Abstract
We report the results of a long-term, multi-site field trial of a situated awareness device for families called the “Whereabouts Clock”. The Clock displayed family members’ current location as one of four privacy-preserving, deliberately coarse-grained categories (HOME , WORK , SCHOOL or ELSEWHERE) In use, the Clock supported not only family co-ordination but also more emotive aspects of family life such as reassurance, connectedness, identity and social touch. This emphasized aspects of family life frequently neglected in Ubicomp, such as the ways in which families’ awareness of each others’ activities contributes to a sense of a family’s identity. We draw further on the results to differentiate between location as a technical aspect of awareness systems and what we characterize as “location-in-interaction”. Location-in-interaction is revealed as an emotional, accountable and even moral part of family life.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Anderson, I., Muller, H.: Qualitative positioning for pervasive environments. In: Third International Conference on Mobile Computing and Ubiquitous Networking (ICMU 2006), London, UK, pp. 10–18 (2006)
Brown, B., Chalmers, M., Bell, M., Macoll, I., Hall, M.: Sharing the square: Collaborative leisure on the city streets. In: Brown, B., Chalmers, M., Bell, M., Macoll, I., Hall, M. (eds.) Procs. of ECSCW 2005, Paris, France, pp. 427–429. Kluwer, Dordrecht (2005)
Button, G.: The curious case of the vanishing technology. In: Button, G. (ed.) Technology in Working Order, Routledge, London (1993)
Chen, M.Y., Sohn, T., Chmelev, D., Haehnel, D., Hightower, J., Hughes, J., LaMarca, A.: Practical metropolitan-scale positioning for GSM phones. In: Dourish, P., Friday, A. (eds.) UbiComp 2006. LNCS, vol. 4206, pp. 225–242. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Consolvo, S., Smith, I., Matthews, T., LaMarca, A., Tabert, J., Powledge, P.: Location disclosure to social relations: Why, when, and what people want to share. In: Procs. CHI 2005, pp. 81–90 (2005)
Gubrium, J.: The family as project. Sociological Review (36), 273–296 (1988)
Hamilton, A.(2007). A wireless street fight. TIME Magazine (February 15th 2007)
Harper, R., Lamming, M., Newman, W.: Locating systems at work: Implications for the development of Active Badge applications. Interacting With Computers 4(3), 343–363 (1992)
Hogben, S.: Life’s on hold. Time & Society 15(2-3), 327–342 (2006)
Iachello, G., Smith, I., Consolvo, S., Chen, M., Abowd, G.: Developing privacy guidelines for social location disclosure applications and services. In: SOUPS 2005: Proceedings of the 2005 Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security, ACM Press, New York (2005)
Martin, B.: Mother wouldn’t like it!’: Housework as magic. Theory, Culture & Society 2(2), 19–35 (1984)
Mynatt, E., Rowan, J., Jacobs, A., Craighill, S.: Digital family portraits: Supporting peace of mind for extended family members. In: Procs. of CHI 2001, ACM Press, New York (2001)
O’Hara, K., Perry, M., Churchill, E., Russell, D. (eds.): Public and Situated Displays: Social and Interactional Aspects of Shared Display Technologies. Springer, Heidelberg (2003)
Sacks, H.: Lectures on Conversation, vol. 1, 2. Basil Blackwell, Oxford (1995)
Schegloff, E.: Notes on a conversational practice: Formulating place. In: Sudnow, D. (ed.) Studies in Social Interaction, pp. 75–119. Free Press, New York (1972)
Sellen, A., Eardley, R., Izadi, S., Harper, R.: The Whereabouts Clock: Early testing of a situated awareness device. In: Procs. of CHI, Extended Abstracts, ACM Press, New York (2006)
Sellen, A., Harper, R., Eardley, R., Izadi, S., Regan, T., Taylor, A.S., Wood, K.R.: HomeNote: Supporting situated messaging in the home. In: Procs of CSCW 2006, pp. 383–392. ACM Press, New York (2006)
Smith, I.E., Consolvo, S., LaMarca, A., Hightower, J., Scott, J.: Social disclosure of place: From location technology to communication practices. In: Gellersen, H.-W., Want, R., Schmidt, A. (eds.) PERVASIVE 2005. LNCS, vol. 3468, pp. 134–151. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)
Taylor, A.S., Swan, L.: Artful systems in the home. In: Procs of CHI 2005, pp. 641–650. ACM Press, New York (2005)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2007 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Brown, B., Taylor, A.S., Izadi, S., Sellen, A., Kaye, J.J., Eardley, R. (2007). Locating Family Values: A Field Trial of the Whereabouts Clock. In: Krumm, J., Abowd, G.D., Seneviratne, A., Strang, T. (eds) UbiComp 2007: Ubiquitous Computing. UbiComp 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4717. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-74853-3_21
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-74853-3_21
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-74852-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-74853-3
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)