Programme

SnowGlobe: an awareness system to support social connectedness

Format: Poster / Demo | Language: English | Tags: social, psychology
By: Thomas Visser, Martijn Vastenburg, David Keyson | TU Delft | @visserthomas

Description
Awareness systems provide people with a subtle sense of knowing what is happening within their social network. Most recent system aim to subtly change people’s experience of social connectedness by blending form and interaction in the user context. A case study was conducted to develop design insights for such awareness systems, and to evaluate current measurement techniques for social connectedness. We developed ‘SnowGlobe’, as part of this study. The SnowGlobe awareness system supports passive awareness of movement in the living room between two users by changing displayed light and snowflake intensity. As a more active way for generating awareness, shaking one SnowGlobe triggers the other SnowGlobe’s display to light up. The user interaction with SnowGlobe was evaluated, as well as the effect the system had on people’s experienced social connectedness. We found that people used the device actively as a complementary form of communication, for the full duration of the trial, which lasted several weeks. We were unable to capture the users’ sense of social connectedness using a set of subjective scales developed to measure connectedness in a lab setting. However, interviews and objective behavioural patterns indicated SnowGlobe did contribute to social connectedness. Moreover, the case study provided design insights for the design and deployment of such systems in a real user context.

About Thomas
Thomas Visser is a PhD candidate at the Delft University of Technology in the Faculty of Design Engineering. He has a background in the design of interactive products. Thomas’ research focusses on the design of social awareness systems to help people maintain their sense of social well being. In his work he uses design and design skills to explore the dynamics between interactive technology and the people using them, in their own natural environment.

About Martijn
Martijn Vastenburg is an assistant professor in designing smart products and environments. He has a MSc in Computer Science and a PhD in Industrial Design Engineering. His main interest is in design-oriented research in the areas of living-routine-aware products and ambient assisted living. At present, Martijn is the project leader of a 4-year research project Independent at Home, he supervises MSc projects, is involved in educational activities, and is working on new project proposals.

Research themes:

• situated product behavior (including activity-awareness and routine-awareness)
• design methodology related to designing context-aware products
• modeling user experiences
• products that improve in time
• motivational and persuasive interfaces

Application domains:

• ambient assisted living
• sustainable living (e.g., stimulating energy preservation)
• home automation and communication

About David
After graduating from Tel Aviv U. I worked for a year teaching high school computer science (BASIC and PASCAL in those days on an Apple IIE). I then headed off to Loughborough University of Technology in England to do my MSc in Ergonomics. While there I worked on developing a methodology for rapid prototyping of user interfaces for an expert system called KEES. Having enjoyed my studies in English (a lot easier than Hebrew) I headed back to Israel and worked a year for Tadiran Telecommunications as a human factors engineer on hardware designs and UIs for central telephone exchange systems. Ready for a change, my wife and I went back to California. I worked for four years at Xerox Corporation in California in the department of Industrial Design and Human Interface (IDHI). We worked on the follower of the famous Xerox Star called Viewpoint and later Salient (Unix based) and finally DocuPC (OS2). With an interest in research I conducted studies and developed design guidelines on the functional use of color in user interfaces and documentation together with staff at Xerox PARC. Later I worked on designing the client end for Docutech services and developed UI centerline strategies for next generation digital reprographic systems. In 1992 I moved with my wife and one child then to the Netherlands to do my Ph.D. as a Philips Research sponsored candidate at Eindhoven University of Technology. My dissertation was in Touch in User Interface Navigation. In 1996 I joined Philips Research in Eindhoven as a Research Scientist in the group User-System Interaction Technolgoy (USIT) and continued to apply my Ph.D. work in the area of multimodal interaction styles as a project leader. With the goal of moving to Amsterdam I accepted a position as a management consultant for Informaat. During the year there I setup user interface expertise groups in industry. Missing the research world, I joined the Technical University of Delft in January of 1999 as an Associate Professor. As a full professor in Smart Products and Environments, I currently coordinate the Social Contextual Interaction Design Group. This group is situated within the ID Studio Lab.