Introducing the Design Principles & The calmr platform to Build Assistive & Sensible Public Space, Learning Space and Workspaces

Reinventing the enterprise Serie (tm)

At Paracosm (an Educational Design & Prospective Design Consultancy) I have been thinking about building a unique platform ready for the Learning challenges of the 21st Century since 2005.

In 2013 I mapped the service processes & connected devices available and soon-to-arrive technologies and soon-to-be economically accessible already existing sensors. Then I sketched the the first Experience Design Management system and Spatial Analytics Platform to build and deploy evolutive solutions for the emerging needs of the 21c Enterprise, Public Space, Learning Space and Workspace by refering to the design principles and functions exposed in my Wuxia the Fox Augmented Space & Walkable Film 2005 concept proposal.

This conceptual StoryTelling Engine framework got Financed by the Canadian Media Fund in 2014 and 2015 and allowed to build its first prototype to showcase Wuxia the Fox augmented reading experience at the Future of Storytelling Festival in New York. The prototype was built with the SAGA Team (now LU) where I was Chief Design Officer. I gave it the name ioTHEATRE and when I left SAGA I relaunch the initiative under the name Calmr.

Introduction

Cities & Buildings are changing in Tandem with work and workstyles.

The workspace suffers from a case of “opposite detract”.?People need to collaborate and are hungry for places suited to conversations among a few people where magic can happen, where creative flow is persistent, where productivity is natural.

People need to focus, but they also need to interact - Immersive presentation room, Conference calls without the hustle of the lengthy setup, virtual meetings with warmth to facilitate teamwork across long-distance, and people stopping by.

Look for Activity-Based Choices, User-shaped Space, and Furniture to calm distractions - Look for Balance.?An approach to calm technologies embedded in the built/physical environment will help you achieve this vision.

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SEIZE THE OPPORTUNITY TO BECOME A LEADER IN THE REINVENTION OF WORKSPACES

THE PROMISE OF PROGRAMMABLE ENVIRONMENTS Built environments are out of sync with the change required in our economy and society; they don’t take advantage of technology to be responsive either to human needs or to demands for sustainability.

EXPLORATION OF PROGRAMMABILITY There is potential for new value in making buildings less rigid and more sustainable. Finding that space division and utility delivery caused rigidity, we set about to find ways to apply modularity and programmability as two paths to flexibility.

ACHIEVING THE PROMISE OF PROGRAMMABILITY We’ve identified fundamental design principles and thought about how programmable environments will be created and experienced. We think these environments will make people’s lives better. We invite others to explore, invent, implement, and learn along with us.

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SUPPORT THE NEW COLLABORATIVE MODEL

Examples of collaborative practices can be found in art and in software engineering. They offer an alternative model in which innovation is achieved through the active participation of all parties. Ideas and products are no longer developed in a closed production process organized around the autonomy of the artist or the company but evolve out of the pragmatism of usage. That is the motor of innovation.” —Dennis Kaspori, A Communism of Ideas: Towards an Architectural Open Source Practice

Toward new economics of place

Retail stores measure the value of space by sales per square foot. Theaters know what percentage of their seats they’ve filled. In manufacturing, square footage is part of the cost overhead equation; lean principles have allowed use of industrial space to become more and more efficient—frequently surpassing managers’ expectations.

But in an economy with knowledge and service as increasingly large parts of our commercial output, we’re without metrics for measuring the value of space for knowledge and service workers. Is it workstation occupancy? How, then, factor in community space, the collaboration that happens outside the office, travel to suppliers, research partners, and customers? It’s not surprising, perhaps, that we’re without reliable metrics for the value of knowledge worker facilities, when we’ve yet to agree on measures for the value of knowledge work. How much thinking should a person do in a day? How innovative should that thinking be? When can you quantify the value of an innovation? How do you assign credit for the results of collaboration?

Everyone agrees that organizations need to attract and empower people who do knowledge work.

