TUI_at home@work

Another course, another subject, another brief.

This is the month of TUI_Tangible User Interface, teached by Vinay and Richard. I am in group with Elena Gianni and together we will go through a one month assignment around building/prototyping a working physical interface for a particular user that “works at home”. Yes, the brief is right that one: at home@work.

As soon as we started, we needed to do a user research interviewing a user and trying to go to his/her home. Me and Elena, not knowing many people in Copenhagen, started to google/search in facebook/ search in linkdn different kind of professionals that could be into the wanted category: musicians, writers, illustrators.

Fortunately, one user answers us and we managed to go to her place straight away 40 minutes after the email we sent.

I will refer to our really kind user as *Anna*. She is a editor, writer and communication consultant.  After collecting information and pics from her and her place, me and Elena worked on organizing those information and visualizing physically.

“My work happens in my head, it is not related to space and time”- *Anna* said us

How to represent this?

We tried with an hybrid map that maps the spaces (physical and digital ones) that *Anna* visits while working, both for professionally carrying on a task, getting inspiration and resting.

Here some pictures of our map, with places and streets. For streets as well we mean *Anna’s* paths among her working habits that she “walk” through to pass from my “place” to another.

We hope in this way to get more insights for the next step of the research.

The diagram from a top view. You can see the house space (studio/kitchen/living room) on a white paper, the social network/internet space on the plastic transparent sheet on the left and the outside word with red/white tape borders

The way she uses the social network is playful and inspiring for her work: it is, using her word, a “thought tennis”, like throwing ideas for challenging spontaneous collaboration among a huge variety of people

A view of the “streets” as path of work habits from the studio place, where the professional mood reigns

“To focus more, I unfocus first” and *Anna* use to leave the studio and go to the kitchen chopping vegetables for hours in order to be able to come up with a solution for her work

Throwing the tennis ball to Facebook and the social network

To see more pictures, there is Elena Flickr about our project with all the close up pics.