Sticx
Role
Software used
Project type
Duration
Overview
Sticx is a joint research project between the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) and Innoty, focusing on leveraging technology to enhance collaboration and knowledge sharing. To this end, we investigated the differences between in-person versus remote collaboration, the possibilities of augmented and virtual reality, and the capacity of AI to break down information silos.
My role
As a researcher my responsibilities included doing systematic research from scientific papers and industry reports, conducting qualitative interviews, documenting findings and looking for the best way to apply them to Innoty's services. As a PhD student I supervised student theses, taught HCI lab sessions at the VUB and worked on papers for academic publication.
Users’ needs
Design process
Project outcomes
- We published “Where Do We Meet?” a paper analysing factors that influence collaboration in physical, digital and hybrid meetings. This paper is based on scientific literature and interviews with managers across multiple industries.
- Drawing from our research, we developed a workshop to improve collaboration and knowledge transfer in teams. We presented the workshop in two international HCI conferences and used it with clients in Benelux’s IT consulting industry.
- Co-defined and taught the HCI labs to bachelor students at the VUB. To complement the theoretical lectures with practical skills, we taught students how to gather user requirements, translate them into design artifacts, create prototypes, test with users and iterate on their designs.
- Supervised and supported Computer Science students through their theses writing and technical implementation. This included bachelor and master students in topics such as AR, VR and tangible interfaces.
Workshop: “Stop the soulless meetings!”
My industry supervisor and I worked together to design this workshop that we presented at SIGCHI, the biggest scientific conference on Human-Computer Interaction. After some adjustments, the company started to use it with clients in the Benelux area.
“Stop the soulless meetings!” is a workshop that we designed to show participants how to discuss ideas or problems through collaborative sketching alongside tangible objects. Additionally, we explain what existing research says about multi-sensory activities and how they positively impact brain processes that help us to learn and retain information better.
The workshop takes between 2 and 3 hours and consists of 5 exercises. The mechanics of the activities are pre-defined but the topics and problems to solve are adapted to each client.
At the end of the workshop, participants have new tools to collaborate with their teammates, to communicate and to solve actual problems at their workplace.
Paper: “Where Do We Meet?”
With the increase of online and hybrid meetings in the workplace, many teams are struggling to define policies for where and when to meet. Our project aimed to uncover the factors that influence collaboration during meetings, to assist teams to define policies based on industry research, academic literature and insights from interviews with managers across multiple industry sectors.
Our findings are explained in-depth in our paper “Where do we meet?” In it, we detailed the mechanics of collaboration and how it is impacted by physical and digital environments. Additionally, we summarized our insights in a model that outlines the crucial aspects of meetings, their impact on four key collaboration factors, and recommendations on suitable environments and tools for teams to achieve their collaboration goals.
Challenges
Adapting to academia and reskilling: The move from industry to academia was harder than I though. The rhythm and the skills needed are different. In the industry you move faster, you need to be pragmatic and test ideas. In academy, you need to go slow, study, plan and document. I asked my supervisors for continuous feedback and followed workshops in topics such as scientific writing and experiment design. In the end this helped me to drastically improve my writing and research skills.
Supervising students: Before my PhD, I had experience mentoring junior team members, but supervising a university thesis was a new challenge. I reached out to other colleagues supervising students. I realized many of them had issues similar to mine so I led the effort to create a centralized repository where we could find answers to the most common questions and share useful resources.
Conclusions
In this project we successfully uncovered the factors that influence collaboration and knowledge transfer during meetings. This has been used by the company in its consulting services. On the other hand, it gave me the chance to be exposed to topics that I hadn’t studied before, such as, embodied cognition or AI. The project also help me to improve my research skills and to refresh my base knowledge of Human-Computer Interaction by teaching it to others.