Supporting relationships with awareness systems

SUPPORTING RELATIONSHIPS WITH AWARENESS SYSTEMS
O. Romijn, A. Philopoulos, C.A.G.J. Huijnen and P. Markopoulos
Technical University Eindhoven
Den Dolech 2, PO Box 513, 5600 MB Eindhoven, The Netherlands
{O.Romijn, A.Philopoulos, C.Huijnen, P.Markopoulos} @tue.nl

ABSTRACT
The paper describes the design of a novel end-to-end
communication system for helping elderly people and
their grandchildren keep in touch in a pleasurable,
low-pace interaction. The paper focuses on the
requirements gathering process that combined diaries
with field testing of prototypes and interviews; thereby
bringing elements of more ‘playful’ design to a wellstructured requirements engineering process.
Keywords
Awareness systems, affective media, diary study.

1. INTRODUCTION
“Can you imagine the look on his face when he opens
the door!” Anybody who has ever witnessed a
surprise party will recall this collective anxiety when
awaiting the moment suprême.
This situation
combines three concepts that are essential to
understanding a communication system that may be
capable of supporting ongoing relationships.
•

Immediacy - the people at the party are eager to
see an immediate reaction to their action.

•

The salience of facial expressions.

•

Co-Presence - both the crowd and the target of
the surprise party have to be there at the same
time for the plan to work.

This paper describes the design case of an
awareness system that explores these concepts in
supporting the communication between grandparents
and grandchildren. By an awareness system we
mean a computer mediated communication system
that enables communicators to maintain a peripheral
awareness of each other’s activities effortlessly for
prolonged periods of time. Our target users are
primary candidates to benefit from this type of
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Proceedings Volume 2 of the
16th British HCI Conference
London, September 2002
© 2002 British HCI Group

technology, as they might live far away from one
another or simply find it difficult to see one another in
person as often as they would like.
The remainder of this paper is structured as follows:
Section 2 discusses related work concerning the
communication needs of elderly people and
awareness systems. Section 3 discusses the essence
of the design concept and its rationale. Section 4
describes the requirements gathering activities, their
results and the more general lessons learnt. Section 5
outlines the implementation and early user testing.
Finally, section 6 presents some open questions and
future work.

2. RELATED WORK
Older adults are very selective with their social
relationships and invest energy in socializing and telecommunicating very parsimoniously, tending to
restrict communications and socializing to close
family [11]. Our design challenge has been to design
an awareness system that would be acceptable to the
elderly people and their grandchildren alike, and that
would match their respective needs and daily
routines. Our approach adopts the thesis by Hollan
and Stornetta [7] who advocate capitalising on the
strengths of Information and Communication
Technology (ICT) to augment and complement faceto-face interactions, instead of emulating them via
second-best substitutes such as video-conferencing.
Reticence to adopt and learn new technologies is not
an issue with children. At least in western societies,
children are immersed in technology, perceiving and
assimilating new technologies as an integral part of
the world in which they grow up. Designing for
children requires their timely and active inclusion in
the design process. Sections 4 and 5 present the
steps taken to involve both target user groups.
The application of awareness systems to support
interpersonal relationships has been the subject of
several projects. One recent and notable example is
the Family Portrait developed at Georgia Tech [12].
Compared to that work we opt for a display of
concrete rather than abstract information (i.e. we
display photographs and video-clips) and we study a
symmetric
set-up
rather
than
a
one-way
communication, which can easily be perceived as a
surveillance system [4]. A few design concepts
related to ours have been produced by the Aroma

through an avatar-based display does not convey
adequately one’s true emotions. Even the use of
language may sometimes give less information than
seeing someone’s face. Finally, synchronous
communication can be perceived as obtrusive and not
ideal for linking people at all times of the day [1].
We set out to discover what grandparents and
grandchildren want to share with each other and
incorporate these findings in an awareness system
that combines the 3 key factors successfully. After an
extensive literature review and some first interviews
(described in section 4) the general concept for the
awareness system was shaped up as follows:
Figure 1. A diary page
project [14]. These were non-functional industrialdesign prototypes, with minimal interactivity, and
which emphasized the form of the devices. The
present study focuses on interactivity and the
emerging user experience in the intended context of
use. Heeter [6], showed how the prolonged live video
connections between elderly people supports
awareness and can provide personal benefits.
However, such connections can also threaten privacy
or be deemed meaningless (e.g., watching a room
where nothing happens) and, crucially, constrain both
parties to synchronise parts of their daily routines.

