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Design of the Swisshouse: A Physical/Virtual Cooperative Workspace

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Cooperative Buildings. Integrating Information, Organizations, and Architecture (CoBuild 1999)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 1670))

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Abstract

This paper describes the design of the Swisshouse, a physical/virtual cooperative workspace to foster networking and knowledge exchange among a distributed community of Swiss scientists, with business people, lawyers, doctors and politicians. The physical ”cooperative building” of the Swisshouse, will result from the transformation of an existing 3,200 sq.ft. large retail store located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, into a wired loft-space, to be completed in December 1999. The design encompasses both a physical building and an intimately connected Internet-based web-space. In this paper, we describe our work-in-progress on the design of the interfaces between the two worlds. We present our current design of the embedded information devices that connect the virtual community, and -as architectural elements- define the physical cooperative loft space: an interactive information wall, stackable videoconferencing chairs, a knowledge café, a media space and a kinetic arena.

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© 1999 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Huang, J., Waldvogel, M., Lertsithichai, S. (1999). Design of the Swisshouse: A Physical/Virtual Cooperative Workspace. In: Streitz, N.A., Siegel, J., Hartkopf, V., Konomi, S. (eds) Cooperative Buildings. Integrating Information, Organizations, and Architecture. CoBuild 1999. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1670. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/10705432_21

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/10705432_21

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-66596-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-48106-5

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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