The office is not what it used to be. Rapid developments in IT technology, fuelled by the ever increasing need for businesses to reduce their costs make way for offices with a sometimes unhealthy appetite for facility and employee efficiency. The office building is transforming from a static piece of concrete towards a flexible shell with internet connected infrastructure, called smart buildings. These buildings, that heavily depend on digital technology, can quickly adapt to the changing need of the office workers. However, office workers turn out to be the rigid part of the equation, as they find it hard to work in a flexible manner. This is where Mapiq comes in, which is a smart building platform. Mapiq is a software platform that integrates all of the services and facilities that are available in an office into one interface that can be accessed on any consumer device. Among other things users can book meeting rooms from their laptop, find their colleagues with a kiosk at the entrance, and adjust the lighting above their desk from their smartphone.

However, the usage of Mapiq in an office does not yet guarantee flexible workforce that is essential for a truly smart building. Next to that, there is still an opportunity to create a more meaningful and engaging interaction between a smart building and its users. Currently Mapiq can only be accessed through a GUI, and the platform is not embedded into the architecture in any way that is meaningful to the office workers. In this project the context of the office has been researched through literature research and context mapping research, in which four flexworkers were followed throughout their working day. The research provided rich insight in the experiences of flexworkers, such as the need for community in order to break loose from fixed workplaces and the lack of control that employees have over their environment at the start of a working day. From the insights a future vision was created, to set the context of the design.

The design goal is to allow constellations of collaborators to feel like they belong to their temporary place in the office. The interaction can be characterised as arbitrary predictability, which is embodied by the metaphor of tuning to a radio station with music you want to lister to with a rotary knob on a receiver. Starting with the design goal, concepts were developed in an explorative and iterative way by making quick prototypes and learning quickly from the feedback from users.

The final design is Flocc: a system of team identities to connect users to their smart building. Every project team has their own unique visual and auditory identity. These identities can be embedded in multiple ways throughout an office building. The identities allow employees to associate themselves with the teams they are working with, thus increasing the sense of community. Next to this employees can locate each other quickly when they want to work together. The visual patterns that make up the team identities share the same visual language, but are still recognisable from each other. A large amount of unique patterns can be used as they are created in a generative way. In this project the system of team identities has been applied in three different designs that can be used in an office building. Together, these create one coherent experience for an office worker going about his day.

In the lobby of the office an interactive display is embedded in the floor. The display shows an overview of all the team identities that are working at any moment in the office. When a user walks over the patterns, he is identified by the smart building installation and user’s teams are highlighted on the floor. When the user walks over the highlighted patterns an auditory identity is heard. The sound, together with a line that emerges from the pattern, shows the user the directions to that particular team in the office. The line ends in a screen on the wall that provides more detailed wayfinding instructions, so the user can find its way to the team.

The teams are at work in big, open workspaces in the office. In the ceiling above every group of desks, the team identities are displayed as well. Every team will have their own team identity that lights up above them. The identity will follow a team throughout the office, creating a shared point of reference for the team members. By placing the identity in the vicinity of where people work, they will slowly start to familiarise themselves better with the patterns, which will increase the recognition of a particular team over time. The pattern bonds the team together, and gives them a fixed reference in a flexworking office.

At last Flocc can be integrated with the Mapiq smartphone application. In the application interface a personal overview of team identities can be viewed, with additional details on who is part of a team and where the team can be found. The application provides more in-depth and functional information about the team identities, as an addition to the ambiguous nature of the embedded installations. The smartphone application and installation are always synchronised in real-time through the smart building platform. This allows the user to open the smartphone interface while walking over the lobby installation, and receive relevant information. These features create a consistent experience across modalities.

To evaluate whether the concept of team identities could be understood well by the target group, and whether the interaction is as envisioned, a final user evaluation has been conducted. A full-size interactive prototype in a similar context has been created of the lobby installation for this purpose. The result was that most participants understood the system and found it valuable, if the way of working in flexible offices was clear to them. The usability of the lobby installation has been increased with some final adjustments in the way directions are given. It is recommended to conduct a long-term user evaluation to find out whether the design increases the feeling of belonging. Flocc demonstrates that a new direction of interactions can be facilitated by smart buildings, which serves the complex needs of office workers in an ambiguous manner.