3. DESIGN CONCEPT AND RATIONALE
Emotions play an important role in ongoing
relationships. Therefore, systems that support
ongoing relationships should be able to convey
emotions in an adequate way. We identified the
following factors as crucial:
•

Support a high level of immediacy.

•

Use an expressive medium to convey emotions.

•

Non-synchronicity.

Why is this the case? First, the more time between an
event and subsequent reactions, the more time a
person can cognitively mediate his reaction to the
outside world. Thus, immediacy may result in a more
genuine reflection of that person’s emotional state.
Second, a conveying medium that only allows for a
limited number of emotions and gradations, e.g.,

The system should support grandparents and their
grandchildren to capture and send each other
pictures, messages and video-clips easily throughout
the day. While viewing a received item, the facial
expressions of the viewer will be captured
automatically. These reactions will be sent back to the
sender of the original item.
This concept addresses the requirement for nonsynchronicity. We opted to capture and display facial
expressions since they provide a rapid, emotionspecific and largely innate system for the reliable
interpersonal communication of emotional state [5].
Social context is not a prerequisite for spontaneous
facial expressions: even when people are alone
affective media such as pictures can elicit facial
reactions [9]. There appears to be a strong link
between facial expressions and emotions [8], so
people seem to be well equipped to encode emotions
through facial expressions. In addition, there are
neural mechanisms that enable them to decode these
expressions rapidly and reliably [13]. By sending
across facial expressions a system may portray the
emotional state of the users quite accurately; by
capturing facial expressions while viewing the
pictures, immediacy is maximised. A concomitant
advantage is that no user input or cognitive mediation
is required to convey emotions. This conveying
medium is very expressive due to the wide range of
facial expressions [3]. Related work is the KAN-G
prototype [10] for sharing photographs on the web
and conveying friends’ reactions to the pictures
through “canned” auditory reactions resembling
emoticons, an approach lacking in immediacy and
expressiveness.

4. REQUIREMENTS ANALYSIS
The requirements gathering technique can be thought
of as a mix of ethnography and experience
prototyping [2]. It involved field-testing of mock-ups at
the homes of our informants during repeated visits,
simulating daily use. Early exposure to prototypes or
mock-ups during the requirements gathering phase
helps move beyond the commonplace and unspecific
understanding of user needs and gives insight into its
potential fit to our users’ daily life. We believe that
this approach has an exciting potential for designing
technologies that must be appreciated and enjoyed
as part of people’s daily lives. Our aim during this
process has been to understand what is important to
the target users regarding each other, what they need
to or would like to know and what they are prepared
to do to keep in touch with each other. In addition, we
had to understand the current and the desired
interactions for both user groups.
An initial survey involved a visit and a few interviews
at a special home where elderly people live
independently with some support for their practical
needs. Interviews with them and their grandchildren
established that, in general, they both would like to
communicate more with each other about their daily
lives. The initial design concept was then formulated.
To test whether users liked our concept, we
performed a diary study incorporating interviews and
prototyping. The prototype was emulated and tested
in the intended context of use and care was taken to
ensure as much realism as possible for the testing
situation.
3 Older adults with ages 81, 76 and 57 participated in
the study. The main criterion for their recruitment is
whether we could also involve their grandchildren in
the study. The children were 14, 12, 9 and 7. The
main criterion for their selection was that they had to
be old enough to express their wishes and to take
pictures or write brief messages.
4 Visits to each participant were conducted. In the
first visit a structured interview was conducted and
the subjects were given a diary, where they were
asked to record instances when they wanted to send
something to or share something with their
counterpart. They were also given a camera to take
pictures throughout the day that they would like to
post to their counterpart.
The elderly participants and their grandchildren
received different types of diaries. Since diaries as
artefacts can set the tone of the interaction between
informants and researchers, a lot of care was put into
designing appropriate diaries for the grandparents
and their grandchildren. For example, diaries were
crafted to be playful, pretty and happy to avoid the
image of austere and dry data collection instruments.