These workers will take their expertise, network, and digital file boxes so they can efficiently get to work any place, with a new or old team, or within a new organization. For the individual, this change can be wonderfully empowering. From a work manager’s point of view, the same shifts seem as if the world is falling apart. For a vice president of real estate, it becomes more difficult to decide to build or lease space, how much.

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NEW MEASURES NEEDED

Productivity has long been measured by the ratio of input to output. This works in manufacturing or service jobs where the tasks are repetitive and materials are tangible. For people who work primarily with knowledge, how do we value units of information used as inputs? How do we gauge the quality of outputs? If the tasks are different from day to day, how do we track the ratio over time?

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THE PROMISE

Organizations evaluate tradeoffs they’re unaccustomed to, choosing between investing in mobile technology or in spaces workers may or may not come to. The future is ambiguous—for the metrics of a knowledge economy and the implications for real estate to support that economy. Designing for change is the best approach for protecting investments as work strategies evolve. This is the era of pliancy: emergent structures, fluid and permeable boundaries, intangible assets, rapid evolution, and a new kind of economics.

Charles Eames said, in the early 70s, “Design depends largely on constraints.” Game developer Dino Dini elaborates: “Design is simply the management of constraints, and the choice of which constraints are nonnegotiable is crucial.” Solving the problem of space requires a reevaluation of the negotiability of constraints. What once seemed crucial may no longer be so, and what is crucial now may be entirely new.

We have found a way to think about the interiors of Workspace and their interconnectedness with the realm of digital services that is aligned with the constraints of the beginning of the 21st century. Our ideas stand on the shoulders of the work of inventors, architects, designers, and thinkers from around the world.

Ubiquitous computing, ambient intelligence, flexible architecture, adaptive architecture, kinetic structures, smart architecture, intelligent buildings, responsive architecture—these are all different ways to describe very similar phenomena. We have chosen to call our idea programmable environments.

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KEY BENEFITS

For Employees

1. Reduce Stress
2. Augment Creativity
3. Help Focus and Gain Clarity
4. Help Dialogue
5. Nurture Flow and Serendipity

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For Employers

1. Real-Time Activity Tracking
2. Efficient Space Management
3. Social Enterprise Dashboard
4. Productivity Augmentation
5. Attract empower people who do innovative / knowledge work.

Global Advantages

1. Facilitate Flow of Navigation in the WorkSpace
2. HighTouch Environment promoting Tangible and Natural interactions
3. Highly Adaptable and Expandable sets of Digital Tools & Connected Furniture Solutions
4. MultiSensory Experiences
5. Rapidly emulate successful Workflows across all workspaces

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IT WILL IMPROVE / EASE MANAGEMENT OF / AUGMENT / ENRICH

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Tele-Permanence

1. Design of simple usershaped automation patterns
2. Ensure compliance & constant communication with key personnel
3. Enable interconnectivity between communication systems

Office Management

1. Manage workspace intelligently
2. Design Workflows around employee’s activity
3. Track entries, movement and share information with relevant personnel in the Right Context (Right Place / Right Moment)

Creative & Resonant Communications

1. Offer stunning new ways to present ideas & work;
2. Add context-awareness to any space to enable frictionless Telecommunications, Annotations and Information Capture & Synthesis and Ubiquitous Search & Playful Retrieval Capabilities of Relevant Insights;
3. Offer collaborative toolkit for Conceptual, Architectural, Modelization & Presentations, Dialogues & Design Work.

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Creative & Resonant Communications

1. Invent Natural Interactions & Voice-Activate Commands to Record Conversations, Film Session, Detect Connected Furniture Layout & Printed Documents ID’s, Launch Conference or Presentation Automated Presets.
2. Design Complex Rules to extend the Space Possibilities.?Image each Desk having its own Programmable Environment API to invent new modes of Work/Play.
3. Automate Attendance, notetaking and other clerical tasks/business functions to liberate cognitive time, reduce stress and augment agreableness of the Workspace.