Diego Pulido

The idea behind Corkaborator is very simple: A cork board is a place in the office or at home where any type of paper documents can be placed and secured with a thumb tack. It’s visible to everyone, for it’s usually hanging on a wall and with a simple glance, anyone can see what is up for seeing. Whether it’s fliers, reminders or proper documents, a cork board is a great tool for handling certain types of documents.

The idea to use the metaphor of the cork board came as a result of a growing problem at my previous work place, the Roudebush VA Medical Center in Indianapolis. I worked in the research area of the hospital, alongside nurses and other investigators usually involved in projects and different kinds of studies. These projects are usually managed by someone who is constantly reviewing all the documents regarding different studies. That person is called a “project manager” and at times, there would be many “investigators” a Project Manager would have to work with.

According to the project manager and the IT specialists of the research division of the VA hospital, there would be times where three, four and even five different copies of the same file would appear in any given study folder.

It was an ideal chance to design something that would allow workers sharing these document files to collaborate without having to sort out many copies of the same dated file time after time.

Something needed to be created that would constrain users to use only one document, pass it along and never allow copies of it to float around for all the other researchers and project managers to get confused.

The purpose was to transfer the cork board into the computer screen: Having a virtual “cork board” where the project manager would place a document that would be in a central place where any user could go grab a document, work on it, edit it and put it back in the cork board for another investigator to either take a look or edit it some more.

The concept behind Corkaborator is to allow great flexibility to an administrator, at the same time it makes it considerably easy to collaborate for a “regular user” with one another, but virtually impossible to do anything else with the document

With Corkaborator, the idea was to eliminate the possibility of a non-administrator user (e.g. investigator) for him/her to manipulate a document file in any other way that wasn’t editing and saving the same document.

Issues of two users trying to update the same document at the same time, as well as some of the main focus areas in the User Experience Design of the system would need further consideration, re-valuation and iterative design to make of Corkaborator a powerful document collaborating tool for the office and research environment.

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