Overview

Most environments are passive - deaf, dumb and blind - unaware of their inhabitant and unable to assist them in a meaningful way. In contrast, an active environment is a physical space that can sense and respond appropriately to the people and activities taking place within it.

We developed a suite of tools for creating greater awareness of the location and activities of colleagues within a workgroup, with an aim to provide more opportunities for the kind of informal communication that is increasingly crucial to the success of project- and team-oriented work. All these tools rely on a network of infrared sensors and badges, and were in daily use from the time they were released (in 1999 and 2000) until the time I left Accenture in 2002.

PocketWatch provides a simple query facility to ask where a person is, who is with a person, or who is in a specific location. ActiveMap provides large-scale awareness (the forest for the trees), superimposing pictures of people on a blueprint-style map of the workplace in the places the people were last seen. EventManager provides an interface for defining events of interest concerning people and locations, and a set of notification mechanisms that can be invoked when those events occur.