As part of a large researchproject, I created Iris, an awareness toolkit for creative professionals. Before the advent of computers, creative professionals could easily share their work by putting things like drawings up on the wall, which in turn makes it easy for others to become aware of people's work. Iris is an attempt to re-enable this low-threshold form of communication, using the fact that most of people's work is done on computers nowadays.
Iris
The premise of this project was that people need to have an overview what's happening in their workspace, whether it's work, talk or just people's presence. This awareness may serve as as a basis for communication, learning or inspiration, which is often the main reason for working in a shared working environment in the first place. I believe that physical nature, size and visibility of models and drawings facilitate this, by enabling peripheral, low-threshold and opportunistic communication. With our computers having become our main tools these days, this form of communication seems to have all but faded.
In order to overcome these problems, I designed a client-server system that would allow people to easily show things to each other, using a photo wall, a widget client and a robot. The photo wall, or Sticky Board as I called it, is the main focus of the system. In essence, it's a digital collage, filled with images and taglines, resembling a wall of polaroid photos, which I showed in the workspace using Ianus Keller's TRI. Because most people use a computer nowadays for their work, I created a client, which gives an overview of people's presence and enables access to the Sticky Board, both for viewing and posting. Users can change the client into a magnifying glass, allowing people to take snapshots of anything on their computer screens. The robot, Arthur, started out as a hobby project, but I transformed it into a curious little character, which could post using motion detection.
Iris was named after the Greek goddess of communication, I also took inspiration from the logo, which kind of resembles an iris. I successfully tested the system over a five week period at the ID-StudioLab, a community of researchers and designers. This led to some interesting observations, which I documented in a report and a paper. Aadjan van der Helm got me to submit Iris to Ars Electronica, for which we created a small demonstration. No prizes won and the film is somewhat awkward in hindsight, but it was a lot of fun to do.