Taming of the ring: context specific social mediation for communication devices

ABSTRACT

Taming of the Ring is an interactive system that lessens the problems of social disturbance caused by cell phone communication. As cell phone usage levels increase, social disturbance becomes an increasingly important issue. Callers and receivers have a need to discretely handle phone communication in delicate social situations. Early cell phone usage observations led to an interaction model hypothesis. A functional prototype was created to test the concept in the field. Preliminary results indicate that both calling and receiving users want more responsibility and control when placing phone calls, and that two remotely-mediated options, "hold" and "meeting," were enough to fill this communication need in the majority of situations.

REFERENCES

• 1: Basic Stamp, Parallax, Inc. Rocklin, CA. Available at http://www.parallaxinc.com
• 2: Bernsen, N. et al, Wizard of Oz prototyping: How and when? CCI Working Papers in Cognitive Science and HCI, WPCS-94-1. Centre for Cognitive Science, Roskilde University 1994.
• 3: Les Nelson , Sara Bly , Tomas Sokoler, Quiet calls: talking silently on mobile phones, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, p.174-181, March 2001, Seattle, Washington, United States [doi>10.1145/365024.365094]

INDEX TERMS

Keywords:
functional prototype, interaction design, mediated communication, telecommunication