Activitydesk: multi-device configuration work using an interactive desk

Recent studies have shown that knowledge workers are increasingly using multiple devices, such as notebooks, tablets and smartphones to interact with different types of information that are part of their daily activities. Using multiple devices introduces a configuration overhead as users have to manually reconfigure all devices according to ongoing activities. Especially in an environment such as an office, where the use of multiple devices is more common, the process of configuring them in context of ongoing activities is cumbersome. In this paper, we present the initial explorations of the ActivityDesk system, an interactive desk that supports multi-device configuration work and workspace aggregation into a personal ad hoc smart space for knowledge workers. The main goal of ActivityDesk is to reduce the configuration work required to use multiple devices at the same time by using an interactive desk as a configuration space.