisreduction of temporal resolution makes the challenge ofcapturing and reviewing months-long activity more tractable,and made the system implementation more practical as well.Work conducted by Czerwinski [7] comparing the use of videoand still images from work sessions suggests that this use ofstill images should adequately jog user memories atsubstantially lower technological and cognitive cost.

Contextual organization: Another important aspect of datareduction is organization. WorkspaceNavigator’s browsersmake use of a timeline and overview snapshots of the physicalspace to help put collected data into context. This synthesis ofmultiple data streams into a unified interface is similar to thatof the Coral project [17], in which continuous multimediastreams from different sources in a meeting were unified usinguser-defined and automatically created indices. Using Coral,Moran [18] showed how users come to rely on the linkage ofaudio with pen strokes when creating meeting summaries.However, whereas Coral project focused on synthesizingcontinuous data streams in limited duration meetings, oursystem synthesizes discrete data objects in order to scale thedata capture as previously mentioned.

Visual organization: The strength of human spatial memoryhas also been harnessed by a number of researchers indesigning related interfaces [10], [24]. Renaud [21] found thatvisual and pictorial representations are far superior to verbaldescriptions when trying to resume work after an interruption.By linking captured information, such as computer files orwhiteboard sketches, with their visual representations, we helpto improve the ability of design team members to recollect themeaning of the data artifacts. WorkspaceNavigator’s browserinterface also provides for textual annotation of snapshots andsupports search over those annotations.

Multiple views: WorkspaceNavigator also incorporatesdifferent views into the captured information to allowadaptation of the data for different kinds of uses. The type andlevel of detail needed by team members to track their owndesign process is different from the needs of managers,instructors or design researchers engaged in overseeing thedesign process. As such, our current implementation ofWorkspaceNavigator provides several different views into thecaptured data (see Figure 2).

3. WORKSPACE NAVIGATORWorkspaceNavigator has to main components the knowledgecapture system and the knowledge access interfaces.

3.1 Knowledge Capture SystemTo provide a rich data stream of information artifacts,WorkspaceNavigator uses a variety of implicit and explicitnetworked capture tools. One of our goals was to affect theexisting design work environment as little as possible. In orderto achieve this we created a flexible system architecture thatallows different tools to be added to suit the specific needs ofdifferent work environments. We also worked to minimize theamount of change each capture tool imposed upon the space.

3.1.1 Implicit CaptureTo relieve users of the burden of mindfully capturing designevents, implicit data capture is initiated by a central server,rather than by the users. Every thirty seconds, a centrallydeployed synchronization event is sent by the EventHeap [11]via TCP/IP to trigger each of the active implicit capture toolsto contribute to that timeslice. The following data are used:

Overview Imaging: A networked camera mounted above thespace takes overview images. These images are later used in theWSN Browser to index the other stored information. All of theinstrumented workspaces used this capture tool.

Motion Detection: Successive images from the networkedcamera are analyzed to detect motion in the workspace. Thesemotion events are used by WSN Browser to filter potentiallyrelevant timeslices and by WSN Viz to determine periods ofworkspace activity.

Computer Capture: Each instrumented computer in the spaceprovides a screenshot and an inventory of all open URLs andMicrosoft Office application files (Word, Excel andPowerPoint) at each timeslice. URLs are stored by reference.

Whiteboard Capture: Ultrasonic pens and white-boardmounted transducers allow WorkspaceNavigator to capture thewhiteboards, which are the primary medium for group ideationand brainstorming in many design environments. Thisaugmentation of existing tools and practices showssimilarities to Designer’s Outpost [13], where websitedesigners’ use of “stickies” on whiteboards was captured tohelp build a digital record of the design process. Here, weretrofitted existing workspace whiteboards usingcommercially available hardware (http://www.e-beam.com).Flat-panel monitors mounted next to each whiteboard providefeedback on what strokes are captured, and an adjoining PCsends captured board-shots to the EventHeap server. One suchsetup is shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3. WorkspaceNavigator whiteboard capture setup

3.1.2 Explicit CaptureWhiteboard snaps: We put a button on the whiteboard thatallows users to explicitly store the current image into theWorkspaceNavigator database at any time. In addition, we tookadvantage of natural usage without regard for capture andprovided a button to print the current image. Althoughprinting is not an explicit capture action for the users, it servesthe purpose of identifying salient images and we store allprinted images in the database.

