and depending on the nature of the activity, decide not to disturb one another.
Instead of focusing on user goals and tasks, cultural theory identified an emerging trend, and design activities were used to capitalize on this trend in the creation of tangible screens.
[ 5] Turkle, S. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995.
November + December 2008
[ 6] Laurel, B., ed. Design Research: Methods and Perspectives, 196. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003.
ences; traditional ethnographic HCI technique watches work unfold in a very pragmatic sense. Cultural theory watches culture unfold, in a much more ethereal sense.
Cultural theory, then, provided a useful lens for understanding the needs of young people in the user study and helped to reveal features of youth culture as a social construction. In doing so, the signifying features, as distinct to those of mainstream society, were revealed. This analysis demonstrated that for a new generation the mobile phone was integral in the formation of fluid social interactions and had accelerated urban mobility. Users once restrained by premade plans were able to spontaneously traverse the city and suburbs, swarming between friendship groups and activities. A distinct user archetype was emerging from these mobile-phone-driven subcultures—the Nomad. While this may have been a predictable finding for older generations, it represents a dramatic shift in thinking about
teenagers and youth. For these users, the mobile phone was central in the construction and expression of social existence, resulting in mobile-phone-gen-erated spaces becoming the new place for the digital generation to “hang out.” Could current systems be improved to better meet their needs?
Looking at the signifying elements of youth culture itself provided insights that shaped the development of a design called the Swarm. Mobile users were disconnected physically but connected digitally. They responded to increasingly fragmented lifestyles by turning the mobile artifact itself into a kind of virtual home base. This enabled them to continually express and maintain their identity, albeit a digital representation of it. In response, the Swarm has at its core a virtual lounge room where, through the use of avatars, users can maintain a virtual presence where they can always be found.
The avatars depict the user’s current activity and can be programmed to appear on the user’s friends’ mobile phones. As the activity changes, the avatars can be updated accordingly. This allows individuals to see at glance what the other members of their friendship networks are doing at any particular time. By providing users with this contextual information about what other members of their social group are doing, presence and intimacy are maintained. This can give serendipity a nudge, facilitating interactions with individuals or groups who may be in the same vicinity. In turn, users can draw on their sense of social and cultural etiquette,
A central interest for cultural theorists is the representation of identity and how in the disembodied world of digital space, the cues to identity that we have in the real world are absent. The result is that digital identities have greater fluidity. For example, Turkle finds that digital environments allow users to shed the human qualities of age, gender, race, disability, and even—as in the case of an HIV-positive man who had promiscuous online sex—disease [ 5]. Furthermore, unlike notions of identity held within ubiquitous computing that aim to reveal where a user is located and what their activity is, the use of culturally informed perspectives into digital identity presents the challenge of allowing different identities to be expressed in a range of contexts.
At a time when designers are theorizing about the nature of user experiences in digital environments—and asking, as researcher Laurel does, “Can we create real social depth? [ 6]”— these perspectives provide more than academic insights into the ideology of identity politics. They have a practical application, encouraging us to consider the implications as a new generation extends their identity into an increasingly pervasive digital sphere. Being digital is not about
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