This thesis consists of six chapters. Chapter one, introduction, states the research background, motivations, objectives, and limitations. Chapter two, literature reviews, compares results from the researches in several different fields, such as human connectedness, including social relationship, emotional and intimate interface, the methodologies of user experience research, and participatory design. Chapter three, methodology, presents the research plan and the methods for research activities. In chapter four, the data of the user’s experience research are analyzed and interpreted, and the findings collected are also included to assist in designing. Chapter five, participatory design, shows the process and the outcomes of the participatory design, and the design concepts of future communication devices are brought in through the field trials and reviewing processes. Chapter six concludes the summary of this thesis and some suggestions are provided for further studies on promotion design of embodied communication media.
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2. LITERARY REVIEWS
Interactions and relationships with others, which are essential needs for human beings, make people content and feel relieved or inspired. The development of technology has brought people convenience in communicating, such as mobile telecommunication and the Internet. That signifies a feeling of equidistance of everyone to everyone else and truly supports connections between one and his/her friends or family members at a remote place.
However, these emerging media also influence the ways of social interactions, and bring some obsessions about recognition, but might have some effects of isolation on people.
Lots of research groups are studying for the issue of people’s association and the way they’ve mediated through new technology. The way to conceive a new genre of technology and experiences, or a sense of intimacy and closeness to enhance the relationships in new way has been extensively discussed. In this chapter, the communicating phenomenon in today’s society and several different aspects of human connectedness are reviewed and compared. In addition, the methodologies related to this research would also be introduced.
2.1 Technology and Social Relationship
In an age of communicational opulence, people are aspiring to a way of life in which the distance existing between them and is becoming irrelevant to their realm of consciousness. A sense of presence built by technology signifies a feeling of equidistance of every from everyone else, and from one to any world event (Moles 1988). In other words, this artificial presence with friends or family members becomes unrelated to people’s embodied sensation.
It neutralizes the people’s inherent recognition of distance. The interpersonal connections could be supported by the technology media. In addition to that, people might have at their disposal more sources of communication and interaction than they were ever able to use in the relatively short lifetime. Moles had also emphasized the fragility of this complex world continuously changed by technology between the abstract and the concrete. Technology
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application must be required to conform to the programmed sensualization of the environment and reliability.
The abundant accessible sources also overflow people’s lives surroundings, including their work place or home environment. In a modern region like Taiwan, many people start getting used to rely on those new media, such as the Internet, wireless or mobile technology, which supply a convenient communicating platform for the social contact. However, these emerging media not only change people’s social manners, but also make them easily grouped or isolated by their customs and the different choices of the media. In such working environment, an unexpected phenomenon comes out with the advent of these novel devices. It seems that people could be estranged from their colleagues by the different usages of communication media even if they work in a crowded workplace.
With a variety of technical development since 1980s, office automation has also influenced different phases of the coworkers’ activities (Diani, 1986). Even if office automation is a great liberating agent to give many technical and economic advantages, it is also as a device to reduce human freedom. What it has affected covers the changes in tasks, job profiles, relations among colleagues, organizational structure, and role of management. With information technology, most operations, procedures, and act at work become abstract and solitude, and the division of labour becomes extremely explicit. Especially in the case of today’s high-tech companies in Taiwan, the project cooperation sometimes means to hold a team discussion once a week, but for the most part the engineers could finish their work alone without any interactions with their colleagues (Tang, 2001).
Some great influences come with technology are the cognitive pressure and accelerating tempos. Given the formalization and abstraction of the work processes inside programs, most engineers are now more isolated and independent. The airy interactions of coworkers are not too much, and connections between the colleagues are quite slight (Tang, 2001). Some kind of silent revolutions are now producing profound changes of social interactions of coworkers in an office as it affects the self-identification of individuals and groups. In addition, since the workers with huge stress in a long period of time, they might mix up work and leisure time.
