Look Who's Talking : mechanisms for sharing interpersonal context and social titles as awareness information

Abstract

Mobile awareness systems aim to convey personal context information between people in a way that is less intrusive, somewhat automatic, and often much more persistent than a phone call. Although there are many ways in which awareness information can be useful, the privacy of the individual can become more of an issue as more information is made available. Prototype awareness systems developed to date have therefore often been aimed at familiar cliques. In this thesis proposal, we introduce a mobile address book based awareness system called Look Who's Talking (LWT) that aims to transcend the user's various social settings and social groups. Among its novel features is the ability to grant 'episodic access' to the device owner's context information in circumstances where their day-today access settings do not suffice. This is achieved by way of an SMS-like message called a LookAtMe. LWT also introduces a new type of awareness information for communicating aspects of the user's social attention (called Social Titling). Additionally, the system has a user interface that is geared towards mobile use, including mechanisms for on-the-fly input and a glanceable summary of incoming awareness information.