Digital Pictures: Users can integrate digital camera imagesinto the data stream by uploading the images to a designatedcomputer. Uploads are monitored and copies of the images aresubmitted to the central database, with timeline integrationtaking place using the timestamp in the JPEG image’s EXIFheader.

Annotations: We provide three tools for users to make

annotations. Users can make annotations in real-time during asession by using wireless buttons that send a marker via theEventHeap. They can also provide text annotations during thesession using a stand-alone application or during subsequentreview using the WSN Browser.

3.2 Knowledge Access InterfacesThere are three ways to access the data captured by theWorkspaceNavigator. We designed and built two browsers, theWSN Browser, created primarily for design team members, andWSN Viz, for observers and researchers of the design process.Both browsers allow users to visually track activity in thephysical workspace, but at different levels of detail. The thirdmethod for accessing captured data involves using InternetExplorer to browse the raw data stored on the webDAV server.

WSN Browser presents captured project data for a single team.It provides a unified interface for accessing all of the capturedinformation from a physical design workspace, as shown inFigure 2a.

The focal elements of the interface are a timeline and anoverview wide-angle image of the workspace. The timelinecontains two rows, one representing implicitly captureddiscrete data acquired at regular intervals, and the otherrepresenting explicitly uploaded digital images. Users cannavigate through the captured timeslices either by directlyclicking on the timeline, or by using the arrows to step forwardand backward. The text area at the bottom right displaysannotations and various files associated with the displayedtimeslice. A timeline has been used by many researchers topresent data. One example is Rekimoto’s TimeMachineComputing [20]: confined to a computer desktop only, i tallows users to step backwards and forwards to previousdesktop states.

Clicking on the image of a captured device (such as awhiteboard or computer display) in the overview image opensa condensed screenshot of its contents. Along with thecondensed screenshot is a list of files and URLs displayed onthat device when the shot was taken. Clicking on any elementin this list allows the item to be reopened and displayed.

WSN Viz provides a graphical visualization of activity nseveral team spaces simultaneously, as shown in Figure 1b.Each row represents a different physical space, each blockrepresents a time period, and the brightness of each blockrepresents how much activity was occurring at a given point.Course milestone markers provide the researchers withlandmarks as they look at patterns of activity in the space.This view presents high-level information about workspaceactivity and patterns to facilitate cross-team comparisons.

Internet Explorer was often used by teams to access raw datastored in the webDAV folders. Users browsed through foldersand long textual file lists to find various images that had beenstored. We did not anticipate this method of accessing thedata, but in retrospect we have come to realize that folder andfile lists are familiar, and Internet Explorer is a standard pieceof software available on any computer one uses.

4. EVALUATIONWe conducted both controlled studies and an extended fieldtest of WorkspaceNavigator. The findings from these studiesare discussed in the next section.

4.1 Pilot studies4.1.1 Entrepreneurial MeetingThe main purpose of this first pilot study was to validate thetimeslice-based capture model. The subjects were members of abusiness school research group who used WorkspaceNavigatorin an interactive meeting room to capture a three-day meetingstudying the entrepreneurial process. We provided this groupwith computer capture on their laptops and the large shareddisplays. We also provided button and text annotation tools.

This pilot was evaluated through observation and interviews.This study validated the use of 30-second time intervals, andencouraged further development of the system. More detailedobservations from this study will be presented in subsequentsections of this paper.

4.1.2 Trip PlanningOur second pilot study focused on the usability of the WSNBrowser, particularly its use of spatial cues to organizeinformation. In this study two teams of three recruited subjectsworked on a multi-session design activity in three sessionsover an eight day period. The teams were given the task ofplanning a trip to Bangkok with different constraints in eachsession. The constraints were designed so that users wouldfind it useful to recall and reuse previously located material.

These sessions were evaluated through observation andinterviews. This study validated the visual method of findinginformation using the WSN Browser. More detailedobservations from this study will be presented in subsequentsections of this paper.

4.2 Field testsTo test our system in actual design environments, we deployedWorkspaceNavigator in a variety of pre-existing designworkspaces associated with two courses in the MechanicalEngineering department. Both courses involved team-baseddesign projects and had large laboratory spaces with specificareas designated for each team’s use. The study and datacollection took place over nine months

One class was a three-quarter graduate sequence where studentdesign teams of four or five students worked on industry-sponsored projects to produce a final product prototype. Weinstrumented four project team spaces, as well as a shared classspace. All five spaces in the design project course wereaugmented with overview image capture, motion detection,whiteboard capture, and explicit digital picture capture; oneteam also had a personal computer which ran the computercapture tool.

