Awareness within a community of practice

The computer is a wonderful tool, which has helped us greatly so far. Especially in communication, we've made an enormous amount of progress. We've been enabled to create wonderful things, from art, games, prints, websites and tools. Unfortunately, we've lost a few things as well. For example, before the computer people had all kinds of specialized tools for their work, whereas now, everyone is using the same tool. Designers mainly used materials for drawing, molding and building, now they use computers. The specialized tools they're using these days, are the programs they're running on their computers, with the exception of drawing tablets, without appropriate physical counterparts.

Another problem for artists and designers is in the lacking of the visibility of what they're working on. For example, before Disney Studios had computers, artists we're sitting behind large, elevated drawing tables, drawing and sketching on paper. It was easy for people to see what their colleagues we're working on and easy to comment on. If an artist had finished something, he could easily put it up on the wall for public visibility. This contributed greatly to having an inspirational working environment. Nowadays, our computers make this more difficult, because monitors are much smaller than drawing tables and getting our work out of the computer and visible in public seems to be quite a threshold for many of us, in spite of having printers, weblogs, e-mail, personal websites and so on.

To me it seems that, in order to solve this problem we need to use the computer to bring some of these things back to our working areas. One important aspect to consider here is how people deal with events happening around them. Our computers often generate highly interruptive events, while this is often not necessary or even worse, highly distracting. First pioneered by Mark Weiser in "Ubiquitous Computing" and later "Calm Technology", he states that artificial events need to be able to move back and forth between the centre and the periphery of our attention. An active periphery connects us to our surroundings, but since it's not in the center of our attention doesn't overload us mentally. Changes herein may coerce us to take something out of the periphery to the centre of our attention and act on it. The main advantage of this, is that we can be aware of our surroundings, but without the need to be actively attuned to it. It's like when it's raining outside; only when you need to go outside you attune to the fact that it's raining outside and you have to think you may need an umbrella.

Since computers are here to stay, I'm trying to explore the possibilities of a tool to bring this back, using the computer. This tool will be a means for supporting a community of practice. This support will mainly focus on the awareness people experience towards their colleagues and their surroundings. The people in this case are the members of the IDStudioLab; since you're on the IDStudioLab-website I'm assuming you already know what we're all about, if not, check here.

Expect pictures soon :)

personal project iris
Last update: Sunday, January 2, 2005 at 10:45:12 PM.