Problem statement

In the future working from home will become more conventional (Ozimek, 2020). Working from home offers flexibility and an improved work-life balance but lacks the interaction with colleagues and the workplace environment. However, when encountering a situation in which you desperately need your colleague in order to be able to move on with a task, you can’t just walk to their office to check if they can have a chat.

Design proposal

For a better social translucence (Erickson et. al, 2000) in the context of dislocated working knowledge workers, the idea of Presence was conceived. Presence can boost collaboration, make remote working more social and improve work-life balance. The physical interface shows five doors, 4 that show the extend of availability of 4 coworkers in an intuitive and embodied manner. And one door that you can use to communicate your own availability to your colleagues. Communicating both extend of availability and extend of urgency of the question creates mutual social transculence in work context. Connecting the smart home of the future to the office, but above all, connecting the user with their colleagues again.

Sources:

1. Ozimek, Adam, The Future of Remote Work (May 27, 2020). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3638597
   or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3638597

2. Erickson, T. & Kellogg W. A. (2000). Social translucence: an approach to designing systems that support social processes. ACM Trans. Comput.-Hum. Interact. 7, 1 (March 2000), 5983. https://doi.org/10.1145/344949.345004

3. Matysiak, A. J. (2009). Social ways to manage availability in mediated communication. [Phd Thesis 1 (Research TU/e / Graduation TU/e), Industrial Design]. Technische Universiteit Eindhoven. https://doi.org/10.6100/IR654205