Evaluating a Wearable Camera's Social Acceptability In-the-Wild
Marion Koelle, Torben Wallbaum, Wilko Heuten, Susanne Boll · 2019
With increasing ubiquity, wearable technologies are becoming part of everyday life where they may cause controversy, discomfort and social tension. Particularly, body-worn "always-on" cameras raise social acceptability concerns as their form factors hinder bystanders to infer whether they are "in the frame". Screen-based status indicators have been suggested as remedy, but not evaluated in-the-wild. Simultaneously, best practices for evaluating social acceptability in field studies are rare. This work contributes to closing both gaps. First, we contribute results of an in-the-wild evaluation of a screen-based status indicator testing the suitability of the "displayed camera image" design strategy. Second, we discuss methodical implications for evaluating social acceptability in the field, and cover lessons learned from collecting hypersubjective self-reports. We provide a self-critical, in-depth discussion of our field experiment, including study-related behavior patterns, and prototype fidelity. Our work may serve as a reference for field studies evaluating social acceptability.