Mapping our Lives: Spatio-temporal Data Mining in an Office Environment

Understanding of how people use space and interact among them and with the built environment is largely of a tacit nature and remains untested by empirical verification. It is very difficult to understand the benefits that a particular spatial configuration provides in terms of creating new, and developing existing, meaningful social behaviours. Organisations are particularly interested in linking the design of their buildings to their work activities. And in linking space and work one main aim is to improve the effectiveness of those work activities. This link is difficult to prove, because there are problems in trying to determine which aspects of the workplace most affect the productivity of people using it and how the productivity can be measured in a way that can be related to established business measures such as cost or output. An interesting possibility, which has very recently been introduced into the office environment with the purpose of gaining a more accurate understanding of space utilisation by organisations themselves, is that offered by location tracking technologies. We have conducted some practical research in organisations that have deployed a location tracking system, exploring the following questions: What can these technologies tell us about space and social interaction in the office environment that we can not extract with current methods and tools? And how can we make this newly acquired knowledge useful for organizations in terms of understanding productivity?