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

“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.

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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