CAM: A Collaborative Object Memory System
Dhaval Vyas & Anton Nijholt
Human Media Interaction
University of Twente, the Netherlands
+31 53 489 4654
d.m.vyas | a.nijholt @ewi.utwente.nl
Alexander Kröner
Intelligent User Interfaces
DFKI Saarbrücken, Germany
+49 681 85775 5395
alexander.kroener@dfki.de
ABSTRACT
Physical design objects such as sketches, drawings, collages, storyboards and models play an important role in supporting communication and coordination in design studios. CAM (Cooperative Artefact Memory) is a mobile-tagging based messaging system that allows designers to collaboratively store relevant information onto their design objects in the form of messages, annotations and external web links. We studied the use of CAM in a Product Design studio over three weeks, involving three different design teams. In this paper, we briefly describe CAM and show how it serves as ‘object memory’.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
H.5.m [Information Interfaces and Presentation] (e.g. HCI): Miscellaneous
General Terms
Design, Human Factors.
Keywords
Mobile-tagging, Design Studio, Design Objects, Object Memory
1. INTRODUCTION
Ethnographic studies of collaborative work have shown that material objects (such as papers) that populate work environments play an important role in supporting communication and coordination [5, 6]. The materiality of physical objects can be further exploited by adding computational powers [11] to these objects. Following longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork [7, 8, 9] in different design studios, we have developed a mobile phone-based system called CAM (Cooperative Artefact Memory) that allows designers to store relevant information onto their physical design objects. CAM is a very simple, low-tech system that uses off-the-shelf tools such as Microsoft’s mobile-tagging application TagReader, 2D barcodes and a JAVA web server that uses Twitter API. In the context of industrial design, CAM can be used to store annotations, comments, and external web links on design artefacts such as sketches, posters, collages and physical models. We studied the use of CAM in a Product Design studio for three weeks. Our preliminary findings show that CAM was used as an extension of physical design objects, as a design archive, and was useful in supporting flexible and mobile collaborative work. In this poster, we briefly describe the functionality and architecture of CAM and briefly provide results of a three week long field study in a Product Design studio.
2. RELATED WORK
In the past decade, we have seen an increasing number of applications that focus on augmenting physical objects in different domains – varying from household kitchen environments to logistics (see [3] for a review). One of the earliest technologies was the eTag system [10] that used electronic tags on items such as books and posters linked to online information and actions. The authors demonstrated the utility of linking the electronic services and actions that are naturally associated with their form. Other similar systems such as AURA [1] and Physical Hypermedia [4] looked into supporting collaborative activities using augmented objects. Recently, in the domain of logistics, Decker et al. [2] showed how augmented objects could store parts of the business logic to achieve an efficient monitoring of the environmental parameters the objects are exposed to.
3. CAM: COOPERATIVE ARTEFACT
MEMORY
CAM is a simple, low-tech system that uses off-the-shelf tools such as Microsoft’s mobile-tagging application TagReader, 2D barcodes and a JAVA web server that uses Twitter API. Using CAM, design objects can have an individual digital profile (which can be seen as a memory of the design object) on the Internet where relevant information can be added, updated or changed by all designers. CAM focuses on a vision of bringing ubiquitous computing into design studios. According to this vision, using 2D barcodes design professionals can collaboratively store relevant information onto their physical design artefacts (e.g. sketches, posters, collages, physical models, prototypes) and can access this information through their mobile devices. Designers can exchange ideas and collaborate via these design artefacts, hence supporting collaborative work in ubiquitous ways.
CAM has a very simple UI (Figure 1a). “Check Updates” allows viewing of all the messages of a design object and “Post Message” allows for writing and sending a new message to it. In a
(a) (b)
Figure 1: (a) CAM running on an iPhone; (b) Reading a design sketch using Microsoft’s TagReader client.
Copyright is held by the author/owner(s).
MobileHCI’10, September 7 - 10, 2010, Lisboa, Portugal.
typical usage scenario, a designer can attach a 2D barcode to his/her physical design object and write messages to the barcode via scanning the tag with TagReader. When the designer scans the barcode (Figure 1b), a Google App called cam-app starts, which is developed with Google Web Toolkit and supported by Google App Engine. In this case, the Google App carries the ID of that
particular barcode. Figure 3: Foam model of an alarm clock with 2D barcode and its Tweet log showing different activities. Figure 2 shows a high-level
architecture of CAM. Its central idea is to associate a 2D barcode with a Twitter account. Whenever a designer writes something to a barcode, the message is sent as a Tweet to that barcode’s Twitter account. Similarly, when one reads a barcode, one sees a log of Tweets in the form of messages, annotations and comments about that particular design object. In a collaborative design project, this would eventually lead to a collection of Tweets written by different group members that will provide information about different design activities in the project.
Figure 2: High-level architecture of CAM.
4. PROBING CAM
Using a probing approach, we studied the use of CAM in a Product Design studio over three weeks. We invited three student design teams (4 participants in each team) to use CAM for their one-week-long design project. We gave them three WIFI enabled Windows mobile phones and one iPhone. We created several temporary Twitter IDs and the same number of 2D barcodes generated using Microsoft Tag. Our intention in the field study was not to evaluate CAM as a fully functional technology, but to explore different uses and appropriations of CAM.
We observed that CAM facilitated design objects to support cooperation between the participants. Using CAM, participants recorded design ideas, activities, important decisions and milestones onto their design objects. After participants described their design objects, team members made comments, suggestions and asked for clarifications about each other’s work. Though the actual design objects had limited physical dimensions, the use of CAM allowed participants to extend the information pertaining to the objects in the form of messages. Figure 3 shows a foam model of an alarm clock and its Tweet log (in German). One can read information pertaining to the design model, cautious remarks, and design suggestions made by colleagues. In this way, CAM has been used as a tool to support communication within the design teams and to create a kind of a dialogue between designers. The expressive nature of CAM also seemed to provoke a degree of playfulness and creativity. Reading messages from an object had a serendipitous character, as asynchronous communication through design objects had a level of serendipity. This serendipity actually fascinated the participants and made their interactions with design objects inherently playful.
5. CONCLUSION
CAM extends the current uses of mobile-tagging applications to support collaboration between team members. In the current form, CAM is not meant to be a complete system as it uses low-tech, off-the-shelf tools for explorative purposes. However, the probing of CAM in a design studio showed how our participants adapted and appropriated the use of CAM.
6. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
This work is supported by the European IST Programme Project FP6-0033812 (AMIDA) and by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research under grant 01|A08002 A (SemProM).
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