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The mental loads of coworkers might have direct influences upon the atmosphere of the workplace and lead to an interpersonal isolation.
2.2 Connectedness
A variety of different factors apart from family and friends, might have forced people to attain a balance in the kinds of relationships that people need to have with others. It is believed as a fundamental need of humans to contact with others, and these interactions with others are expected not only to make humans consoled and satisfied, but enrich humans’ lives.
Recently, a lot research groups are devoted to exploring the inherent needs of people in communication and trying to enlarge the technology possibilities to mediate people at a remote place by intimate interface or background awareness (Agamanolis et al. 2002; Vetere et al. 2005). The issues of human connectedness have been reviewed and compared.
2.2.1 Issues
The social interactions and relationships with others are such the fundamental needs of people. They make humans consoled and satisfied, and enrich everyone’s life. However, for the impact of customs and trends at a societal level, such as the widespread use of technologies that has caused isolating effects, the Human Connectedness research group have indicated that these new problems in social relations might jeopardize a human’s mental and physical well-being, and the health of the communities and civilizations (Agamanolis et al.
2002).
Human Connectedness research group, a European research partner of MIT Media Lab, have been devoted to exploring the issue of human relationship and the aspects of mediation supported by technology. In a succession of their researches, they tried to conceive the possibility of new forms for social interaction to maintain and enhance the relationships. To this end, the group had an insight into the perception and activities in communicating, such as
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background awareness of presence and togetherness, or a sense of intimacy and closeness. In addition, they also sought a way to support collaboration between different groups of people and new forms of cultural exchanges. Based on the understanding of sociological and psychological factors in their studies, the technological frameworks were designed to reflect the needs and sensibilities of people with the expectation of the future, such as the infinite bandwidth and processing-rich computing environments.
There are several significant themes discussed in their researches, like background awareness, social networking, cultural exchange, shared experience, slow communication, wearable computing, and intimate interface. Among the themes, background awareness and intimate interface seem to be all on purpose to enrich people’s communicating interactions, and then to promote their social relationships. These approaches exactly conform to the main intention of this research, so both two themes would be introduced separately and more particularly in the following sections.
One of the special cases in their researches, such as Iso-phone (Auger et al, 2003), is a telecommunication device that builds a slow telecommunication space of heightened purity and focus by blocking out peripheral sensory stimulation and distraction. A substantial emphasis conferred here is the widespread usage of mobile phone. That has led to telecommunicating in the vain pursuit of an efficient rather than a qualitative manner. It abstracts conversation from specific social context, and lack of discretion and sensitivity of the user to decide if the circumstances are suitable for communicating. To redress the awkwardness and imbalance, the device of Iso-phone has a purpose to allow the users to concentrate solely on the conversation for quality and depth of a singular, submersion, telephonic experience, and to alter the contemporary preoccupation with efficiency and multifunction (Figure 1).
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Figure 1. Iso-phone: a telecommunication device providing a conversation of the phone and the floating tank. http://web.media.mit.edu/~stefan/hc/projects/isophone/
Another particular issue in communicating is shared experience. It might evoke the collective experiences and memories of people and change itself as people’s social identification with others. In the case of tunA (Bassoli, 2002), a common handhold music player becomes a mobile radio station by wireless protocol. It provides users with the opportunity to share the music currently listening while moving around, and promotes a sense of background awareness of the surrounding physical environment. Listening to music turns from an individual and isolating experience into a fun and socializing experience. Relative to this aspect, HP Laboratory research team believed and tried to demonstrate that an indirect experience evoked by a product is very important to many users (Hull, 2002). In a case study of a museum, they found that the engaging experience constituted by challenge, social interactions, or sensation with a drama, makes people’s lives more relaxing and pleased. In addition, they believed that users would be able to create their own contexts for experiences using some new technology. It may influence how the emerging technology be rapidly adopted and shaped towards its eventual meaning and value.
