Design and Use of Mobile Multimedia: Mediating Strong-Tie Relationships

Scientist in charge: Jesper Kjeldskov Participants: Steve Howard, Frank Vetere, Martin Gibbs, Marcus Bunyan, Sonja Pedell, Karen Mecoles, Florian Muller Funding: The Danish Technical Research Council (STVF ref. 26-03-0341), the Australian Smart Internet Technologies Cooperative Research Centre Industrial collaborators: Novell Pty, Melbourne The Mediating Strong-Tie Relationships project addresses the challenges of designing technologies for use in the private sphere specifically context-aware mobile multimedia systems for supporting communication in intimate and strongtie relationships. Intimacy is a crucial element of domestic life that has received very little attention from Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) researchers despite their rapidly growing interest in the design of interactive technologies for domestic use. Intimate acts differ from other activities, and there are unexplored opportunities to develop interactive technologies to support these acts. Investigating the phenomenon of technology use in strong-tie and intimate relationships, this project involved an ethnographic study of people’s communication and interaction habits using cultural probes, development of novel design ideas and implementation of functional prototypes.