Studying and Designing for Mobile Social Awareness Cues in Urban Interactions
Abdallah El Ali · 2011
In making us aware of the experiences and actions of others while on the move, mobile social awareness cues have the capacity to transform and reconfigure our understanding of urban space, and influence our actions within it. These cues range from multimedia content (e.g., geotagged FlickR photos) to multimodal signals (e.g., tactile or audio feedback) that embody meaning to some social effect. In mobile contexts, presenting these cues comes at the cost of sensory and information overload, given already limited user attentional and memory resources. To deal with this challenge, we draw upon three methods (ethnography, urban spatial analysis, psychophysical experimentation) to study how social information is represented in awareness cues and communicated to mobile users, and how this informs the design of non-visual interaction methods that enhance urban interactions.