The second class was a three-quarter graduate sequence onmechatronics. Ten teams were instrumented during the courseof two final projects in the winter and spring quarters of thiscourse. These classes involved greater use of computerworkstations, so every workspace was outfitted with thecomputer capture tool, overview image capture, and motiondetection. The shared space was instrumented with whiteboardand overview image capture.

Teams were able to access their collected data both through theWSN Browser and through a direct web-based interface into thedata repository. Both interfaces were password protected sothat only team members and design researchers had access tocollected data. Data about the usage of the system werecollected through server logs, student and instructorinterviews, questionnaires, as well as analysis of student

documentation. This data was collected both to evaluateWorkspaceNavigator as a tool for the design teams, and as adataset for researchers studying the behavior and practices ofthe design teams. Information about team usage ofWorkspaceNavigator tools was not shared with and did notinfluence the academic evaluation of team performance.

5. FINDINGSThe Workspace Navigator system evolved considerably duringits extended deployment. Our experiments and field testrefined our understanding of what makes knowledge captureand reuse tools effective, both for the design teams themselvesand for those observing them. In this section, we discuss ourexperiences and how they inform the design of knowledgecapture and reuse systems in general.

5.1 Lessons about knowledge captureKnowledge capture tools need to accommodate both activeand passive users. One of the benefits of designingWorkspaceNavigator with both explicit and implicit capturemechanisms is that it addressed this diversity of behaviors.The extremes of the spectrum between low and high adoptionof WorkspaceNavigator were embodied in two of the teams inthe team-based design class, which we will call Team A andTeam Z.

From the outset, the members of Team A were our mostenthusiastic users. They eagerly used and experimented withthe system and suggested many improvements. “I totally likethe idea…that it can be accessed anywhere,” stated one Team Amember in an interview about WorkspaceNavigator, “Evenbefore using this system, whatever points I would write onpaper, I used to email myself or put online so that… I can justaccess it at any time.”

Although Team A’s eager adoption of WorkspaceNavigator,was heartening, it also suggests a pre-existing inclinationtowards documentation that would have found other tools touse if WorkspaceNavigator had not been in place.

Team Z, on the other hand, made no secret of theirdisinclination to explicitly capture artifacts from their designprocess. “Personally, I hate spending time on documentingthings. Period. I feel like it impedes my process of designing,”one Team Z member confessed in interview. “I hate that if wehave a brainstorm session we have to draw little things aboutwhat we did instead of just getting to our idea.” In later

Figure 4. Activity levels for Teams A & Z

questionnaires, Team Z reported, “We never really got on trackwith using [these tools].”

Team Z did n o t in fact do a n y documentation, andsubsequen t l y found t hemse lve s t u r n i n g toWorkspaceNavigator in the two weeks before their winterdocument was due. In the words of the courseinstructor,“[Team Z] always seemed to be a step behind . . .WorkspaceNavigator really saved their asses.” In this way,WorkspaceNavigator converted its biggest skeptics into avidproponents of the system.

WorkspaceNavigator data (Figure X) shows that Team A andTeam Z had similar activity levels throughout their projects,so they likely did similar amounts of work. WithoutWorkspaceNavigator, though, Team Z’s documentation wouldhave suffered from lack of foresight.

Design teams have real-time and near-term knowledgecapture needs. Our design was based around knowledge reusescenarios where design teams would access capturedinformation after a considerable time had elapsed since theevent of interest. However, our field deployments helped us torealize that teams have many “near-term reuse” needs. In bothfield test deployments, teams like Team A used the ability toprint out copies of the whiteboard images to generate copiesfor everyone present at the meeting, and a few more for thosewho could not make it. In interviews, team members indicatedthat this near-term reuse increased the flow of ideas duringbrainstorming sessions, because they felt the ideas werecaptured and hence acknowledged.

In the mechatronics course, participants creatively used theoverview capture from their homes to tell if teammates were inlab. One asked us to change the firewalls on the system so thattheir parents could observe their project progress online. Thisindicated to us that one key use for WorkspaceNavigator wasto provide real-time updates on location and activity to teammembers and other interested parties in far-flung locations.

