Awareness Systems

Awareness systems can be broadly defined as those systems that help people construct and maintain awareness of each others' activities, context or status, even if the participants are not co-located. Originally intended for supporting people involved in the same activities at different locations, such systems are now used to support social interactions between any connected individuals and to support social relationships over sustained periods of time.

Providing an overview of the current state-of-the-art this book provides a theoretical foundation for the design and development of Awareness Systems. It offers a reflection on the field, tracking research progress from past visions to current trends and future challenges, while presenting a representative collection of design concepts in the area and helping to systematize evaluation practices. It will be welcomed by all those working in the area of Awareness Systems.

Résumé

People go about their daily tasks with an in-built awareness of their social and physical environments. This awareness helps them to work cooperatively in groups, coordinate actions, and to maintain and enhance social communication with others. Networked technology has extended the reach of people's awareness to remote and distributed groups and provided access to a much larger social network than was previously feasible.

Awareness systems that are designed to support people to build up, maintain and make use of these extended networks are attracting the interest of industry, and include buddy lists in instant messaging, sustained audio-video links, active contact lists on mobile phones and so forth.

This book contains contributions from leading researchers in the field and looks at the design of awareness systems from theoretical foundations through to empirical studies and design concepts and will be of interest to practitioners and researchers in the field of HCI.

Contenu

AWARENESS IN CONTEXT.- An Historical Reflection of Awareness in Collaboration.- A Design Framework for Awareness Systems.- Awareness in the Home: The Nuances of Relationships, Domestic Coordination and Communication.- THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES.- Making Sense of What Is Going on 'Around': Designing Environmental Awareness Information Displays.- Social Inference Through Technology.- Abstractions of Awareness: Aware of What?.- Phatic Interactions: Being Aware and Feeling Connected.- Privacy Considerations in Awareness Systems: Designing with Privacy in Mind.- Grounding Privacy with Awareness: A Social Approach to Describe Privacy Related Issues in Awareness Systems.- Awareness Information with Speech and Sound.- APPLICATIONS.- Awareware: Narrowcasting Attributes for Selective Attention, Privacy, and Multipresence.- Emotinet: A Framework for the Development of Social Awareness Systems.- Conversational Awareness in Text-Based Computer Mediated Communication.- Fostering Social Engagement and Self-Efficacy in Later Life: Studies with Ubiquitous Computing.- Awareness of Daily Life Activities.- Design and Evaluation of Intentionally Enriched Awareness.- Situatedness of Awareness Information: Impact on the Design and Usage of Awareness Systems.- EVALUATING AWARENESS SYSTEMS.- Supporting Family Awareness with the Whereabouts Clock.- Evaluating Peripheral Displays.- Measuring Affective Benefits and Costs of Mediated Awareness: Development and Validation of the ABC-Questionnaire.