Office Teller : Activating Sense of Connection, Attentiveness and Understanding among Workers in Remote Office by Conveying Awareness Information of Ba

Abstract

Lately the role of the office environment in improving knowledge creation capabilities has been gaining more attention, and various types of information systems have been proposed to promote interaction among office workers. This study focuses on the concept of “awareness information,” which shows a worker's presence and status. In previous studies, many types of information systems have been proposed to improve awareness information among geographically separated offices to enhance interaction among workers. However, they mainly focused on the awareness of an individual worker's status, and neither on the relationship among the workers nor the generated context. We propose the concept of “awareness information of Ba,” which we define to mean awareness of the self-assembled dynamic context of workers, objects and their relationships in the office. The researchers constructed an information system called “Office Teller,” which aims to improve the awareness information of Ba between physically separated offices. The system constructed uses cartoon-style stories to express the dynamic context of each office and to share the context information with a remote office. The system was tested at two sites: laboratory rooms of university and offices of company. Results from the experiments indicate that the system implemented improves cross-office context awareness and increases sense of connection, mutual attentiveness and understanding.