Enter the projectBARN

The projectBARN is an interactive, physical and digital workspace. It is the digital equivalent of a dedicated project room. Teams share non-dedicated physical spaces and restore their group’s project work at the “flip of a switch”.

The physical BARN room is enhanced with many digital tools and interactive devices that support collocated group collaboration. Mobile extensions facilitate remote collaboration, as well as individual work outside the context of group meetings. Together, these tools support the rapid generation, organization, synthesis, and archival of ideas.

In sum, the Project BARN’s persistent collaborative environment bolsters group performance for the life of the project.

To learn more about the architecture of the projectBARN, click here for a presentation.

Visionary Scenario

New Group, New Meeting, Any BARN
Let’s take for example what meetings would look like for a group charged with developing a context-aware cellular phone. A newly assigned foursome -- Rahul, Jane, Yim, and Fred -- have a fast hour after class. They decide to take their chances by “dropping-in” to one of the empty BARNs on campus, instead of reserving one in advance online. In this case, three of the four group members are present.

Jane ID’s-in by flashing her student ID at the DashBoard, one of the BARN’s control panels located in the room – this one is mounted on the wall next to the door. Her choices illuminate on the wall above it -- does she want to sign into one of her other two existing groups or would she like to start a new group? She selects New, and adds a missing member, Fred, to the Group. Meanwhile the other two members, Yim and Rahul, file into the room, ID-in at another DashBoard, on the table, and choose their seats. Everyone puts on BARN-Wear, equipped with sensors to identify the speaker, record the meeting, and sense social geometries within the room.

At the end of this process, the group has a persistent, virtual BARN to work “in” for the life of their project. This workspace can be accessed from individual devices or from any BARN Room on campus. The BARN’s MeetingLogs have already begun to record the meeting’s activity and meeting support tools are loaded.

The Meeting Begins
Everyone settles in -- Rahul, at the table, opens his laptop, which automatically logs him into the newly formed meeting, and Yim sits beside a BARN tablet. Knowing that their time is limited, Jane sets the relative time clock for 56minutes so that members can always monitor how much time they have left. She remains standing at the Thinking Surface -- an intelligent interactive display -- ready to write. Each has their personal iPen in hand.

Using social geometry data, the BARN knows its guests are ready to commence the meeting and proactively adjusts the lights accordingly. The BARN room is ready for interaction.

Idea Generation
Using his iPen, Rahul loads a copy of their client’s PowerPoint presentation from his laptop to the Presentation Surface -- a shared display surface, dedicated for group viewing and reference to documents. From across, he launches the document by selecting it on the projected portal, with his iPen.

The group begins by reviewing the presentation (knowledge transfer). They then move into a BARN-Storm (brainstorm) of all the conditions that a context-aware cell phone might operate in (knowledge generation). Simultaneously, they add ideas to the Thinking Surface using multiple input mechanisms in the room. Rahul selects a blue note to post his idea -- “when I’m in class”-- to the Thinking Surface. It shows up on the Thinking Surface in a form much like an electronic post-it note. Then remembering a recent vacation, he pulls a picture of himself on the beach out of his bag, and scans it using the built-in Media-aider. A digital version of the photo is automatically transferred to the display. Yim sketches a person driving a car using a BARN Sketcher (tablet), and casts it onto the shared surface by loading the image. Using her own iPen, Jane annotates and then draws an arrow from Yim’s sketch and adds her ideas directly to the Thinking Surface as if she were writing on a whiteboard.

While they rapidly generate more ideas, Rahul glances at the relative time clock and sees that there are only a few minutes left in their meeting. He types “you hungry?” into his Chatter interface and sends the message only to Yim. She smiles and gives him a nod. They conclude their meeting with a jumbled pile of ideas and content on the wall ready to organize. They save the state of the BARN and exit.

Collaborative Building
At their next meeting, one-by-one the group members enter their reserved BARN room and ID in. They are ready to pick-up where they left off. Jane, the group leader, uses here iPen to pull up the last meeting’s Thinking Surface and creates a new copy to work with. She appoints Rahul to be the chief scribe. As such, his responsibility is to hit the TWI (that was important) button on the table DashBoard each time they change topics or an important concept is revealed. Each hit places a marker in time in the MeetingLogs facilitating easy review of the meeting’s progress at a later time. The group decides to sort their ideas by relevance. Jane chooses the Columns BARN-Tool. She makes 3 columns, and annotates each with high, medium or low for relevance. Then she starts to organize the content by hand (the state of the first Thinking Surface they generated is maintained). Once the group has categorized their ideas, Jane saves the new Thinking Surface and opens a new one to start identifying characteristics of the most relevant cellular conditions. Rahul hits the TWI button.

Suddenly, Yim calls out, “Where’s Fred?” No one knows. “He is supposed to be here. I could understand why he couldn’t make the first meeting, but this one was on the calendar.” They all chime in and discuss whether Fred is going to be a slacker. Realizing that the BARN is archiving their conversation, Yim uses the Scratch That Button on the table DashBoard to delete their conversation from the MeetingLogs. She then selects MeetingMute to restrict further conversation from being permanently recorded.

Mobile Extension
Jane pulls up the group’s member information and sees that Fred is indeed on campus. She pings him, and using the Chatter finds out that he is in another meeting across campus. They decide it is not worth it for him to come for the remaining 20 minutes, so Fred eavesdrops in on the rest of the meeting. He catches up by jumping to the TWI markers in the meeting logs. He passively follows the rest of the group’s meeting through his cell phone, reading the Chatter, and viewing the Thinking Surfaces. He is able to contribute by adding a few ideas of his own using the Chatter and spatially organizing them on the Thinking Surface accordingly.

And the work continues…
The meeting needs to wrap-up. Jane activates the Rows BARN-Tool to write an action list for the group. They use Chatter to generate the action list. Yim and Fred will research GPS technology sources. Rahul and Jane will draft a scenario. Once they leave, each can continue to use and create new Thinking Surfaces asynchronously with the BARN to do their follow-up work. So they will all have access to joint and individual work at all times.