Tiltool Erez Kikin-Gil | Interaction + Design

Overview
The concept is to place digital whiteboards in interaction design institutes such as IDII, RCA, ITP, MIT and others. Located in high traffic areas in institutes, the digital bulletin board will serve the local users to express user’s ideas. Their ideas will be displayed in all the remote locations, which will enable individual exposure.
All users can place information bits on the board as long as they are close to it physically. This could mean liberation from social, geographical and financial limitation. As long as the user’s ideas are remarkable, people will pay attention to them. It’s not about being a status, budget, or appearance.

Contacting with unapproachable peers, constructing multidisciplinary discussions and provoking thoughts are few of the system benefits to the users as well as to the institutes.

Context
Faculty, students and researches share information as part of their normal work process. Coffee talks, meetings, calling over the phone or cell, send mail to their peers are common methods to express options. Writing comments on paper, using post its walls in brain storming process, handing posters on walls and exhibiting their work in public are few of the methods they use to display their thoughts and receive feedback. On line digital tools are used frequently both to retrieve information and to post it. Vortals and portals, web zines, dedicated weblogs and forums are used to search for information and to post problems online. Users can post opinions and ideas on news groups and mailing lists. Recently even messenger’s identity has been used to publics a mood, event or requests. Other set of digital tools used in local shared spaces are the digital whiteboards, projectors, plasma screens and touch screens.

The communication methods can be segmented according to several qualities. A method can have a direction, domain, duration, visibility and complexity.

The information can be channeled in one direction or can have interaction with the recipient. The tool can be used in the digital Domain, the physical domain or both. Information bit have duration period, which relates to its appearance time. Information bit can be visible in a private or a public domain. Each tool allows different level of complexity in the displayed info bit.

Experience prototype
Interacting directly with bulletin board is a unique experience. Related domains are art of graffiti – the rebellious act of placing ones thoughts on other people property and the white board, which is used as a tool that enables users to display ideas to their peers.

The prototype was designed to check how users use a bulletin board in real life. I have placed a bulletin board in a high traffic place – near the coffee machine. In order to provoke their attention and start a conversation I placed a controversial question on top of the board. The question was misspelled and used terms in a way that raised questions about its meaning. Two markers were hanging on and near the board and the board was monitored for a week.
After the first week I have placed new sheets and provoking article, for additional analysis.

Findings
After one week the board was covered with writings. People were writing about the sentence, about the syntax and misspelling and about other people comments. Some even placed items on the board. Using markers with different colors people.

Solution
The Public Digital Bulletin Board was designed to show users thoughts and stimuli for participation. It was composed of a large projected screen, touch pad that can respond to finger writing, and digital pen writing, a blue tooth connector, a printer and a web cam. The UI was divided to camera display area and information area.
Users could read articles and other people comments and respond with handwriting,
on the board. Their writing was associated with article they were commenting
about, time of the writing and place. If the anted to add digital information
they could approach with a blue tooth enabled device, connect and add their ideas.
As each information bit was labeled according to date relevance and place, users
can return, look at their comments and see if some one replayed to their thoughts,
and print the screen/ article if needed.

Time navigation
As each day pass, the information item disappear and becomes smaller. This provides room for new thoughts to be displayed. In addition, this action stimulates users to check the new items.
Users can use the bottom slider to navigate by time. They can go back day by day and increase the number of days to b displayed. A user can go back and look at information items that were presented for the duration of three days. This navigation is done by touch. The search display is temporary and local, which means that only the searching user see his requested. This is done in order to keep users privacy.

Privacy
The camera display shows the different activity in the remote location. Its main goal is to attract people to participate and interact. In order to keep users privacy the displayed image is blurry and details cannot be identified. The software does not record the captured image.

Prototype Movie