Using Digital but Physical Surrogates to Mediate Awareness, Communication and Privacy in Media Spaces

Abstract

Digital but physical surrogates are tangible representations of remote people, typically members of small intimate teams, positioned within an office and under digital control. Surrogates selectively collect and present awareness information about the people they represent. They also react to people's explicit and implicit physical actions: a person's explicit acts include grasping and moving them, while their implicit acts include how they move towards or away from the surrogate. By responding appropriately to these physical actions of people, surrogates can control the communication capabilities of a media space in a natural way. Surrogates also balance awareness and privacy by limiting and abstracting how activities are portrayed, and by offering different levels of salience to its users. The combination of all these attributes means that surrogates can make it easy for intimate collaborators to smoothly move from awareness of each other to casual interaction while mitigating privac..