Application Workshops

Background

Pin&Play relates to how people use surfaces such as walls and boards to spatially arrange artefacts and to organize information in public and private spaces. To find areas of use and to demonstrate the flexibility of the Pin&Play concept, we are investigating different possible usage situations. We will organize workshops with various potential users, involving brainstorming and the development of use scenarios, with video as the primary documenting tool. 

School – Teachers and Pupils

The education situation offers two interesting areas where Pin&Play could be used:

The former could involve augmenting already existing learning tools in the classroom environment. The latter relates to the teachers’ working condition, where we believe Pin&Play technology could make many everyday tasks easier to perform, plan and overview.

At this stage, we have visited a Swedish junior level school to explore the working environment and to briefly interview some teachers. We discovered that the majority of the walls in the school were used to attach all kinds of information. Staff members, including the principal, use notice boards to post general announcements as well as notes meant for a specific person. E-mail is rarely used to inform staff members.

The walls in the classrooms are also used to support learning and to give an overview of information.

Göteborg Film Festival

The annual Göteborg Film Festival shows approximately 500 films during ten days at several cinemas in Göteborg. The scheduling of the film program is done on large walls using differently coloured notes. We intend to explore the possible benefits of using Pin&Play technology in this particular situation, where large scale is a condition for collaborative work and overview.

At this stage, we have visited the organization team to explore their working environment and to briefly interview some members of the team. They use the surface of an entire office as a notice board where each note represents a film and its color indicates the category. Today there is a missing link between the film database and the actual scheduling of the film program. The notes are handwritten according to the information stored in the database and when the scheduling is done, the final film program is entered manually into the database.

Schedule

The workshops were carried out during the autumn 2002. 

Contact

Maria Håkansson
Future Applications Lab, Viktoria Institute, Sweden
+46 (0) 31 773 55 31
mariah@viktoria.se