Interactive Meeting Room
CREAD
Can interactive space boost creativity? CREAD is an interactive meeting room that aims to help the problem-solving to starts on the right foot, and facilitates iterations of brainstorming throughout the process by interacting with users. It invites people working in a space surrounded by large whiteboards as canvas together, thus allows meetings to expand and create without limits. The hardware of CREAD made editing and documenting the progress of the project on the fly possible. Just simply grasp and shoot with the handy beam gun, the team can easily manipulate the work and reflect on previous sessions in order to evaluate and build upon the past problem-solving process with new rounds of iterations.
The project is one of many from the 2019 cohort of at the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering of Delft University of Technology. As part of the Design Doing collaboration between TU Delft and KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, CREAD was designed with the help and feedbacks from KLM's Operational Decision Support and Delft Institute of Positive Design. The prototype was on public exhibition at both TU Delft IDE and Schiphol Airport for user testing in January 2020.
Project Type /
Interactive Installation
Role /
Interaction Design
Environment Construction
Hardware Development
Visual Creation
Team /
Martine van den Boogaart
Ricardo Jongerius
Sherman Lee
Willie Overman
George Paxton
Collaboration Partner /
TU Delft id Studio Lab
KLM Royal Dutch Airlines
Year /
2019 - 2020
Opportunity Gaps at the ODS
As the oldest airline that still operates under the original name, the KLM Royal Dutch Airlines still strives to innovate and bring creative changes to the air travel industry. At Amsterdam Schiphol Airport, designers, engineers, and programmers work together at its Operational Decision Support (ODS) office generating the next ground-breaking innovation for the airline. However, the current setup of the office somehow limits the team's creativity and efficiency. We want to design a new solution that helps to boost the process of brainstorming, and document the progress of the project. The design can also find its place in other creative institutions and teams.
Product Opportunity Gap analysis
By researching and visiting, we found that as office becoming bigger and starting embracing an open space philosophy to improve communication and collaboration between interdisciplinary teams, meeting rooms have started acquiring a new role as it is where more focused and target-orientated work can be done. At creative entities like ODS, a meeting room should support a variety of activities from brainstorming to data analysis, or even client meetings and team alignments. With this being said, we want the meeting room to be flexible and responsive to all meeting needs, leveraging the technology to create an interactive and unconventional environment that provides an extraordinary experience and sets people in a creative and motivated mindset which eventually results in the outcome of the meetings.
To create an unconventional and interactive space, we deconstructed the design goal and placed them into the four quadrants of Kreb's Cycle of Creativity. We created mood boards in these aspects to help us better envision the concept.
CREAD's Kreb's Cycle of Creativity
1. Reality Projector, 2019. By Olafur Eliasson.
2. Turrell Wedgework, 1990. By James Turrell.
3. Forest of Resonating Lamp, 2019. By teamLab.
4. Room for One Color, 1997. By Olafur Eliasson.
5. Riverbed, 2014. By Olafur Eliasson.
6. The Unspeakable Openness of Things, 2018. By Olafur Eliasson.
7. Light Forest Orchestra, 2019. By teamLab.
8. Deep Mirror (Yellow), 2016. By Olafur Eliasson.
9. Glass I, 2015. By MIT Media Lab: Mediated Matter.
10. Fog Assembly, 2016. By Olafur Eliasson.
11. Gemini, 2018. By MIT Media Lab: Mediated Matter.
Concept Generation
Forest scene provides an unconventional immersive environment that can boost creativity. Through intertwined branches, participants can categorize and manipulate information on canvas.
Huge whiteboards surround the environment as canvas. LED strips embedded in the floor can connect similar ideas on different canvas together.
The surrounded whiteboards provide an infinite working space for users to work freely. By taking a picture of the useful information or sticky notes with a cell phone, current progress can be saved on a cloud server. Through the central control pedestal, the past sessions can be easily retrieved and projected to one of the whiteboards. Considering the feasibility and actual environment at ODS, we agreed that this concept would be the most appropriate option to start prototyping while still meeting all of our design requirements.
