Junyi Cao

ToU is a critical design project that explores the boundary between technology and people. Especially when the pandemic becomes a new normal, looking for the future and posibility in the hybrid meeting scenario of small to medium size chinese companies.

Junyi Cao is a creative and energetic service designer with the background in product design. She has been exploring the relationship between people and studying how to deal with the relationship between people delicately, so that this relationship is at a balance point.

ToU explored the balance between people in hybrid meetings. Junyi and her team members have insights into the weakness of online participants in the actual hybrid conference, and tried to reduce this sense of difference, so as to achieve the effect of improving the efficiency of the conference.

— ToU is a critical design project that explores the boundary between technology and people. Especially when the pandemic becomes a new normal, looking for the future and posibility in the hybrid meeting scenario of small to medium size chinese companies.

Service Trailer — For many organizations, COVID-19 dramatically changed the way they cooperate. As one might expect, for many people, accepting existing technologies and practices is chaotic. As the urgent threat to business continuity has receded, some IT staff, HR and other stakeholders are finding time to ask themselves other important questions: How can we better collaborate in this new normal? What kind of challenges exist in collaboration? How can technology better serve employees.

— When we talk and meet people face to face, we get most of the information about what they are thinking from body language and facial expressions. In a virtual environment, we get much less information, and we need more times to confirm the other's attitude. Because there is less interaction, remote participants feel lonely and alienated, and they will be easier distracted than offline. We believe that increasing the viscosity of the meeting will help solve the above problems.

— As we know, visual communication is more interactive than pure verbal communication, so we mainly promoted the whiteboard as our core function. Besides, the operations on the whiteboard will cooperate with the subsequent two features. It will provide one of the judgment basis for the participation map, and it will also be automatically recorded in the third feature of the post-meeting summary.

— Through a variety of ways of learning and understanding, ToU can understand the state of the participants. It will provede an anonymous display and give a gentle notification when a pattern shows up. Most importantly, it will let the participants to make the final say. It will stop at this extent. The reason is, we only aim to empower offline participants having the awareness of the care of other side and don't want to interfere the conversation too much.

— We will miss part of the content in the meeting, and it is difficult to find it in the complete video. We cut it off to make it easier to find. And we can see the feedback from the audience during the speaking period. Based on this, we can reasonably optimize the way we speak.

— The insight we found in our research is that 87% of target users think that if we don’t require the camera to be turned on, they don’t mind this userflow and think it will be helpful. This may be counter-intuitive, and we are also surprised. In the end, we think this may be ethical, but it still needs more discussion on morals.

Junyi Cao

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Royal College of Art