批判互動設計作業5 / M10210118 王柏皓

Gelatine is a system designed to encourage co-workers to share encounters in the work space by allowing them to check in digitally. The system consist of following 4 modules:

1.  User profile website, the database allow users to create, edit and maintain their profile information such as background, interests, areas of expertise, status information and questions to others.
2. Check in Points, a physical electric device allow user to check in with their RFID membership cards.
3. Public screen application, a screen aesthetically displaying visualizations of information about interests, backgrounds, projects status of people currently checked in.
4. Thermal printer, a printer prints out the user profile of the most recent checkin.

To evaluate the research project - Gelatine, we use 4 lenses from Research through Design.

1. Process: The researchers provide various details of how the system is construct, including how these 4 modules interact with each others, what controller they choose to build up the check point module, which software they used to implement the public screen...etc. In such, they provide a rich documentation for following researcher who wants to reproduce a similar system.
2. Invention: The system they created was in fact becoming interface for social learning through exploratory, opportunistic and serendipitous inspirations, and amplifies users’ sense of place and awareness of other coworkers.
3. Relevance: From the researchers point of view, the preferred state of a public area or a co-working space is that social learning, inspiration, and collaboration between workers are able to happen within the space naturally. The pilot evaluation at The Edge not only proves the success of Gelatine, also showing that the pre-entry motivation highly influencing whether people notice the screen and further interact with it.
4. Extensibility: In terms of extensibility, although the system was initially design for co-working space, it can also be deployed into large enterprises, which have large group of employees with different expertise, to help different divisions to cooperate well.