[Back to projects]

Dynamic Door Displays

Using Office Doors as an Information Medium

David Nguyen, Joe Tullio, Tom Drewes, Elizabeth Mynatt

Traditionally, office doors have been used as display surfaces for communicating a variety of information between door owners and visitors. While flexible, doors also burden their owners with the task of maintenance and do not support notions of public and private information.Dynamic Door Displays are tools for enhancing an office door’s display capabilities to include automatic updates and tailored displays of private information for particular visitors.

This project arose from an initial curiosity into the function of information that is tied to the context of a specific location [3].  In many office settings, it is common practice to post information on doors in the form of documents and pictures. This information may serve to answer some frequently asked questions when the owner is away, or it may simply provide an expression of the owner’s interests or personality. Postings may contain anything from a favorite comic strip to a weekly calendar. These may be intended for permanent display, or may be posted for only a few minutes. Shorter-term messages are frequently used to indicate future availability (“back in 5 minutes”) or current location (“at lunch”).

Although the practice of posting on doors is effective, problems arise. Since it is typically the owner’s responsibility to maintain the door’s information, postings can quickly go out of date when the owner is too busy or forgetful. In addition, the public nature of the door’s surface causes owners to withhold private information that may be useful to a select individual or group.

Design of Dynamic Door Displays

Our door displays automatically update displays of dynamic information. In addition to the owner’s current location [4], his/her calendar information is updated.The displays also provide access to private information by allowing visitors to identify themselves through the Dallas Semiconductor iButton system. They only occupy a small portion of the door, allowing users to continue using paper-based postings as well. Finally, information is displayed in differing levels of detail depending on the owner’s privacy requirements with respect to the visiting group or individual. As with the paper-based postings currently used on office doors, available information is constrained to have some relevance to the door’s owner, and it is kept short enough to be comprehended at a brief glance.

The display on our lab door initially shows a welcome message and a list of current lab residents with available information:

Selecting a student allows access to his/her calendar and last known location. Visitors may also leave a voice message or select from a list of short text messages.

Our first prototypes used a 40x4 character LCD and four pushbuttons connected to a PC via serial interface (Figure 1a). Since the LCD lacks the graphical richness needed to properly display the variety of information that can be posted on doors, we now use a color display from a Hewlett-Packard 620LX handheld computer (Figure 1b).The touch-sensitivity of the color display eliminates the need for the original pushbuttons. A Proxim wireless LAN connects the display to the lab network.

To permit automatic updates to calendar and location information, we use the Context Toolkit [2], a suite of reusable widgets capable of continually monitoring incoming data sensed from the outside world. A widget for each user’s calendar and location is periodically queried by the door display to keep the information current.

Future Work

Initial response to the door displays has been positive, and we are currently in the process of building several more prototypes to accommodate a demand for them. We are excited to see how new users express themselves through their own custom screens and applications. A web-access version of the interface may offer convenience to remote visitors, but with the understanding that different privacy considerations apply for web access than for “face-to-door” access.

We are also considering the possibility of using audio cues to convey messages from the door owner to identified visitors. Using audio in conjunction with implicit identification would enable a lightweight dialog between door and visitor; akin to the passing glance we typically give a colleague’s door. To this end, we are investigating the use of RF tags and speaker identification.

Since the door displays are tied to a particular location, it is possible to develop applications that take advantage of this property. For instance, a simple “you are here” display could assist in orienting visitors from any door in our building.

Finally, we are interested in inferring the door owner’s availability by using implicit sensing and probabilistic inference. In this way, visitors could be notified of availability without disturbing the office occupants.

This research was funded in part by NSF and Microsoft.

References

1.     Mankoff, J. and Schilit, B.Supporting Knowledge Workers Beyond the Desktop with PalPlates, in Proceedings of CHI’97 (Atlanta GA, March 1997), ACM Press, 550-551.

2. Nguyen, D.H., Tullio, J., Drewes, T. and Mynatt, E.D.  Dynamic Door Displays.  GVU Technical Report #GIT-GVU-00-30, 2000. [PDF]

3.     Salber, D., Dey, A., and Abowd, G. The Context Toolkit: Aiding the Development of Context-Enabled Applications, in Proceedings of CHI’99 (Pittsburgh PA, May 1999), ACM Press, 434-441.

4.     Spohrer, J.C.Information in Places.IBM Systems Journal 38, 4 (1999).

5.     Weatherall, N. and Hopper, A. Predator: A Distributed Location Service and Example Applications, in Proceedings of CoBuild’99 (Pittsburgh PA, October 1999), Springer, 127-139.