415 research outputs found
Demanding by Design: Supporting Effortful Communication Practices in Close Personal Relationships
The investment of effort into personal communication can be highly meaningful to people, and has particular significance for the mediation of close relationships. This paper presents qualities of effort investment that are seen to be valuable. Furthermore, we consider how these qualities might sensitise designers of communication technologies to the meaningfulness of effort. We report a qualitative study focusing on individual descriptions of meaningful effort invested into everyday correspondence. We encapsulate our findings in the form of five qualities that characterise valued effort: discretionary investment, personal craft, focused time, responsiveness to the recipient, and challenge to a sender’s capacities. Drawing on ideas generated in brainstorming sessions, we present two illustrative concepts for new communication technologies, highlighting how our findings can guide the creation of designed artefacts
Slow but Likeable? Inefficient Robots as Caring Team Members
This position paper discusses the notion of efficiency as a criterion for designing and evaluating the contributions that robots might make to human work teams. Participation in teams requires the coordination and prosecution of task-centric work activity but also requires the investment of caring social behavior as a distinctive kind of positive contribution to group interaction. Team spirit, emotional support, trust and reputation are all the outcome of such investments; they reinforce the capabilities of a team for particular joint activities, and contribute to its resilience over time. The requisite social behavior for these qualities of a team might be treated as a given in design considerations for human work teams. But the picture must change for human-robot teams: socially supportive behavior can only exist if it is explicitly designed in, and the consequent “task inefficiencies” are treated as a core part of the design equation. We draw on our own research on relational effort in social communication to offer some initial considerations about how task-inefficient action might be required for robots to engage in caring interactions with human collaborators
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“It’s More Like a Letter”: An Exploration of Mediated Conversational Effort in Message Builder
Communication technologies for maintaining close personal relationships are often designed to be lightweight and easy to use. While these properties allow for relationships to be maintained with speed and efficiency, they may come at the expense of more effortful messages that are constructed with thought, time and care. This raises the question of how communication technologies might be designed to provoke moments of effortful maintenance from their users. To explore this question, we designed and implemented Message Builder, a text-based communication system that encourages relational partners to send increasingly long messages. We report findings from a field trial in which 14 dyads used Message Builder for everyday relational maintenance. While some of the effort-provoking features of Message Builder were described as problematic, we found that the system had value in guiding users towards authentic and meaningful effort investments that were valuable within their individual relationships
Understanding interactive behaviour : a quantitative approach.
SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:DXN029243 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo
Characterising the inventive appropriation of emoji as relationally meaningful in mediated close personal relationships
The Impact of Social Presence on Feelings of Closeness in Personal Relationships
Any interactive communication system can support personal relationships by facilitating a welcome and timely presence of an absent person in the mind of the other. This paper presents a consideration of how short term feelings, as experienced during acts of communication, relate to a relationship’s longer term feelings towards one another. Through a 21-day study with 63 participants, we report ratings of Closeness and Social Presence as evidence that links the two concepts as temporally distinct aspects of emotional connectedness. Such a relationship is useful as by relating Social Presence to Closeness we can demonstrate that by creating technologies which help to create emotionally significant experiences during acts of communication we are supporting the relationship in a more meaningful, long-term fashion by supporting feelings of Closeness. This assists the HCI community by clarifying how Social Presence and Closeness can be used as phenomenological concepts to assess communication devices designed to support inter-personal relationships
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