Workplaces for Teams

Akihiro Kishimoto, Institute of Office Systems, Kokuyo Co., Ltd.

In the workplace which bypasses traditional administrative hierachy and barriers existing vertical corporate structures, and brings together workers with various jobs and skills in order to support collaboration among them, it would be necessary to have users be responsible for privacy and communication control and provide some system whereby users can select workplaces and tools which suit their particular jobs.


 
Chiat/Day, New York, USA
 
The case studies in this issue intorduce the contrasting working spaces of two coprorations--Chiat/Day and Microsoft. Chiat/Day is an U.S. advertising agency noted for its strong creativity. Two offices they created in 1994 made headlines such as "Virtual Office" or "Virtual Agency" in management-related magazines. These offices removed the barriers standing in the way of collaboration as much as possible, in order to shift from the traditional department-base hierarchy toward the client-driven team structure. These new types of office are an experiment to encourage workers to get out of their private cubilcles, access the information network with the state-of-the-art information technology and maximize the team performance. Microsoft, a giant in the personal computer sofware industry, on the other hand, has created a vast collaborative virtual space, in which all the workers, who are assigned to private spaces, communicate globally by e-mail. These two completely different concepts of office design offer a rich array of suggestions on how to choose the optimum space and technology best suited to a particular organizational structure and workstyle.
 
Chiat/Day, New York, USA
 
 
Chiat/Day, California, USA
 
 
Microsoft, Redmond, USA
 

CREATIVE WORKSHOP

  
Yukihisa Kawakita, the Institute of Office Systems, Kokuyo Co., Ltd.

The image of an ideal modern office for supporting project teams resembles that of a workshop for creative artisans which has existed since the Medieval Age. Its modern version, however, is an information-sharing space in which a hybrid of the virtual space and the real space produces a geometrical effect in supporting workers. This article proposes an image of a new workshop for team collaboration, based on an analysis of how the project team functions and the process model of how information is generated.

Talk: Collaborating to Encourage Encounters with the Heterogeneous

  
Toshihiro Kanai, Professor of Kobe University + Yoichi Kotani, OSI Dept., Kokuyo Co., Ltd.

Explicit management and implicit management--these two contrasting types of management meet each other, generating various conflicts and finally realizing a truly unique collaboration.
 

Contribution: A design of Realtime Groupware

  
Hiroshi Ishii, NTT Human Interface Laboratories

An overview of groupware, which discusses its design aspects, citing various examples such as teleconferecing, joint-use window system, screen-sharing system, group editor and support system for visual collaboration work.

Interview: What Can the Communication Network Do?

  
Akio Sugii, Information Coordinator

Mr. Sugii talks about the direction the communication network should take in order to speed up the flow of information in an organization and make business activities more creative.