while the presenter is telling the story behind this particular picture, the two people on the left are looking directly at him, and the presenter and the person on the right are looking at the photo. This type of interaction, mediated by mobile phones, fully supports the richness of real-world social interactions, at the same time taking full advantage of digital technology. For example, the app also contained a way to easily duplicate images, an automatic slideshow function, and ways to tile devices together to create a larger joint display.

March + April 2013

interactions

Taking an Offline Break

Consider the amount of time you spend managing your life on your social networks. All of this online activity must come at the expense of face-to-face communication. We are spending less time physically with each other and more time with our mobile devices. And when we actually do get together, people seem to be glued to their screens, often ignoring those around them, avoiding eye contact [ 1]. Inspired by Turkle’s arguments, we think it is time to lift our heads away from the screen and start noticing those around us.

Mobile collocated interactions offer a way to disconnect from the network for a while and take a break. This handheld-supported downtime could provide the necessary space to nurture our human relationships and make room for reflection [ 1]. To achieve this, we have been looking into human activities currently supported by digital technology, and have decided to provide a humanistic alternative [ 3], especially for those interactions that benefit from face-to-face communication.

One such example is photo sharing. Online photo-sharing services such as Flickr or Photobucket offer many benefits; however, they lack the richness of social interaction when compared with sharing paper prints between collocated users [ 4]. In Figure 2 we see four people discussing photos face-to-face using Pass-Them-Around. This app uses the metaphor of passing paper prints around, whereby each mobile phone becomes a physical container of individual photos.

What we see here is the type of mobile collocated interactions where attention naturally shifts between the artifact (the photo) and the presenter. In this case,

Creating Joint Attention

When using their mobile phones, people have a tendency to hold their devices with one or two hands, with the screen facing toward them. People will usually adopt a particular device position, combined even with a second hand to cover the screen, either to browse private content, such as a confidential email, or to avoid glare. We are accustomed to manipulating our mobile devices this way, and as we all know, habits are hard to break.

For people to fully benefit from
mobile collocated interactions,
they must open up and start seeing
their personal devices as shared,
public devices. In mobile collocated
interactions, phones are at the
intersection of fully personal and
fully shared use. This basic prin-
ciple is exploited by board games
that combine the individual use of
tokens, money, and cards with the
shared use of the dice and board.
The mobile phone will sometimes
behave as a token and sometimes
be part of a larger board. In mobile
collocated interactions, people
should ideally be able to both
make individual moves, such as
browsing for private content, and
play together. The shared uses
will usually entail keeping the
device flat on a table or projecting
information on a wall so that all
people, or at least more than one
person, can comfortably see the
shared content and get informa-
tion about the current state of the
interaction. People should be able
to perceive the interactive space
created by these shared devices as
one entity. Siftables [ 5] are a good
example of small mobile devices
that show this type of behavior.