Animated Work Envirionment [AWE]

在美国工作生活的性质、地点和组织方面，最近的一个趋势是工作越来越复杂，新的工作人口（老年工人、低技能工人、远程工作者和灵活轮班工人）的出现，以及人们在家工作（至少是兼职）的可能性越来越大。随着家越来越像办公室，办公室也越来越像家，“热办公桌”、休息室、沙发、WI-FI和内部网络经常取代小隔间和硬连线的工作站。工作性质的这些戏剧性变化，加上与工作生活相关的前所未有的新技术，建议重新评估工人、他们的技术和工作环境之间的关系，并重新设计工作环境本身，使其成为一个既占据家庭又占据办公室的社会和技术响应系统。本着这种精神，这个项目的重点是“智能”工作环境的一个关键方面：物理工作空间本身。PI和他的团队将设计，原型，演示和评估“动画工作环境”（AWE），这是一个铰接的，可编程的内部环境，可容纳一系列数字技术，PI期望这些技术将促进生产力，连通性和创新，跨越在各种地点和环境中使用模拟和数字材料的流动组合。AWE具有由用户友好界面控制的连续变形表面，将结合并补充其他研究人员的努力，他们将继续实现“智能”工作环境中有前途的组件，如投影仪、屏幕、平板电脑、传感器、执行器和其他数字设备。通过定义“机器人即房间”和“房间即机器人”，这项研究将促进建筑、计算机和信息科学与工程领域的知识和理解。“对房间进行编程”的需求将刺激IT和“智能环境”中现有的和正在进行的工作，并使其成为可能。更广泛的影响:这项研究将由代表建筑、机器人、社会学和人因心理学四个学科的四名研究人员进行并广泛传播，研究生和本科生（包括来自代表性不足群体的学生）也将积极参与，这将扩大研究人员的视野。信息技术的开发人员和制造商认识到物理环境是人与信息技术之间动态交互的一个完整和必要的部分。项目成果将包括一个技术先进的工作环境的工作原型，旨在提高工作人群的满意度、参与度、连通性和生产力，否则他们可能会工作效率低下、不愉快，甚至根本不工作。从社会学的角度来看，这项工作也是创新的，因为它重新考虑了工作场所。近几十年来，随着工作性质的变化，社会学家把注意力集中在这些变化对社会生产关系的影响上。该项目采用了新的视角，强调物质工作场所是不断变化的社会生产关系的重要组成部分。

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.