Ambient visualization for awareness in co-located team meetings.
Project Focus
My Final Master Project, Making Group State Visible, brings together many interests I developed during my Master: human-centered research, collective experience, visual communication, subtle interaction, privacy, and ambiguity.
The project explores how changing group states in co-located team meetings can be made perceivable through ambient visualization. In meetings, people may shift between shared focus, negotiation, low energy, or uncertainty, but these changes are often difficult to notice while everyone is engaged in the task. At the same time, directly labelling emotions or individual behavior could make people feel monitored or judged.
Exploratory Workshop
Process
Through Research through Design, I reframed from “group mood” to “group state” to avoid reducing the experience to fixed emotional labels. I explored bodily cues, synchrony, ambient interaction, and ambiguity as theoretical foundations. Based on exploratory research and user feedback, I developed several concept directions and iterated toward a timeline-based tabletop prototype.
The final prototype combines meeting activity blocks, a meeting timeline, AI-supported visual generation, and silhouette-based group visuals. Before the meeting, participants can place activity blocks to express their expected meeting flow. During the meeting, ambient visuals can shift to represent possible group states, such as shared focus, negotiation, or low energy. The aim is not to tell the team what to do, but to create a gentle opportunity to notice and reflect.
Reflection
For me, this project is the strongest integration of my Master journey. It connects my interest in people lived experiences, visual and experiential expression, and the careful design of awareness in social situations. It also reflects my PI&V: using human-centered design to support people’s emotional and social experiences without making them feel judged, exposed, or controlled.
