Connecting remote visits and design environment: User needs and prototypes for architecture design

We present a case of mobile and tangible computing prototypes developed for architecture design. We have carried out extensive observation of how architecture students visit places, collect material and manipulate it in design projects. The direct implications we inferred analyzing the field work material were the need of mobile support to link contextual information and the collected material. Moreover we envisioned the opportunity to create a tool to navigate and manipulate material from visits. Finally we identified the need of integrating and linking digital media from visits, with the physical environment in the atelier. We have concretized the user needs in a scenario and we describe a set of prototypes: a mobile application to create a media path of the visits, a visualizing tool to navigate and manipulate it, and an infrastructure in the atelier environment to share and access media objects and links between them. In the discussion we analyze challenges in integrating two design spaces of architects with computational support: the remote sites and visits on one hand, the atelier environment with design representations on the other.