Value Lab: Collaboration in Space Jan Halatsch, Antje Kunze Information Architecture, ETH Zurich {halatsch@arch.ethz.ch, kunze@arch.ethz.ch} Abstract Visualization of huge data sets for activities in business worlds, entertainment industries and extended visualization in sciences are one of the most exciting chances in architecture. They can result in interweaving physical spaces - physical architectures - with electronic data spaces - virtual architectures. Places and localities with distances in geographical, intercultural and economic matters do not need to exist separated any longer. The networking concepts shout for the use of new architectural languages. Architectural interfaces in physical and digital spaces deliver associated communication, collaboration and learning - breaking up distances in time and geographic spaces. Inside this paper we will discuss how information architecture could be set up in existing buildings with the Value Lab as an example and which methods can be used to develop and to design physical architecture. We present the Value Lab as a recent prototype for Information Architecture. Keywords: Information Architecture, Information Visualization Tools, Interactive Visualization techniques, Large Scale Information Rooms 1. Introduction Starting with the process of virtualizing structures in global operating organizations along with the exponential growth of complex data sets, we like to provide an integrated approach to get over still existing dualities between physical and virtual architectures. We see important chances for the architects in our time in integrating digital information into physical architectures. Therefore, we would like to present a framework, how information visualization can be integrated within built architecture. How can architectonic buildings be combined with information structures? What kind of consequences or even changes will result to architectural topologies that have been already built? We like to give answers to the questions above with actual to be built example. Before that we like to give an overview onto today's existing or evolving Information Spaces. We already can access onto sorted data sets inside the Internet or intranets of organizations via forward-looking technologies. But the higher the amount of data sets rises the faster we will loose our overview. Today's Information Visualization techniques help to deal with this challenging problem. Nowadays many experts from the field of Information Visualization combine information visualization frameworks and tools together with large high-resolution displays. We need to interact with these tools in a user- friendly manner. We need to collaborate with others at the same place or far away, within lectures or within workshops. Because of these circumstances the ETH Zurich, the Swiss Institute for Technology, developed a new concept for collaboration in space: The Value Lab. 2. The Physical and the Digital Space Figure 1 Information Spaces can build bridges between time and space [4]. We found out in discussions with the international leaders in Information Visualization that there is a strong demand for visualization rooms, which can be dened as the crossing space between our data worlds and our built reality. In these places knowledge should be exchanged and also evolved together in teams e.g. within workshops. The generated resources or knowledge should be shared interactively and in real-time abroad to distant Locations through distinct interactive computer display technologies [Figure 1]. These places should be the architect's answer to the interests of our societies in order to break through knowledge barriers, no matter to which nature they do belong. They are not only special equipped rooms that are connecting digital data to physical spaces. They belong to a new class of buildings. Their architectural design establishes the connection between virtual and physical worlds of work as built Information Architecture. 11th International Conference Information Visualization (IV'07) 0-7695-2900-3/07 $20.00 © 2007