Interactions - March/April 2013

Unless people
are able to
spontaneously join
a group and start
interacting with

once again a day or a week later. These comments point toward the fact that people don’t want to think about the hassles of setting up a group, but rather about the potential joys of repeatedly sharing and interacting with others in mobile collocated interactions.

others in a fast
and easy way,
they might lose
interest in
participating
in mobile collocated
interactions in the

2. Harper, R.H.R. Texture: Human Expression in the Age of Communications Overload. The MI T Press, Cambridge, MA, 2010.

3. Lanier, J. You Are Not a Gadget. Penguin Books, London, 2010.

4. Lucero, A., Holopainen, J. and Jokela, T. Pass-them-around: Collaborative use of mobile phones for photo sharing. Proc. of the 2011 Annual Conf. on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 2011, 1787-1796.

5. Merrill, D., Kalanithi, J. and Maes, P. Siftables: Towards sensor network user interfaces. Proc. of the 1st Inter. Conf. on Tangible and Embedded Interaction. ACM, 2007, 75-78. 6. Terrenghi, L., Quigley, A. and Dix, A. A taxonomy for and analysis of multi-person-display ecosystems. Personal Ubiquitous Comput. 13, 8 (November 2009), 583-598. 7. Greenberg, S., Marquardt, N., Ballendat, T., Diaz-Marino, R. and Wang, M. Proxemic interactions: The new ubicomp? interactions 18, 1 (January 2011), 42-50. 8. Lucero, A., Holopainen, J. and Jokela, T. MobiComics: Collaborative use of mobile phones and large displays for public expression. Proc. of the 14th Inter. Conf. on Human Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services. ACM, 2012, 383-392. 9. Robinson, S., Vartiainen, E., Jones, M. and Marsden, G. Pico Tales: Collaborative authoring of animated stories using handheld projectors. Proc. of the ACM 2012 Conf. on Computer Supported Cooperative Work. ACM, 2012, 671-680. 10. Reitmaier, T., Bidwell, N. J., and Marsden, G. Field testing mobile digital storytelling software in rural Kenya. Proc. of the 12th Inter. Conf. on Human Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services. ACM, 2010, 283-286.

first place.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS Andrés Lucero is a senior researcher at Nokia in Tampere, Finland, where he leads research projects. His interests lie in human-computer interaction Matt Jones is a professor of computer science at the FIT Lab, Swansea University, and the co-author of Mobile Interaction Design. For more about the lab, see www.fitlab.eu.

March + April 2013

interactions

Sharing Personal Phones

Going back to our initial question of whether people are willing to share their mobile devices and engage in collaborative interactions, in our studies we have found that people are concerned about letting other people handle their personal phones. Often-mentioned reasons for those concerns were that they may spill drinks on the phone when using it in the context of a bar or cafe, or unintentionally damage it (e.g., scratch the back when moving the phone on a surface), beyond the normal wear and tear that happens from daily use. People seemed more comfortable with sharing their devices with people they know and trust, such as close friends and family members, as opposed to complete strangers. In such cases, the owners of the phones can more accurately judge whether or not someone will be careful with their phone. On the positive side, most participants felt that the benefit of engaging in ad hoc collocated social interactions using the phones outweighed the potential risk of damaging the devices. But first, we must be able to deliver useful and sensible mobile collocated experiences to people. This is the first step toward better balancing our networked life with our intimate, personal life.

Tero Jokela is a principal researcher at Nokia Research Center in Tampere, Finland. His primary research interests include human-computer interaction and user interface software, as well as mobile multimedia applications.

Simon Robinson is a researcher at the FI T Lab, Swansea University. He is interested in interactions that allow people to maintain their immersion in their surroundings, rather than a device.