Designing User Friendly Augmented Work Environments

This book aims at capitalizing and transmitting know-how about the design of Augmented Environments (AE) from some of the most prominent laboratories in the field worldwide. The authors belong to the RUFAE network (Research on User- Friendly Augmented Environments, founded in 2002) who meet in research seminars to share experience; Writing this book was perceived as an opportunity to look back over the last few years to sum up important findings; and formalize their approach and experience, which they never had the time or opportunity to do. Although the authors of this book have very different backgrounds, striking similarities emerge in their approach and design principles: never-endingness, activity-orientedness, continuous design, realism are some of the pillars of this approach; enabling to deal with the complex, heterogeneous, multi-user and mul- purpose constructions which AE designers have to face. The book illustrates how these principles enabled them to construct robust, ef- cient, and user-friendly Augmented Environments in spite of the many challenges to make these operational. We hope their experience will help the reader. Primary audience: Academics, Students and Professionals involved in the CHI, CSCW, Ubicomp, Cooperative Building communities. Computer Scientists int- ested by end-users and applications, Social Scientists operating in the IT domain, IT & Organization Consultants. Secondary audience: Developers of office and conferencing applications or middleware, Architects of office buildings, Space Planners, Designers; Facility Managers; IT, furniture & building Business Communities.

Augmented environments – where objects are empowered by underlying information technology, are now installed in an ever-growing number of offices, public spaces and homes. However designing them to be usable and user-friendly remains a challenge.

This book provides an overview and summary of the key research undertaken in augmented environments by some of the most prominent laboratories in the field worldwide (Stanford, Carnegie-Mellon, Fuji-Xerox Palo Alto, EDF R&D, Politecnico di Milano, Swedish Royal Institute of Technology, Russian Academy of Science, UC San Diego, University of Aachen). The book covers all relevant aspects of Augmented Environments from architecture to computer science and psychology. Most useful theories (activity theory, distributed cognition, cognitive attractors, perceived quality…) and design principles (COTS, semantic Rubicon, never-endingness…) as well as practical patterns for implementation are provided by the seminal authors themselves.

With this overview, readers can benefit from the experiences of key researchers in the field to construct robust, efficient and user-friendly augmented environments. All those working in the field of human-computer interaction will find this book an invaluable reference source.