Human-centred workplace: Re-finding physical documents in an office environment

Abstract

It is often difficult for busy people to keep track of or re-find documents in their own workplace. They may try to remember the location of documents by context (that is by information associated with the object) or they may try to improve the chance of finding documents by placing them in a highly visible area. However, very few methods have been developed for finding a physical object's location in an office. Most of the existing methods require some kind of structured approach to be followed by the user. We created a "Human-Centred Workplace" system that does not require orderly users. The system generates and prints passive tags on documents and uses (web) cameras in the office to capture images and track changes in the documents' locations. This paper introduces the design and implementation of the system, explores its use in an office environment and gives a first-cut evaluation of our prototypical implementation.