WorkspaceNavigator could be made more useful byintegrating capture tools into the building phases of thedesign process. During the mechatronics course field test, infact, we observed that one team had redirected their camera 60degrees away from their computer workspace. We worried atfirst that this might be an indication that the team had privacyconcerns with the web camera, but discovered in fact that theteam wanted to record the work they were doing on theworkbench when they were building their mechatronic robots.

Use of implicit capture vastly increases adoption andusefulness. In our field tests, we found that explicit use ofWorkspaceNavigator data capture tools tended to drop off afterthe initial introduction. Team A made extensive use of theability to explicitly save and print whiteboard images,capturing 168 shots over two quarters compared to the 64shots captured by the other three teams combined, but eventhey made far greater use of the whiteboard images in the firstthan second quarter.

While this discrepancy partially be attributed to the fact thatsketches and diagrams made on a whiteboard are moreprevalent during early conceptual design phases than laterwhen the designers are busy building, we found that many ofthe implicitly captured images were deemed to be useful afterthe fact. This may be interpreted to validate our assumptionthat much valuable information is found to be useful after thefact, and that users adapt readily to having the systemimplicitly capture data for them.

One of the major issues with implicit capture is privacy. Manyof the system users expressed concern about privacy issuesand hence the initial implementation included capturepause/resume buttons for each captured screen. However, in thepilot studies, users repeatedly demonstrated that in the heat ofactual work, users would forget that capture was occurring orforget how to turn capture off, no matter how simple or visiblethe pause and resume mechanisms were. This indicated to usthat requiring an explicit action to trigger privacy during ameeting is not a viable option.

The need to differentiate between public and privateinformation in a shared workspace complicates implicitcapture. There are explicit and implicit aspects to privacy.First, it needed to be more obvious to users that their actionswere being captured, so that they could modify their behavioraccordingly. In addition, however, a knowledge capture systemneeds to be proactive about protecting user privacy. Our usersinformed us that their biggest privacy concern was email, sosubsequent screen capture applications blacked out all emailweb-based e-mail windows.

5.2 Lessons about Information ReuseCaptured knowledge can be adapted to many design needs.The strongest finding from our pilot studies and field tests i sthat the capture of the workspace overview images, thecomputer screenshots and the whiteboard sketches wereactively used for a wide variety of purposes.

In the pilot study with the entrepreneurial team, team membersroutinely referenced WorkspaceNavigator screenshots overtheir own notes in writing up meeting summaries. Similarly,three of the four the teams in the industry-sponsored designcourse used data from WorkspaceNavigator in their projectdocumentation. Team Z strongly dismissed the explicit use ofWSN Browser during their design work, stating in aquestionnaire, “People need to be more organized to use thosetools.” At the end of the quarter, the design team realized thatthey had not done a good job documenting their process butwere able to use WorkspaceNavigator to help reconstruct theirdesign process and locate whiteboard images thatWorkspaceNavigator had automatically saved to use in theirfinal documents.

The trip-planning pilot study indicated WorkspaceNavigator’spromise for knowledge reuse applications. Participants wereable to use spatial cues from overview images to findinformation they had previously used—for instance, theyrelocated a website while reviewing overview images byrecognizing the color of the screen in the location they hadviewed it previously. They also used WorkspaceNavigator tohelp recover lost data. The participants forgot to save aMicrosoft Excel file, and were able to recreate the desiredinformation from a screenshot.

Finally, we heard that design teams would useWorkspaceNavigator to improve group awareness. Frequentlyteam members deeply engrossed in design work will becomelax in telling other team members when they are coming intowork or what they have gotten done, causing major issues inworkload sharing or project integration. Team members oftenused WorkspaceNavigator to review their teammate’s designactivity and progress, and found it useful to have the onus ofgetting such information shifted to the interested party.

Implicit artifact capture affords post-facto analysis. One ofthe key benefits of implicit artifact capture for designers was

that they could pick out key sketches and documentsretroactively, with the benefit of hindsight. Similarly, those indesign oversight roles benefit from the ability to form and testhypotheses after the fact. In the case of the field tests, designresearchers were able to use the multiple months of collecteddata make observations about work activity patterns, toanalyze utilization of the physical workspace for differenttasks, to compare roles played by different team members, andto characterize typical behaviors in different design phases.

For instance, the design researchers were able to observe along-term correlation between the quantity of data artifactsgenerated and overall project performance; prior studies,establishing such correlations were limited in duration(usually design exercises instead of real projects as in [26]) orfocused on one data stream (primarily inter-team e-mail, forinstance, in [16]). The researchers could choose what datastreams, time slices or people to focus on with the knowledgeof how teams performed on the project. This greatly reducesthe amount of work demanded of the researcher, and is criticalto making such a long-term study feasible.

