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.