Work beyond the Desktop: Our Cooperative Building and Roomware Projects

Erich J. Neuhold, GMD-IPSI & T.U. Darmstadt
neuhold@darmstadt.gmd.de

Seminar on People, Computers, and Design
Stanford University May 29, 1998

 

The availability of the worldwide information infrastructure and the ever present computer power is profoundly changing the way we do our work in every type of enterprise. Our notion of Cooperative Building places the human into the center of attention and tries to substantially reduce the currently unnecessary high cognitive overload one faces when dealing with the opportunities offered. This perspective needs to address issues from information technology, new work practices, organizational innovation, new physical and virtual architectural structures and facilities management at work, at home, and on the road.

 In this talk I will illustrate the general idea further and then concentrate on two specific project groups:

• Virtual Cooperative Meeting Rooms are being developed for discussions, on the job learning, and conferencing and are currently utilized and evaluated in support of distributed government agencies, global as well as virtual enterprises, and distributed congresses. Multimedia and large screen based meeting support as well as handling of distributed large document depositories (on SGML and XML basis) are concentration points in our approach.
•  I-Land integrates several so-called 'room ware' components into a combination of real architectural and virtual work environments for dynamic teams. An Electronic Wall, an Interactive Table and Computer-enhanced Chairs are currently explored, evaluated and integrated into this environment.

 

Prof. Dr. Erich J. Neuhold is the Director of the Institute for Integrated Publication and Information Systems of the German National Research Center for Information Technology in Darmstadt, Germany. His primary research and development interests are in heterogeneous interoperable database systems, object-oriented multimedia knowledge bases and intelligent information retrieval. He also guides research and development in user interfaces including virtual reality concepts for information visualization, computer supported cooperative work, virtual meetings and conferences as well as integrated publication and information systems with special emphasize on multimedia hyperdocuments and on information mining in complex distributed systems. He is also Professor of Computer Science, Integrated Publication and Information Systems, at the Darmstadt University of Technolgy, Germany. He has published 4 books and about 100 papers.

 

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