Such uses of the captured data might correlate with industrialdesign needs such as process improvement reviews or projectpost-mortems.

Users prefer web-based interfaces over dedicated clientapplications. Although the WSN Browser offered teams a nicerinterface with which to browse their workspace history, teamsby and large chose to access their data through the webbrowser interface. When pressed why, many observed that theWSN Browser was not fast enough, but also admitted that,though they had already been introduced to the browser, theyhad not even installed the browser on their own computers totest it out until we asked. They preferred to use the webinterface even though it precluded them from seeing thecaptured data in an integrated setting because they already useweb browsers in their design work.

Speed of data browsing is more important than data density.In discussing the concept of WorkspaceNavigator, we areroutinely asked if the system would not be better if it usedcontinuous audio and video streams instead of discretetimeslice information. However, in the pilot studies and thefield studies, none of the participants commented on the needfor greater continuity of data or complained about any missinginformation. Instead, the chief concern—particularly in thefield studies when the design teams were browsing throughmany weeks of data—was the speed with which they couldlocate the desired information.

Although speed was not an issue in the pilot studies, field testparticipants invariably commented on the speed of the WSNBrowser in feedback sessions where users were observed usingthe tool. This concern is manifest in the actual use patterns,when design teams predominantly accessed stored datathrough the web browser rather than through the WSN Browserapplication.

Design oversight benefits from richer data and adjustablelevels of detail. Those engaged in overseeing design—whetherfrom a managerial, instructional or research role—do not havethe benefit of having been involved in the captured processthe first-time through. Hence, it is sometimes difficult toestablish exactly what the design teams are working onwithout the benefit of a continuous audio stream. The designresearchers examining the field test data often struggled toestablish what the context of captured images, and hence made

more regular use of the ability to cross-reference datagenerated simultaneously across different data streams(screenshot and whiteboard, for instance) than did thestudents. The researchers indicated that an audio stream wouldgreatly improve their ability to establish what was going on.Video was less salient due to the time-scale of the field tests,but it is possible that smaller-scale gestures could be ofinterest when examining a critical meeting or disagreement.

For the design researchers, it was important to look at thecollected data from a high level view, across larger chunks oftime, across different teams, over the entirely of the project.WSN Viz provided those performing oversight roles with aquick snapshot of what was occurring across the workspaces atany given time, to help identify periods of high activity, toallow cross-team comparisons, to indicate overall workspaceactivity level. It would have been useful to link the WSN Vizto WSN Browser so that users could more smoothly control thedegree of detail presented in the information interface. As thedata set grows richer, the need for good indexing of prominentmoments and periods is really critical to make rapid insightpossible.

6. DISCUSSIONWe have generalized our specific findings from our real-worlddesign and deployment of WorkspaceNavigator to thefollowing high-level themes:

6.1 Multiple inputsOne of the strongest aspects of the WorkspaceNavigatorsystem was its extensibility. It was easy to add additionalcapture tools to the mix as long as the data being collectedcould be posted to the central server. The digital cameracapture mechanism, for example was created a couple monthsinto the field test after we realized that students madeextensive use of digital pictures to record the progress of theirmechanical prototypes. Such extensibility is valuable for anygeneral purpose knowledge capture system.

6.2 Multiple ViewsWe differentiated WorkspaceNavigator’s browsers to addressthe needs of different user groups. Over the course of itsdeployment , however , we not iced ways thatWorkspaceNavigator could be extended to further supportdesign teams. For example, one design engineering team spentconsiderable time filling up several portable whiteboards withinformation to prepare for meetings. The WSN Browser couldeasily have been used to capture this advance preparation andplay it back during the meeting, but the tool was not optimallydesigned for immediate review. In discussing the informationpresented in WSN Viz, we discovered that researchers oftenwanted to have finer grain control over the granularity ofpresented information, to allow them to “drill down into thedata.” In general, this suggested that the framework for storingand accessing the data needs to be flexible enough to supporta variety of possible outputs, to better allow the system torespond to newly discovered needs.

6.3 Implicit and Explicit CaptureImplicit capture overcomes many of these obstacles ofadoption of capture mechanisms. Users often choose not to usenew technologies because it is not immediately obvious whythey are useful—as we noted in our findings, some field-testdesigns teams were very grateful to make post-facto discoveryof the WorkspaceNavigator functionality.

