Happy coincidences in designing for social connectedness and play through opportunistic image capture

ABSTRACT

We explore the opportunities and constraints for sharing personal and 'social group' communications through the use of multi-location interactive image displays and mobile image capture devices. Accordingly, we seek to provide a better understanding of the use of such technologies in supporting close tie relationships through the implementation of Collage, an interactive image display.

Collage has been designed for immediate and lightweight modes of sharing though synchronous and asynchronous interaction between users and digital images/text. We report on the results of a technology probe with three related families over a ten-week period. Through interviews and participant data we provide a rich account of their use with the system, emergent practices and usability issues that enabled and limited their experience of sharing digital family images. We also show evidence for user driven resolution of ambiguities in the system as an enabler of new experiences - What might be called "happy coincidences".

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INDEX TERMS

Keywords:
children, games, handheld devices and mobile computing, prototyping, tactile, user experience