Prototyping
Through experiments, we decided to choose a TV screen as the display instead of an orthostigmat projector due to the shadow generated when users stand close to the whiteboards. The TV screen is embedded in the whiteboard canvas behind an Acrylic layer so that users can still editing materials displayed on the screen by writing directly on top of it.
The interaction was made possible by Unity. The operation system written in Unity has three modes. The first and foremost sign-in page allows users to sign into their own working space and save their meeting documents in their own accounts. The working mode would show an empty white screen so that the screen can blend into the whiteboards as part of the canvas. In the display mode, all saved materials are shown in chronological order and allow users to select any documents from the past to retrieve and keep working on.
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The control is made possible by Arduino and its peripherals. A touchpad allows users to directly control the system. When the user takes a photo of the notes with a cellphone, the photo would automatically upload to a cloud drive. The user can then use the touchpad to select the saved picture and place it on the screen according to their preference.
The center pedestal serves as a platform for the touchpad and central computer. There are also Arduino peripherals inside generating ambient light of different colors, animating according to the user's input command. Through this ambient light, we want to create a feeling of vigorous yet serious, dreamy yet productive, thus help to increase productivity through mood regulation.
User Feedback
Concept Refinement
Negative feedback from the user testing with the prototype exposed rooms for improvements in the interaction between users and the system, and the setup of the environment. Built upon the original prototype, we specifically redesigned the way of interaction and the overall setup of the space.
CREAD System Diagram
- The Beam Gun
To make the interaction more convenient and intuitive, all operations are integrated into a new device in the form of a beam gun. The new device acts as a camera as well as a handy control. When used as the camera, the augmented viewfinder saves the user from aiming precisely at the target note. When used as the control, just simply point at the target on screen as a wearable device to manipulate and move objects around.
Camera
Control
When used as the camera, users can take pictures with the gun directly by pulling the trigger. The picture will be temporarily saved in the built-in RAM so that it can be projected to another wall according to user's discretion. When a new picture is taken, the old picture will be upload to the cloud storage automatically.
Different from a normal camera on a cell phone, the LED grid on the front of the gun can provide an augmented viewfinder for the camera -- the LED will project a circle that indicates the viewfinder of the camera onto the targeted surface. Instead of looking through a traditional digital viewfinder on the eye level, users now can simply point the beam gun towards the target and encompass the target inside the projected circle viewfinder.
Under the control mode, users can interact with the system through the beam gun as a handy mouse. Users can project retrieved pictures and notes onto the embedded screen inside the whiteboard wall by pointing the gun towards the screen and pull the trigger. The picture will be projected to the center of the augmented viewfinder. Users can also manipulate and move items shown on screen by encompassing target items within the augmented viewfinder and using the trigger to select and deselect items.
The beam gun utilizes infrared technology to realize space positioning. There are four infrared beacons at the corners of each screen that can only be detected through an infrared camera. The infrared camera can pick up the position coordinates of beacons in its local coordinate system, and build transition matrices with known beacon's global position coordinates on the screen, thus determine the relative position between the beam gun and the screen. With transition matrices, the beam gun can also determine the position coordinate of the target direction on the global coordinate system of the screen.
Testing interaction with a projector
- The Pedestal
Short
Medium
Tall
The pedestal is redesigned with three different heights. In the refined final concept, the pedestal does not serve as a control anymore, instead, it serves as an installation where people can write, place items, lean against, or sit on. Multiple pedestals with different sizes can be set up according to users' wishes so that they can provide the most flexibility for usage. The ambient light inside pedestals would create a dreamy atmosphere inside the workspace and thus boosts creativity. These pedestals also serve as the electronic bay for the entire system.
User's Journey Map
Acknowledgement
This project is made possible through TU Delft-KLM Design Doing Collaboration.
Many thanks to coach Aadjan van der Helm, Wouter van der Hoog, Lorenzo Romagnoli, Wim Schemer, KLM coordinator Esther Zijtregtop, and staff members from Delft Institute of Positive Design