It is important, of course, in any system with implicit actionsto provide functionality for redundant input and override.Using the implicit capture model, for instance, it is not reallynecessary to explicitly save files; however, we noticed thatteams used this much in the way they used real-timeannotations in the pilot studies, to denote a record of interest.The fact that users used this facility suggests that users canmake explicit decisions about topics of immediate concern inthe way that they do not for topics of peripheral concern.

6.4 Variable GranularityOne of the chief differences between our system and those ofmeeting capture systems, aside from domain area, was the useof discrete time-slices and data objects rather than continuousstreams of data. We found that while the design teams in thepilots and field studies found the thirty-second timesliceworkable for finding key data, design researchers found thetimeslice model to be somewhat limiting.

This difference is driven by two factors: whether the personreviewing the data was present when the data was first capturedand what the information captured is worth to the reviewer. Thegeneral principle derived from this tradeoff between datadensity, usefulness and usability is that different applicationsdemand different degrees of information granularity. We usethe word granularity to emphasize the degree to whichdiscretizing data objects improves the flexibility of the datareuse, permitting differing levels of detail and richness andeasing the process of integrating multiple sources ofinformation. While the degree of discretization needs to varyin accordance to the specific of the way the data will beaccessed for reuse, we found that varying granularity is the keyto having an application that can help one person get a high-level understanding of team dynamics while, or helpinganother locate for a specific whiteboard drawing.

7. CONCLUSIONSWorkspaceNavigator is a data capture and access system thatsupports work in shared physical workspaces. We found thatexamining the needs of collaborative teams working in thewilder, unstructured environment of design workspaces led todesign requirements very different from those of existingmeeting capture tools. These needs led us to focus on creatinga system that allowed both implicit and explicit data capture,that extended the feasible duration of operation throughappropriate reduction in data resolution, and that allowedgreater configurability both in types of data captured and inthe fashion that the captured data is accessed and presented. Inthe future, we hope to extend this body of research to otherunstructured activity environments.

We would like to delve further into the difference in the designof implicit and explicit interactions, and into the way thatthese types of interactions might influence one another. Wewould also like to experiment with augmenting the discretecaptured data with continuous streams such as audio,exploring how discrete data can provide indices to help usersnavigate more unwieldy continuous data, and to allow explicitcomparison of our timeslice model to a continuous timelinemodel. Finally, we would like to work more explicitly oninterface improvements to WorkspaceNavigator to providedesigners and researchers better access to capturedinformation.

8. REFERENCES[1] Abowd, G., C. Atkenson, J. Brotherton, T. Enqvist, P.

Gulley, J. LeMon. Investigating the Capture, Integrationand Access Problem of Ubiquitous Computing in anEducational Setting. In Proceedings of CHI 1998, pp. 440-447.

[2] Abowd. G. Classroom 2000: An Experiment with theInstrumentation of a Living Educational Environment.IBM Systems Journal, Special issue on PervasiveComputing, Volume 38, Number 4, October 1999. pp.508-530.

[3] Baya, V., J. Gevins, C. Baudin, A. Mabogunje, G. Toye, L.Leifer, An Experimental Study of Design InformationReuse, Proceedings. of 4th Intl Conference on DesignTheory and Methodology (1992), ASME, Scottscale AZ

[4] Brotherton, J., K. Truong, G. Abowd. Supporting captureand access interfaces for informal and opportunisticmeetings. Technical Report GITGVU -99-06, GVU Center,Georgia Institute of Technology, January 1999

[5] Chiu, P., A. Kapuskar, S. Reitmeier, L. Wilcox. NoteLook:Taking Notes in Meetings with Digital Video and Ink. InProceedings of the seventh ACM international conferenceon Multimedia (Part 1), 1999, pp. 149-158.

[6] Cooperstock, J., S. Fels, W. Buxton, K. Smith. Reactiveenvironments. Communications of the ACM, 40(7):65--73, September 1997

[7] Czerwinski, M., E. Horvitz. An Investigation of Memoryfor Daily Computing Events. People and Computers XVI,Proceedings of HCI 2002, pp. 230-245.

[8] Davis, R., J. Landay. et all. NotePals: Lightweight NoteSharing by the Group, for the Group. In Proceedings ofCHI 1999, pp. 338-345

[9] DuVaul, R.W., B. Clarkson, A. Rentalnd. The MemoryGlasses: Towards a Wearable Context Aware, Situation-Appropriate Reminder System. People and Computer XIV:Proceedings of HCI 2000, Vol 2, British ComputerSociety, pp. 71-76.

