What's Happening in the Office: Designing Information Displays for Human-Like Experience to Promote Workspace Awareness in Hybrid Work

With the rise of hybrid office work, employees often miss workspace awareness when working remotely at home, causing feelings of isolation and preventing communication. To address this, we propose designing information displays that present office activities to promote workspace awareness for hybrid workers. We focus on creating human-like experiences—enabling users to easily perceive information, feel social presence, and make sense of information in context. Informed by previous CSCW research findings, we identified three key design considerations: social cues as information carriers, processing ambiguity, and ambient delivery. Guided by these considerations, we generated multiple designs and selected three distinct ones for evaluation of such experiences in a lab study, where 24 participants experienced and compared the designs. Our analysis shows that these designs indeed provide situational awareness and social presence. The results also offer insights into optimizing design options for different goals. Further research is needed to explore their integration with interactive features and into daily workflows.