Human-centred workplace: Re-finding physical document in an office workplace

Abstract

Today’s typical busy schedules make it difficult for people to keep track, organize and search the documents they keep in their own office workplace. The consequences of less organized offices are often that people lose more time in searching for paper documents. To avoid the consequences of losing documents, some archive their physical documents according to their use and others place documents in highly visible areas. These strategies offer some comfort when searching the document, but the practice demands people to be somewhat organized. Even digital support for finding physical documents typically requires some organisation and order has observed. In this thesis, we describe a project that created a system, which does not require people to be orderly and aims at freeing people from the time-consuming job of sorting or sequencing their documents. The system generates and prints passive tags (Quick Response Code) on documents and uses cameras in the office to track changes in the document locations. The thesis describes the design, implementation and initial evaluation of the system ‘Human-centred workplace (HCW).’