[10] Fass, A. M., J. Forlizzi, R. Pausch. MessyDesk andMessyBoard: Two Designs Inspired By the Goal ofImproving Human Memory. In Proceedings of DIS 2002,pp. 303-311.

[11] Johanson, B., A. Fox. The Event Heap: A CoordinationInfrastructure for Interactive Workspaces. In Fourth IEEEWorkshop on Mobile Computing Systems andApplications, 2002a, pp. 83-93.

[12] Johanson, B., A. Fox, T. Winograd. The InteractiveWorkspaces Project: Experiences with UbiquitousComputing Rooms. IEEE Pervasive Computing, 2002b.1(2): pp. 67-74.

[13] Klemmer, S. R., M. Thomsen, E. P. Phelps-Goodman, R.Lee, J. Landay. A. Where Do Web Sites Come FromCapturing and Interacting with Design History. InProceedings of CHI 2002, pp. 1-8.

[14] Lamming, M., M. Flynn. Forget-me-not: IntimateComputing in Support of Human Memory. In Proceedingsof FRIEND21, International Symposium on NextGeneration Human Interface, 1994.

[15] Landay J., R. Davis. "Making Sharing Pervasive:Ubiquitous Computing for Shared Note Taking." IBMSystems Journal, 1999. 38(4): p. 531-550.

[16] Mabogunje, A., L. Leifer, R. Levitt, C. Baudin. ME210-VDT: A Managerial Framework for Improving DesignProcess Performance,” Frontiers in Education Conference(1995) , Atlanta Georgia

[17] Minneman, S., S. Harrison, B. Janssen, G. Kurtenbach, T.Moran, I. Smith, W. van Melle. A confederation of toolsfor capturing and accessing collaborative activity. InProceedings of the third ACM international conference onMultimedia 1995, pp. 523-534.

[18] Moran, T., L. Palen, S. Harrison, P. Chiu, D. Kimber, S.Minneman, W. van Melle, P. Zellweger. I'll Get That Off theAudio: A Case Study of Salvaging Multimedia MeetingRecords. In Proceedings of CHI 1997, pp. 202-209.

[19] Pedersen, E. R., K. McCall, T. Moran, F. Halasz. Tivoli: AnElectronic Whiteboard for Informal Workgroup Meetings.In Proceedings of CHI 1993, pp. 391-398.

[20] Rekimoto, J. Time-Machine Computing: A Time-centricApproach for the Information Environment. InProceedings of ACM UIST 1999, pp. 45-54.

[21] Renaud, K. Expediting Rapid Recovery FromInterruptions by Providing a Visualization of ApplicationActivity. In Proceedings of OZCHI 2000, pp. 348-355.

[22] Richter, H., G. Abowd, W. Geyer, L. Fuchs, S. Daijavad, S.Poltrock. Integrating Meeting Capture within a

Collaborative Team Environment. In Proceedings ofUBICOMP 2001, pp. 123-128.

[23] Rhodes, B., T. Starner. The Remembrance Agent: AContinuously Running Automated Information RetrievalSystem. In Proceedings of the First InternationalConference on The Practical Application of IntelligentAgents and Multi Agent Technology, 1996, pp. 487-495.

[24] Robertson, G., M. Czerwinski, K. Larson, D.C. Robbins, D.Thiel, M. van Dantzich. Data Mountain: Using SpatialMemory for Document Management. In Proceedings ofUIST 1998, pp. 153-162.

[25] Russell, D.M., R. Gossweiler. On the Design of Personal &Communal Large Information Scale Appliances. InProceedings of Ubicomp 2001 Proceedings, pp. 354-360.

[26] Tang, J., Toward an Understanding of the Use of SharedWorkspaces by Design Teams. PhD Thesis, StanfordUniversity, 1989

[27] Toye, G., M. Cutkosky, L. Leifer, J. Tenenbaum, J.Glicksman. SHARE: A Methodology and Environment forCollaborative Product Development. Intl. J. of Intelligentand Cooperative Info. Systems, June 1994, 3(2), p. 129-53.

[28] Whittaker, S., P. Hyland, M. Wiley. Filochat: HandwrittenNotes Provide Access to Recorded Conversations. InProceedings of CHI 1994, pp. 271-277