The EnviroMapper Toolkit: an Input Physicalisation that Captures the Situated Experience of Environmental Comfort in Offices

2025-03-21

AI Summary

Traditional workplace comfort surveys often fail to capture individualized, context-sensitive experiences. To address this, we propose a physical toolkit enabling employees to annotate spatiotemporal comfort/discomfort experiences *in situ* using tangible, markable artifacts. This approach introduces the novel paradigm of “contextualized input visualization,” supporting on-site, non-digital, low-cognitive-load recording while allowing domain experts to offline decode multi-user annotations and synthesize collective patterns. Grounded in physical interaction design, field-based human factors research, and participatory iterative development, the toolkit was deployed with 14 participants across two open-plan offices. Results confirm that remote experts can accurately interpret the physical annotations. From this work, we distill four generalizable design principles for multi-user physical input and visualization systems.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: Interaction Techniques and Devices
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Social Cognition And Interaction
• Computer Vision: Low Level & Physics-based Vision

Application Category

• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Practical large-scale studies of user experience
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Data quality aspects of human-annotated datasets
• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements

Abstract

The environmental comfort in offices is traditionally captured by surveying an entire workforce simultaneously, which yet fails to capture the situatedness of the different personal experiences. To address this limitation, we developed the EnviroMapper Toolkit, a data physicalisation toolkit that allows individual office workers to record their personal experiences of environmental comfort by mapping the actual moments and locations these occurred. By analysing two in-the-wild studies in existing open-plan office environments (N=14), we demonstrate how this toolkit acts like a situated input visualisation that can be interpreted by domain experts who were not present during its construction. This study therefore offers four key contributions: (1) the iterative design process of the physicalisation toolkit; (2) its preliminary deployment in two real-world office contexts; (3) the decoding of the resulting artefacts by domain experts; and (4) design considerations to support future input physicalisation and visualisation constructions that capture and synthesise data from multiple individuals.

Problem

• Captures individual office workers' environmental comfort experiences
• Addresses limitations of traditional workforce-wide comfort surveys
• Enables expert interpretation of situated comfort data visualizations

Innovation

• Toolkit captures individual office comfort experiences
• Uses data physicalisation for situated input visualisation
• Decodes comfort data via expert interpretation