The Speaker's Staff
Bert Vandenberghe, David Geerts · 2016
In this paper we present the ongoing work on the Speaker's Staff, a concept for a tangible user interface to support remote multidisciplinary team meetings in hospitals. We describe the design process of the Speaker's Staff and our research-through-design approach, inspired by critical design, to overcome contextual barriers. By introducing the Speaker's Staff: we don't require tight integration with hospital informatics, we maximize flexibility for physicians in this dynamic environment, and we address the lack of mobile devices during these meetings. In four scenarios, we illustrate the possibilities of the Speaker's Staff: tilting to request the floor, hiding to signal absence, striking to thump the table, and tapping to acknowledge. Also, as the hospital can be a rather restrictive environment for HCI researchers, we argue that the Speaker's Staff supports our research in this context because the object makes our research questions tangible towards physicians.