Offices, balconies, doors and corridors: An experimental interface metaphor for integrating collaborative design styles

Abstract

We describe early research into the use of the metaphor of office landscape (Büro-Landschaft) in interfaces for software systems to support co-operative design teams. This work grew out of a study of the problems encountered by a team of engineering designers using a highly distributed work method. A (paper-based) metalanguage based on the office landscape metaphor was developed to ease communication between group members. We suggest that this metalanguage also has the potential to provide a transparent and familiar interface metaphor for software systems to support such work teams. Software for collaborative design would need to be highly flexible and, ideally, user-tailorable: the end users would need to be able to “rearrange the furniture” of their software environment. The office landscape metaphor offers just this facility and has the power to support a rich variety of co-operative and individual work patterns.