Designing for Emotional and Intimate Communication –Working Environment

• Main Authors: Ko-Hsun Huang, 黃可薰
• Other Authors: Yi-Shin Deng
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2006
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/16405291601928267957

碩士 === 國立交通大學 === 應用藝術研究所 === 94 === The structures of community are acutely changing, and people in an office environment face the rapid development of information technology and workflows. In Taiwan, a region with the longest working hours in Asia, social interactions between colleagues are gradually disappearing since most of the communications related to work is changing from in-person conversation to mediated e-mail through the Internet. This makes people in the same working environment either closely grouped or further isolated by choosing different web-based communication media. By degrees the daily communications take place in the virtual information space, rather than in a real world. For the colleagues become by and by estranged from each other, how to promote their relationship is significant. Therefore, creating an embodied office environment with sense of emotional presence, intimacy, or closeness is definitely essential to people who work long hours together. In this research, the field of study focuses on the Research & Development department, the engineers who explore and develop new processing technologies or system programs in Taiwan’s high-tech companies. The communicating situations people are confronted with and the subtle senses or inherent needs in the social interactions between those colleagues sharing the same working place and communication channel are attained by dyad interviews and probe diaries. After investigating those office cultures, a workshop is held with numerous engineers and designers from different disciplines, including industrial design, computer science and information engineering, mechanical engineering, visual communication. Those experts and the informants of earlier interviews have discussed the potential solution to enhance the interpersonal relationship in the working environment and consider a better application of emerging technology to broaden the directions of perception in communication. With the ideas out of the workshop, prototypes as communication installations with intimate and emotional interface are developed for various working space not only to mediate people’s informational communication but to evoke the emotional contact between colleagues. Then, through field trial and reviewing processes, design concepts to meet the needs of connecting people in the same office are explored. The interactions and relationships with others are expected to make people relieved and satisfied, as well as make peoples’ life meaningful and fulfilling. Through profound comprehension of the communication context, to convey an awareness of the presence of the community would connect them closely. In addition to that, the communication media developed in this research could also be expanded to increase the social interactions between people working together, and the application of technology to make people attuned to their colleagues in varies sense will also be discussed.