Natalia A. Romero

Connecting the family with awareness systems

Awareness systems have attracted significant research interest for their potential to support interpersonal relationships. Investigations of awareness systems for the domestic environment have suggested that such systems can help individuals stay in touch with dear friends or family and provide affective benefits to their users. Our research provides empirical evidence to refine and substantiate such suggestions. We report our experience with designing and evaluating the ASTRA awareness system, for connecting households and mobile family members. We introduce the concept of connectedness and its measurement through the Affective Benefits and Costs of communication questionnaire (ABC-Q). We inform results that testify the benefits of sharing experiences at the moment they happen without interrupting potential receivers. Finally, we document the role that lightweight, picture-based communication can play in the range of communication media available.

Keeping in touch with the family: home and away with the ASTRA awareness system

This paper describes research in supporting close family members living apart to keep in touch with each other. We introduce an awareness system for supporting lightweight social communication between mobile individuals and people at home. Communication is based on pictures, short messages and reachability information. A field test has provided empirical evidence that affective benefits, to this point only hypothesized by researchers in awareness systems, are indeed experienced by users of our system.

Measuring Affective Benefits and Costs of Mediated Awareness: Development and Validation of the ABC-Questionnaire

The interactions and relationships we have with other people form an essential social network that supports us and adds meaning to our lives. This well-known fact is illustrated by the massive success of communication media such as e-mail, mobile telephony, and text messaging and the massive adoption of social networking applications such as Facebook and Twitter. This basic insight can be traced back to the days of Aristotle, or even earlier. Maslov’s theory of human needs, formulated in the 1950s, illustrates that social interaction is essential to satisfying human needs at several levels, in particular needs for belonging, love, and esteem, although even at the more basic levels of physiological and safety needs, communication and coordination is essential to mental and physical well-being, and ultimately survival (see, e.g., House et al. 1988). Reflecting this sentiment, Schutz (1966)describes three basic human needs in his interpersonal needs theory: inclusion, control, and affection. Inclusion refers to the need for the company and recognition of others, to ‘establish and maintain a feeling of mutual interest with other people’ (p. 18). It allows one to feel significant and worthwhile. Control refers to the need to feel a competent, responsible person and to establish a feeling of mutual respect for the competence and responsibleness of others. Affection is the need to form emotionally close relationships with other human beings, to establish and maintain a feeling of mutual affection, to love and be loved. Baumeister and Leary (1995) argue in their belongingness hypothesis that ‘human beings have a pervasive drive to form and maintain at least a minimum quantity of lasting, positive, and significant interpersonal relationships.’ They stress that this drive cannot be satisfied by frequent interactions with strangers but, rather,

A field study of community bar: (mis)-matches between theory and practice

Community Bar (CB) is groupware supporting informal awareness and casual interaction. CBs design was derived from three sources: prior empirical research findings concerning informal awareness and casual interaction, a comprehensive sociological theory called the Locales Framework, and the Focus/Nimbus model of awareness. We conducted a field study of a groups on-going CB use. We use its results to reflect upon the matches and mis-matches that occurred between the theoretical and actual usage behaviors anticipated by our design principles vs. those observed in our deployment. As a critique, this reflectionis an important iterative step in recognizing flaws not just as usability problems, but as an incorrect translation of theory into design that can be re-analyzed from a theoretical perspective.

Addressing interpersonal communication needs through ubiquitous connectivity: Home and away

This paper describes a user study regarding the human need to stay in touch with closely related people. The study was a combination of interviews and diaries. This user needs analysis has informed the design of a novel end-to-end communication system for helping closely related people, who are spread geographically, to stay in touch. The design concept is described in brief, followed by a summary of ongoing implementation and assessment work.

The unbearable lightness of being there: contrasting approaches to presence engineering

The emergence and proliferation of email, mobile communication devices, internet chatrooms, shared virtual environments, advanced tele-conferencing platforms and other telecommunication systems underline the importance of developing measurement methods that are sensitive to the human experience with these systems. In this paper, we discuss the concepts of social presence and connectedness as complementary notions, each relating to a different set of media properties that serve distinct communication needs. We aim to broaden the scope of current presence technologies and applications, illustrating the various factors that play a role in establishing, enhancing, and enriching the experience of human connectedness through communication media. Based on existing literature, we discuss a number of user requirements for home communication and awareness systems. To make these ideas tangible, we finish the paper by briefly discussing the ASTRA project as a case study in designing and evaluating an awareness system for the home.

Privacy and HCI: methodologies for studying privacy issues

This workshop aims to reflect on methodologies to empirically study privacy issues related to advanced technology. The goal is to address methodological concerns by drawing upon both theoretical perspectives as well as practical experiences.

Living Lab and Research on Sustainability: Practical Approaches on Sustainable Interaction Design

Living labs can be understood as the ability to bring user, technology and business into an open innovative development process that establishes real life environments. In this paper we describe our ongoing works on sustainable interaction design on energy saving and trading in which local residents are involved. The SusLabNWE (Sustainable Living Lab North-West Europe) project aims to resolve territorial challenges related to industrial competitiveness and sustainability in North West Europe. We present two projects in which local residents in the Netherlands were engaged in sustainable innovation in the context of the SusLabNWE project.

Grounding interpersonal privacy in mediated settings

Recent technologies supporting continuous connectivity enable sustained awareness within social networks, which eventually boosts interaction and therefore the need of individuals to manage their interpersonal privacy. This paper introduces the Privacy Grounding Model that describes how people develop and use mechanisms to establish a shared understanding of their intentions to interact with others. The main design implication of this model is the need for lightweight interactive mechanisms by which individuals can collaboratively ground needs for interaction. To illustrate how the model supports the design of grounding mechanisms, we present examples and discuss a case study that informs about their use during several weeks.

Common ground to analyse privacy coordination in awareness systems

This paper discusses how Clark’s theory of Common Ground can be applied to analyse how individuals connected by Awareness Systems conjointly meet and coordinate their privacy needs. Relevant aspects of Common Ground theory for the analysis of human communication behaviours are used in this study to understand privacy as a collaborative coordination process. The exposition illustrates how Awareness Systems are a mechanism for helping individuals to meet their privacy needs rather than as a privacy threat, as a first impression might suggest.