The eLabBench
Aurélien Tabard, Juan David Hincapié-Ramos, Morten Esbensen, Jakob E. Bardram · 2011
We present the eLabBench -- a tabletop system supporting experimental research in the biology laboratory. The eLabBench allows biologists to organize their experiments around the notions of activities and resources, and seamlessly roam information between their office computer and the digital laboratory bench. At the bench, biologists can pull digital resources, annotate them, and interact with hybrid (tangible + digital) objects such as racks of test tubes. This paper focuses on the eLabBench's design, and presents three main contributions: First, based on observations we highlight a set of characteristics digital benches should support in a laboratory. Second, we describe the eLabBench, including a simple implementation of activity-based computing for tabletop environments, with support for activity roaming, note-taking, and hybrid objects. Third, we present preliminary feedback of the eLabBench based on a ongoing deployment in a biology laboratory, and propose a design space definition for the design of single-user, work-oriented, tabletop systems.