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2.2.2 Context Awareness
Dourish and Bellotti described awareness as “an understanding of the activities of others, which provides as context for your activity (Dourish et al., 1992).” Rettie then elucidated that
“awareness is almost a simile for consciousness --- its meaning is derived from the object of the awareness...” Awareness here is used in the sense of experiencing what is believed to be external perception, synchronous or asynchronous (Rettie, 2003). Besides, background awareness is a delicate form of connection between close partners, such as a connotative sense of presence or a subtle perception of each other’s moods and emotional deeds. Awareness of daily cycle, routines, or presence is especially important in relationships among family members, close friends, and coworkers. This awareness supports people to convey reassurance and a sense of context for communication, and also forms a bond built between people by background synchronization of their rhythms (Patel at el., 2003).
Rettie also sketched logical relationships between the concepts of awareness, social presence, and connectedness (Figure 2). He found that the experience of connectedness could occur in many situations. The subtle perceptions of other’s body movement, voice, and presence, often evoke people’s experience of connectedness with others. In addition, an old post card or stored text message in a mobile phone might be accompanied by a feeling of connectedness without direct awareness of another person, although the meaning embodied in the experience is derived from that person. Hence, not only the awareness of a person, but the awareness of objects could create the experience of connectedness.
Figure 2. The relationship between social presence, awareness, and connectedness (Rettie, 2003)
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Gaver described technologies of peripheral awareness could give information for particular work activities or relationships to provide a feeling of presence of remote lovers or intimate friends. He tried to explore new sensory and interaction possibilities to extend notions of peripheral awareness to new domains, and addressed a wider range of emotional relationship (Gaver, 2002). In translation of Vetere et al’s article, Gaver identifies three typical characteristics of awareness technologies in the designs:
Making use of evocative materials,
Making mapping of literary usage rather than didactic metaphors, and Having a unique physicality as a more poetic real feature (Vetere, 2005).
The Portholes project of Xerox EuroPARC has already demonstrated that awareness can be supported across distance (Dourish, 1992). The distributed work group could be supported by media space through access to information with general awareness. In their project, the prototype could display the several different scenes of work groups at different locations together in a window at approximately the same time, and provide a view of one another in a daily work environment. It has also been found that awareness may be a useful basis for community access and for community building. In sum, the awareness can contribute a shared sense of community, and lead to informal interactions, spontaneous connections, and the development of shared cultures (Markopoulos, 2004).
In figure 3, Habitat is another design for background awareness of daily routines and rhythms between distant family members or lovers. The system consists of two networked tables at relative sites of these family members’ kitchens, and each table integrates a computer, a RFID tag reader, and a video projector. All of the objects that might be placed on the table, such as cups and books, have their own unique RFID Tags. When some object is placed on one table, the other table would display a graphical representation of that object. When the items are removed, their representations on the other tables would fade away slowly. Since awareness plays an essential role in human relationships, the installation is on purpose to explore the potential of using household furniture as a network of distributed ambient display applications, which also conveys this kind of awareness between close family members or
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lovers at a remote space (Patel at el., 2003).
Figure 3. Habitat: a range of connected furniture for awareness of daily routines and rhythms between distant family members. http://web.media.mit.edu/~stefan/hc/projects/habitat/
2.2.3 Intimate and Emotional Interface
Since communication and computing technology is progressive at accelerated pace, humans hardly to get with it. Hence, people desire an appearance good to use and an intimate connection in relationship between humans and objects. By extension of “control intimacy”
from electronic musical instruments analysis (Moore, 1988), Fels suggests that the ‘intimacy’
is “a measure of subjective match between the behavior of an object and the control of that object.” Here, the object could be a person, a device, or some entity. Moreover, High Intimacy indicates that an object seems to be an extension of the person, satisfaction is derived from interacting with the object, and emotional expression spontaneously flows (Fels et al., 2004).
