MERBoard: A Multidisciplinary Approach To Designing a Collaboration Space for a Mars Mission

This position paper describes the ongoing process by which a multidisciplinary group at NASA’s Ames Research Center (social science and computer science) is designing and implementing a large interactive worksurface called the MERBoard Collaborative Workspace. A MERBoard system involves several distributed, large, touch-enabled, plasma display systems with custom MERBoard software. A centralized server and database back the system. We are continually tuning MERBoard to support over two hundred scientists and engineers during the surface operations of the Mars Exploration Rover Missions. These scientists and engineers come from various disciplines and are working both in small and large groups over a span of space and time. We describe the multidisciplinary, human-centered process by which this MERBoard system is being deployed, the usage patterns and social interactions that we have observed, and issues we are currently facing.



MerBoard Paper for CSCW 2002 (HTML)

MerBoard Paper for CSCW 2002 (word doc)

MerBoard Paper for CSCW 2002 (pdf)

References
Trimble, J., Wales, R., Gossweiler, R. NASA Position Paper for the CSCW 2002 Workshop on Public, Community and Situated Displays: MERBoard., CSCW, 2002.

Jay Trimble, Roxana Wales and Rich Gossweiler, NASA's MERBoard, in Kenton O'Hara, Mark Perry, Elizabeth Churchill, and Daniel Russell (eds), Public and Situated Displays: Social and interactional aspects of shared display technologies, Kluwer, 2003.


Here's a shot of the NASA Ames gang taken while at IDEO (scanned from the book Extra Spatial, pg. 42).
I'm on the end in the white shirt and sitting back: