Tailorable blog

Reboot 9.0 and new work environments

Please visit Ewan McIntosh’s blog (http://edu.blogs.com/edublogs/2007/06/reboot9_your_id.html) for a discussion on my session “Your ideal working environment” on Reboot 9.0.

As I mentioned in his comments as well, I loved the stories people told about their ideal working environment and the fact that this seems to be not only very personal, but also depends on what type of activity you are engaged in (creative or having to finish a paper).

Also very interesting to hear what some people considered ideal social software: software that understands when it is okay to disturb you with awareness information and when not: a Twitter that knows when to bug you. I certainly see some design challenges and possibillities for further research there…

The good news is that I will be able to test some of the suggestions I heard in the near future: the kick-off of the Telematica Instituut project on new work environments is next week! In this project we will start living labs at various medium-sized and large organizations to test the impact of new, flexible collaboration processes. We know that social software opens up new possibilities for communication and even enables new working processes. However, we also expect that the motivations of people to collaborate do not change significantly. So, with this consortium we are going to investigate new working environments, in the physical and organizational sense and in terms of (social) software support.