Figure 2. The “pin-board” interface, showing pictures
and captured reactions to the pictures
The diaries included instructions and the first page
was filled in. We did not structure diary-pages as
forms, so as to give freedom to informants to record
instances where they would have an impulse to
capture something for their counterpart and send it.
We provided several prompts at the margins to cue
the participant as to what kinds of information we
were looking for without forcing them to address each
and every one of them. Figure 1 shows a completed
page.
Participants made pictures during the day. These
pictures were sent across when the designers visited
the subjects.
As designers were present
simultaneously at both ends of the communication,
they would use e-mail to mail the pictures, paste them
on a collage and show them to the participant. In the
2nd visit, a picture was taken of the participant
recording their facial expression when they first
glanced at the pictures they received. This picture
was then sent to the other party in order to assess
whether seeing the facial expression is valued. In the
3rd and 4th visits the same was done, but this time
informants were aware of being photographed.
Results can be summarized as follows:
•

Participants (both groups) enjoyed sending and
receiving pictures and text messages and wanted
to share some daily activities with each other.

•

Participants appreciated seeing the reaction of
the other; facial expressions were perceived as
helpful to strengthen the emotional relationship.

•

Participants stressed that the device should blend
in the background and should be decorative, as
the preferred context of use is the living room.

•

Interaction should be simple and efficient.

5. IMPLEMENTATION AND TESTING

7. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A working prototype was built following a client-server
architecture. On the client side, a small application
was written in Visual Basic in order to access the
digital camera and store the captured pictures into the
file system in a transparent way.
The main
application was developed using Macromedia
Director 8.5 Shockwave Studio. The Server Side
involved the Macromedia Multi-user Server (MUS)
and a normal FTP server. The MUS distributes
messages across the two clients and synchronizes
them, while the FTP server transfers the different
media types.

We thank Olha Bondarenko and Rita Krysiak for their
graphical designs and our informants for sharing
some of their private time with us.

The first prototype was evaluated with 2 children and
their grandmother at their homes. The interface was
shown and the main tasks were simulated.
Afterwards they were prompted by the designers to
indicate whether the main requirements were met.
Preliminary results indicate that the interface is fairly
easy to use for both user groups. The use of the “pin
board” metaphor (see figure 2) for the shared display
was clear to them. After seeing the screens for a
couple of times, it was clear how to operate the
system. However, for the 7-year old participant, the
amount of text on some of the buttons was somewhat
excessive: by the time she read the text of one
button, she had already forgotten the previous one.
The amount and nature of text on the buttons has
been modified in the redesign. For the 9-year old
subject the text on buttons was not an issue. He did
mention that one screen was a bit confusing since the
general organization of the buttons was not entirely
clear.

6. CONCLUSION
The combination of the three key factors led to
promising results. However, some questions remain:
•

How should facial expressions be conveyed: as a
single image, a few frames or a video sequence?

•

Would users like to control the capturing and
sending of facial expressions? Our informants
suggested that they did not mind their expression
being captured. Will that be so in actual use?

•

Would users like to annotate the items they
send?

Future work shall try to answer these questions,
improve the quality of the prototypes and experiment
with automatic capture mechanisms. Further, we
recognise the urgency of user testing in the field, to
test if our results hold in actual usage of the system.

8. REFERENCES
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equipment to individual lifestyle, Ergonomics
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Kellog
W.A.,
Social
Translucence: An approach to designing systems
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[5] Halgren E. and Marinkovic K., Neurophysiological
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[13]Rolls

E.T., A theory of emotion and
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