The workshop was organized by Randy H. Katz of the University of California, Berkeley, and M. Satyanarayanan of Carnegie Mellon University, with the able assistance of Satish Tripathi of the University of Maryland, College Park and Darrell Long of the University of California Santa Cruz. We brought together a diverse community of twenty "by invitation only" leading experts in the underlying disciplines. The first day of the workshop consisted of invited "state-of-the-art" survey presentations on the main technologies that underlie the theme of the workshop, namely developments in wireless communications systems (Kaveh Pahlavan, Worcester Polytechnic Institute), computer supported group work (Steve Whittaker, AT&T Research Laboratories), building systems and reconfigurable workspaces (Vivian Loftness, Carnegie Mellon University), and facilities planning and standardization (Gerald Davis, International Centre for Facilities).
In attendance were three Federal agency program managers that support research in these and associated areas: Darleen Fisher and Leslie Gasser of the National Science Foundation, and Ken Gabriel of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. As representatives of the Computing and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate of NSF, Dr. Fisher and Dr. Gasser were interested in understanding the emerging discipline of "human centered information systems." This discipline investigates the ways in which computing and communications technology can assist people in their individual and collaborative activities. They were also particularly interested in how human activities could be more effectively supported by understanding the full human-social-organizational-cultural environment in which the activities are performed, and encouraged collaborations between technologists and social scientists to address these questions. Clearly the physical infrastructure of the buildings in which the activities are performed contribute a holistic view of human centered systems, but they asked the attendees to consider how its impacts could be quantified.
Dr. Gabriel pointed out his agency's mission and technology focus. Support for collaborative activities in unusual (and often confined) physical spaces, such as aircraft carriers or AWACS planes, was of great interest to DARPA. In addition, DARPA is particularly interested in emerging technologies that could have orders of magnitude impacts on worker effectiveness, such as pervasive computing and communications, information displays, extensive sensing and actuating capabilities, rapid deployment and reorganization of work environments such as command posts, and so on. He charged the attendees to seek out and identify the potential non-linearities in capabilities that lead to radical new breakthroughs.
In the afternoon of the first day, the attendees formed into three cross-disciplinary break out groups to chart a possible research agenda and to draft recommendations on research opportunities. The organizers had originally proposed a series of questions to guide the group discussions, but in general, each group pursued its own process of deliberations (the original questions are included in Appendix B). On the second day, the groups continued their deliberations, and then reassembled to report to each other on their initial recommendations. Group discussions helped to refine the final collection of recommendations as they appear in this report. Randy Katz drafted the report, and circulated it among the workshop attendees for comments and final refinement.
The rest of this report is organized as follows. Section 3 reviews the significant underlying trends in Information Technology, Building Systems, and Work Activity, as identified by the workshop attendees. Section 4 presents the main recommendations of the workshop, organized by Research Challenges in Information Technology, Building Technology, and Work Effectiveness. Four specific research recommendations are made, to collect information on existing studies of workspace effectiveness, to perform human centered design studies and experiments, to quantify the interdependence of building and information technologies, and to create technology testbeds to demonstrate the benefits of the new technologies. Our Summary and Conclusions are given in Section 5.
Last Updated by Randy H. Katz, 22 January 1997