We started by talking about our door action observation studies.
Jake observed people arriving at closed doors, and then walking away. He also observed people leaning down to read items at the bottom of doors.
Perhaps the most interesting scenario that Jake noticed was a student arriving to meet with a professor, who was still with another student. He walked in front of the door repeatedly to ambiently alert the professor to his presence. Once the professor noticed him walking back and forth, he rescheduled the meeting. Afterward, the student no longer passed back and forth in front of the door.
Darren observed people walking down a hall and always looking in open doors. He also observed a person slide a paper under a door and walked away without knocking. Another interesting observation was of a woman walking down a hall to meet with someone, stuck their head in a door, and then walked away from the door and sat down. Later a man walked down the hall, apologized to the woman for being late, and they both went into the office. Apparently the office was empty when she arrived.
Description of Jeff's door study... See his page of notes. Especially the cautionary handout note.
The actions were more interesting than viewing the artifacts, but we felt that it was valuable to know about the artifacts before observing people interacting with doors. Consensus was that it would be valuable to just do a study of doors for the entire semester.
Now we need to break our data down into actions and categories. We should take all of our notes, turn each observation into a post-it note or something, and put them all on a board. This kind of manual clustering will allow us to see where the biggest breakdowns or problems occur. We can then design to improve these kinds of problems. We believe that actions will be more fruitful than artifacts for this process.
From Darren: One of the things that people commonly do is come by a door to see if the occupant is available for chat. He thinks that it would be useful to have an indicator of whether or not a door is open. It would be very interesting to prototype this application and see how it works.
You can even add additional state information, like how long the door has been open, or whether that person is socializing, etc. Some of these things are easy to detect and others are not, but it would be interesting to try some things out.
But before we go too far on this "perfect" idea, we should still do our design analysis and look for interesting clusters of information.
There are also privacy issues involved with the creation of the door open system. What the privacy concerns with different kinds of state information.
We should look at studies of office awareness. There have been previous studies (by Lotus?). In one example study, a telecommuter was linked to the office by a lamp, which turned on at the office when the person was working at home.