BlueSpace: personalizing workspace through awareness and adaptability

Jennifer Lai, Anthony Levas, Paul Chou, Claudio Pinhanez, Marisa Viveros IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, 19 Skyline Drive, Hawthorne, NY, 10532 jlai, levas, pchou, pinhanez, [email protected] This paper reports on research in workplace issues encountered by knowledge workers in cubicle environments, and on BlueSpace, a prototype workspace with the goal of addressing workers’ critical needs for privacy, concentration and personalization. To inform the design process, more than fifty on-site interviews with knowledge workers were conducted at six companies ranging from dot.com startups to Fortune 100 corporations. Several common requirements emerged including the need for a sense of control of one’s workspace, the ability to create privacy on-demand to improve concentration and minimize unwanted interruptions, as well as in-place support for dyadic interactions. Many other common workplace complaints (e.g., too hot, too cold, too noisy) were found to be derivative of the major requirements for individual control and privacy.