Simulating communicative interaction
A multi-disciplinary and multi-cultural R&D project has created a unified framework that ensures compatibility between fixed and mobile as well as between local and remote work areas. Specific ICT tools were prototyped and developed emphasising the innovative application of emerging technologies and services. As a result, project SANE (Sustainable Accommodation in the New Economy) has designed a human environment model to establish a commonality in exchanging knowledge and beliefs via interaction and mutual understanding. The objective of the model operates under the assumption that all knowledge needs to be communicated to someone in some form. Thus, it analysed just how it is that people achieve mutual understanding in the workplace from the human environment perspective. In so doing, they were able to design communication support in physical, mediated and hybrid environments. The technique they sought needed to be both flexible as well as expansive so that it can both join and divide inactive and active facets of a workplace simultaneously. Although the Human Environment Framework is a theoretical model, it provides life-like circumstances of communicative interaction through a representation of temporal and spatial locations and synchronous and asynchronous spaces. The model is intended for use in research that can be applied in human-computer interfaces in the real-life workplace.