Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Informal communication – sharing jokes, expressing feelings and catching up what has happened during a day – is an important part of family life. The MAYPOLE project explored this kind of family communication and developed new product concepts and devices to facilitate such communications. The projects highlights were the developed concepts on the one hand, but equally innovative and worth reporting were the methods that were developed to identify and evaluate the product requirements and specifications. Also worth mentioning is the multidimensional project team, consisting of sociologists, psychologists, designers and engineers fromboth the academic and industrial world.

It is a weekend morning and you are having coffee and a chat with some friends in your local café. However, this is no ordinary café. It is a caf equipped to serve the communication needs of a new type of social context–the digitally connected community. This particular locale is a digital milieu in which information is both ubiquitous and location-independent and it is displayed in advanced communication devices that are embedded in the physical ambience of the neighbourhood. Afeature of these communication devices is that they are densely populated with agents of a special type. In this instance these are software agents, performing autonomously a variety of support roles for the local people. In the example of the café in question, these agents may inhabit, for instance, the coffee tables, the customers’ mobile phones and their personal electronic key ring tokens.

Our interactions and relationships with other people form a network that supports us, makes our lives meaningful, and ultimately enables us to survive. The Human Connectedness research group has been exploring the topic of human relationships and how they are mediated by technology. This chapter presents, together for the first time, several major pieces of work from the 3½ years of the group’s existence that highlight the increasingly varied and subtle nature of technology-enabled human communication. Discussion on these projects is collected into seven major sub-themes: extended family rooms, keepsakes of the future, intimate interactive spaces, slow communication, socially transforming interfaces, sports over a distance, and minimisation of mediation.

Anybody who has witnessed the explosive growth of mobile telephony, i-Pod fetishism and online grocery deliveries knows that digital and electronic technologies can work profound changes in our personal, social and cultural lives.We might hope, however, that new technologieswill go beyond commercial value to provide societal ones as well, helping address some of the significant societal problems of our time. This might mean rethinking our approach to technologies–what they can do, howwe interactwith them and the methods we use to develop them.

Effective communication is a fundamental prerequisite of the sustainable community. In the projects reported here, large-scale interactive screen displays have been proposed and evaluated as augmented means to promote communication and information exchange within and across communities, either in public spaces or at work sites.

A 50-year-old man was apparently hesitant carrying such a small and expensive computer around in the museum and in particular he was afraid he would not to be able to use it. As soon as he stepped into the Sala del Mappamondo, wearing a headphone and firmly grasping the device, a deep loud voice started speaking, “ This is the Sala del Mappamondo one of the most important halls of the whole Palazzo Pubblico. The wonderful frescoes, even the more religious ones, impose themselves as the very first examples of laic art involved in history and contemporary political life. ” Just another audio guide, thought the man a little bit relieved about the situation. Yet, when he approached the opposite wall the voice started speaking again, “ This is La Maestà, depicted by S. Martini in 1315. The fresco is located in the main part of the hall, the central point that gave the orientation of the Sala del Mappamondo. By contrast, the Guidoriccio fresco, located just behind you, was a sort of ‘poster,’ glorifying the power of the Siena Republic. ” The man turned around and the voice continued, “ In front of you, you can see the Guidoriccio, it was also painted by S. Martini […].”. The man was amazed; the audio guide seemed to work by itself. Suddenly, he recalled the small computer that he was still firmly grasping. He looked at it and first of all he noticed a small picture of the wall in front of him, all the frescoes were blurred but one: so that one is the Guidoriccio.