Hello.Wall®
The Hello.Wall is an ambient display that emits information via light patterns and is considered informative art.

As an integral part of the physical environment, Hello.Wall constitutes a seeding element of a social architectural space conveying awareness information and atmospheric aspects within organizations or at specific places.

Interaction in Public Spaces
To contribute to a social architectural space, we focused on user interactions in rather public spaces within office buildings and designed a medium and mediator for conveying social awareness and atmospheric aspects at specific places in order to support informal communication.

Informative Art and Privacy-Enhancing Technology
We designed a piece of calm technology which contributes to the definition of a place while at the same time unobtrusively serves an informative role only to the initiated members of an organization or a place. Others might see it as an atmospheric decorative element and enjoy its aesthetic quality. Therefore, we consider our work to be at the crossroads of privacy-enhancing technology and informative art.

Hello.Wall exploits humans` ability to perceive information via codes that do not require the same level
of explicit coding as with words. It can stay in the background, only perceived at the periphery of attention, while one is being concerned with another activity, e.g., a face-to-face conversation.

Light Patterns
With respect to the Hello.Wall being a stimulating architectural element, the light patterns displayed on the wall are mostly dynamic and have a blurred and rather abstract appearance. Although recognizable to users, they are not being predictable and thereby introduce an element of chance or surprise.

Social Awareness
Communicating social awareness and atmospheric aspects within an organization includes general and specific feedback mechanisms that allow addressing different target groups via different representation codes and displays [implicit vs. explicit]. Individuals as well as groups can create public and private codes depending on the purpose of their intervention. The content to be communicated can cover a wide range and will be subject to modification, adjustment, and elaboration based on the experience people have.

View.Port®
We propose a mechanism where the Hello.Wall can 'borrow' other artefacts in order to communicate more detailed information. These mobile devices are called View.Ports. Due to the nature of the View.Port's display, the information shown can be more explicit and it can also be more personal. Depending on their access rights and the current situation [e.g., distance to the wall], people can use View.Ports to decode visual codes / light patterns, to download ['freeze'] or just browse information [e.g., video], to paint signs on the wall, or to access a message announced by a light pattern.

View.Port® Designstudy
This physical View.Port design study comprises the concept of having two parts of a display identified by form, e.g., to differentiate between a private and a public part of a display. This is to be responsive to the fact that sharing of information will be ubiquitous in smart environments and keeping personal data private will be a major challenge.

SIAM
SIAM is a lightweight task-management system. Moreover,
it is meant to foster group communication and to provide
awareness of what other people are doing. Tasks are not
only descriptions of what has to be done or what was done,
but are also conversational items and subject to collaboration.
Thus, task management in small co-located teams is
not only about structuring, assigning, processing, and documenting
progress in task processing, but also benefits from
the integration of collaboration support and from presenting
common task items in a way that aids conversation
about them. Support for awareness about who is doing
what becomes crucial in a team where members have only
a relatively small amount of overlapping presence at the
office. SIAM focuses on a collaboration infrastructure and
user interface to manage tasks, where every object can be
synchronously shared and every change is immediately
visualized at all machines.

Personal Aura
The Personal Aura is an artefact which enables users to control their
appearance in a smart environment. In real life, every person adopts
different social roles, depending on the present situation and current
social environment. The Personal Aura enables persons to decide on their own
whether they are “visible” and in which “social role” they want to appear.
The artefact consists of two matching parts: the reader module which is able
to “emulate” different identities or professional roles, and the ID stick
containing a unique identity and optional personal information. Each person
has multiple ID sticks symbolizing different professional roles. If people
want to signal their availability to remote team members they do so by
simply connecting a specific ID stick to the reader module.