Human Communication Technology Research Laboratory (HCT lab) is absorbed in new human computer interaction technology and theories of embodiment and intimacy between humans and computers. The research group are trying to combine emerging technology, multimodal (Oviatt, 2002), and multimedia systems, with the enlargements of psychology, sociology and art, to enhance the communication abilities between people, or between people and machines. In the opinion of HCT lab, intimacy is an essential factor for the interface design. In addition, the research group also indicated that the contributing factors of intimacy
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could be consistency, responsiveness, usefulness, learning ability, functionality, and so on (Fels et al., 2004).
Horton and Wohl (1956) have described the bond of intimacy in the personality programs.
They’ve found that an illusion of intimacy could be created through the duplication of the gestures, conversational style, and milieu of an informal face-to-face gathering. In some of TV shows or radio programs, hosts/hostesses usually give impressions that they are responding to and sustaining the contributions to the invisible interlocutors, and an interaction, a dialogue would be created between them and the audience. Horton has called this as “an illusion of intimacy,” since the relationship is actually inevitably one-side and the reciprocity between the two might be suggested. In this case, the technical devices of the media themselves have been exploited to create illusions of intimacy between the hosts/hostesses and the audience.
Intimacy has been mediated through symbols of attention such as flowers, missives and love letters for ages. Today, emerging technologies, like mobile phone and the Internet, is regularly manipulated to help people maintain the intimate relationships with family members or friends living far away. Kaye and Goulding (2004) used the notion of critical technical practice to provide a theoretical construct to understand if there is a problem for couples who try to maintain a feeling of intimacy but live far away from each other. The work of Kaye and Goulding fits the three typical characteristics of Gaver about awareness technologies. They used soft silicone as evocative materials for hand holding, exploited non-didactic metaphors and had unique physicality of an egg’s shape and texture.
Vetere et al. (2005) put their attention on phenomena that are recognizably intimate, as expressions of tenderness, acts of devotion and habit of demonstrable affection. They argued the inadequacy of current technologies which support the social and personal needs in connection. They used cultural probes and technology provocation to comprehend the contextual of people’s intimate lives, and gave several innovation design concepts for communication of emotion to maintain intimacy at a distance.
Similarly Ogawa et al. (2005) also focused on the scenario where two intimate persons live
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in distant places, and developed Small Connection communication media to convey faint information such as light, wind and touch through the use of a robot technology (Figure 4).
Figure 4. Left: “Air” communicates a feeling of presence to a distant partner through the light. A pair of lamps would be kept by the close friends or family members at different places. Since one of the lamps is turned on by touch, the other one would light up, too.
Right: “Passage” is a close proximity media space to create a connection between people in different cities or cultures. http://web.media.mit.edu/~stefan/hc/projects/passages/
Their viewpoint is how to propose media for communication between two persons and let them have a feeling of each other’s presence through a simple communication installation with tangible signs and intimate interfaces. Including the concepts of ambient media, tangible interfaces, intimate technology and robot technology, their work broke down the common communication media forms of vision and hearing and extended the possibility of communication media to convey casual feelings, moods, presence, and atmosphere.
Another special case of intimate design project is Passage of Human Connectedness group (Bitton et al., 2006). It is a very particular design for media space, integrating multiple types of sensual media to connect distant places and groups of people. The significance of this installation is its intention which not only provides an intimate entry of different cities, communities, and cultures, but creates unusual relationships with strangers in different locations. Not like a departed media space design, this research team developed an engaging visual system to allow passers-by to approach extremely close to the interactive screen surface.
Since a passer-by walks through the installation, the silhouette of his/ her body would be reflected on the screen. When this local participant moves in front of this media installation, the viewer could see more of the scene of the remote counterparts. Meanwhile, a silhouette of
Since a passer-by walks through the installation, the silhouette of his/ her body would be reflected on the screen. When this local participant moves in front of this media installation, the viewer could see more of the scene of the remote counterparts. Meanwhile, a silhouette of