Animated Work Envirionment [AWE]

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A recent trend in the nature, place and organization of working life in the United States is the growing complexity of work, the emergence of new working populations (older workers, under-skilled workers, telecommuters and flexible shift workers), and the increasing likelihood that people will work, at least part-time, at home. As the home becomes more an office, the office is becoming more a home, where "hot desks," lounges, sofas, WI-FI and internal networks often replace cubicles and hard-wired workstations. These dramatic transformations in the nature of work, combined with unprecedented new technologies associated with working life, suggest a re-evaluation of the relations between workers, their technologies and their work environments, and a redesign of the work environment itself as a socially and technologically responsive system occupying both home and office. In that spirit, the focus of this project is on a critical aspect of the "intelligent" work environment: the physical workspace itself. The PI and his team will design, prototype, demonstrate and evaluate an "Animated Work Environment" (AWE), an articulated, programmable, interior environment accommodating a range of digital technologies that the PI expects will facilitate productivity, connectedness and innovation across fluid assemblages of people working with both analog and digital materials in a wide variety of locations and settings. Featuring a continuous, morphing surface controlled by a user-friendly interface, AWE will both couple to and complement the efforts of other investigators, who continue to realize promising components of the "intelligent" work environment such as projectors, screens, tablets, sensors, actuators and other digital devices. This research will advance knowledge and understanding in both architecture and computer and information science and engineering, by defining the "robot as a room" and the "room as a robot." The need to "program the room" will both stimulate and be enabled by existing and ongoing efforts in IT and "intelligent environments."Broader Impacts: This research, to be conducted and broadly disseminated by four investigators representing four disciplines - architecture, robotics, sociology and human factors psychology - with the active involvement of graduate and undergraduate students, including those from underrepresented groups, will expand the vision of researchers, developers and manufacturers of information technologies to recognize the physical environment as an integral and necessary part of the dynamic interaction between people and IT. Project outcomes will include a working prototype of a technologically advanced work environment aiming to increase satisfaction, participation, connectedness and productivity across working populations that might otherwise work inefficiently, unhappily, or not at all. This work is innovative, also, from a sociological point of view, for its reconsideration of the workplace. As the nature of work has changed in recent decades, sociologists have focused their attention on the impact of these changes on the social relations of production. This project takes a new perspective, emphasizing the material workplace as part and parcel of the changing social relations of production.