For businesses, increasing collaboration among staff is a hot topic. We asked ourselves if we could devise a way to measure collaboration in order to assess the success of our design decisions. We called the project The Collaboration Counter.
The first part of the project involved setting up a digital camera over two different meeting spaces. We then built a system that leveraged Computer Vision technology to detect when each space was being used, by how many people and for how long.
Below is a screen shot from one of the video's.
We then created an app that reported on the findings and even gave us the ability to compare the two spaces. In doing this we could quickly see what space was better utilized.
The dashboard below shows the metrics for one of our huddle booths over the course of a day.
This dashboard shows how many 'events' or times the huddle booth was used during the day.
This dashboard indicates the number of events, the percentage of the day that the space was utilized and the length of the longest event.
Below, the busiest hour is indicated as well as the average number of visitors and average event duration.
This dashboard overlays the two spaces, the huddle booth and the casual couches.
Whilst we now had a good sense of how a space is utilized, so far it wasn't a proper indication or measurement of true collaboration. However, what we started to see in the video footage was the potential to analyse hand gestures and body language to see if we could determine if 'collaboration' was taking place.
This is the next step for us with the Collaboration Counter project, expect more updates soon on this front.