Moni­teurs has grown in re­cent years. More pro­jects, more teams means more meet­ings. With the re­struc­tur­ing of the of­fice spread over two floors, it be­came clear that the meet­ing rooms and their oc­cu­pancy must be bet­ter com­mu­ni­cated to every­one. A team from Moni­teurs de­vel­oped an ob­ject that en­ables bet­ter com­mu­ni­ca­tion be­tween the work­space on the up­per floor and the con­fer­ence room in the base­ment. It was to be com­bined anal­o­gously with dig­i­tal and im­ple­mented in 3D print­ing.

What does the ori­en­ta­tion sys­tem of the fu­ture look like? What does it mean when ori­en­ta­tion in­creas­ingly takes place dig­i­tally? And what ben­e­fits, what pos­si­bil­i­ties, does this pro­vide? These are the ques­tions Moni­teurs asked it­self early on, within the frame­work of a self-ini­ti­ated re­search pro­ject in 2007. “Points of In­ter­est” play­fully tests the link be­tween real and vir­tual spaces. Moni­teurs’ of­fice kitchen is pro­jected onto the screen as a vir­tual room. Users choose a di­rec­tion from a se­ries of cards, and are then tracked by a cam­era. They then re­ceive user-spe­cific in­for­ma­tion on the screen, rel­a­tive to their lo­ca­tion. If there are mul­ti­ple peo­ple in the space, then graph­ics and con­tent are over­lapped.

Un­der the su­per­vi­sion of Heike Nehl and Sibylle Schlaich, a group of stu­dents were chal­lenged to re­search the po­ten­tials of in­for­ma­tion de­sign. The brief was to crit­i­cally ex­am­ine this par­tic­u­lar topic for its spec­trum of pos­si­ble ap­pli­ca­tions, to ex­plore the every­day and mul­ti­ple uses. The stu­dents’ re­sults em­pha­sise the im­por­tance of sys­tem­atic in­for­ma­tion graph­ics for all ar­eas of our life and so­ci­ety. In this con­text, sci­en­tific data, in­struc­tion man­u­als, cal­en­dars, along with in­ter­ac­tive pro­grams and ex­per­i­men­tal films have been vi­su­alised.