Enticing Sociability In An Intelligent Coffee Corner

In our project on the design of intelligent applications for an office environment we focus on the coffee corner as it is the place in an office where professional and social interactions intermingle. In this article the user-centered design of tangible interfaces, i.e. i-Candies and i-Bowl, which have been used as input devices to access company information in a coffee corner, is described. The i-Candies and the i-Bowl illustrate how everyday objects can be part of a context-aware system. By picking up one of the i-Candies and placing it on the i-Bowl, the i-Candy controls which information is presented on the wall display in the coffee corner. In our evaluation, we found that the office workers not only were enticed to interact with the i-Candies, but also that the i-Candies provided mediums that stimulate sociability among office workers.