Canonical Examples

Office availability indicator

Published

 

Context

Open offices, especially for people working with complex tasks.

Design concept

Context switching is very costly from a cognitive point of view, however especially in open office settings, it is hard to know when someone is in the middle of something or if it’s OK to ask them questions. Here is an indicator light, showing if someone can be disturbed or not.  The light can show different colours indicating “busyness level”. It can either be controlled manually or linked to applications on your computer.

Experiential qualities and related concepts

Calm, fluency, overview, peripheral awareness, sociality, visibility.

Augmentation modality

Visual.

Technical options

USB connection, Bluetooth, programmable multicoloured LED lights.

Prototyping techniques

Wizard of Oz.

Source

Kickstarter in 2015. Now available from Luxafor.

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Urban social navigation (a.k.a. footprints)

Overlaying a suitably abstracted rendering of people’s traces gives a sense of where the action is. Data from your friends yields a socially grounded heat map, whereas a broad data collection provides more of a general overview.

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Collect thermal imaging data, perform edge detection and present on a helmet visor to enable firefighters to see better in smoke and in the dark.

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Improved Google Maps navigation

Make walking directions easier. The user points their phone’s cameras at their surroundings and machine learning will identify the landmarks based on Street View imagery to pinpoint their location. It can then more accurately identify position and orientation, giving directions over the real world.