Mark Bilandzic, QUT Researcher, Urban Informatics Lab, School of Design: I’m Mark Bilandzic, I’m a researcher at Urban Informatics Lab at QUT. I’m working on a project called Gelatine, and that investigates the design of smart space technology to improve social learning within collaborative spaces, such as public libraries or co-working spaces.

We are here at the Edge, an innovative slash co-working collaborative space at the State Library of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. There are a lot people and meet-up groups who use this place in very, very cool and creative ways. The problem is they come here, do their things and leave again, and no one actually notices. What Gelatine is trying to do is capture these activities and reflect them back to the physical space. So when someone comes here who has never been here before, he gets an overview of, you know, what everyone has been doing in this space, or what people usually do in this space.

When you come into this space, you basically just check-in with your personal profile information, as well as questions that you might have for others, which is then displayed on the public screens. So other people when they enter this space, they see your digital foot print, and they see everyone else’s digital foot print. They see pretty much what the social environment of users who are here right now is like.

In addition to the screens, I created a little thermal print out, that prints out everyone personal profile, that people can then rip off and put on a little blackboard. People can take these notes, take them away, and look for the person that the paper actually represents.

In my field research I observed around 450 users, who, you know, passed by, or viewed, or actually directly interacted with the system. So I found that it affects people in two ways. Some people who don’t feel comfortable going ahead and talking to someone, they get a better sense of what the place is about. But some people who are a bit more open to social interaction with others, use the print out or the information on the screen to actually initiate conversations with complete strangers that they might not have known before.

I think the system just scratches the surface of what’s possible. It’s just to showcase how the physical space can be combined with digital space, and create a hybrid space that embodies affordances of both the digital and physical. And combining these two, I think you create a hybrid space that is very powerful and can provide powerful affordances in terms of social learning.