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Awareness Systems pp 425–445Cite as

Supporting Family Awareness with the Whereabouts Clock

Part of the Human-Computer Interaction Series book series (HCIS)

Abstract

We report the results of a field trial of a situated awareness device for families called the “Whereabouts Clock”. The Clock displays the location of family members using cellphone data as one of four privacy-preserving, deliberately coarse-grained categories (HOME, WORK, SCHOOL or ELSEWHERE). The results show that awareness of others through the Clock supports not only family communication and coordination but also more emotive aspects of family life such as reassurance, connectedness, identity and social touch. We discuss how the term “awareness” means many things in practice and highlight the importance of designing not just for family activities, but in order to support the emotional, social and even moral aspects of family life.

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Acknowledgements

We are indebted to the families who gave generously of their time for this study. We are also grateful to Rachel Eardley for designing the Whereabouts Clock and to Richard Harper and Ken Wood for their valuable commentary and advice on an earlier version of this chapter.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Microsoft Research, 7 JJ Thomson Ave, Cambridge, CB3 OFB, UK

    Abigail Sellen & Alex S. Taylor

  2. Nokia Research Center, Palo Alto, USA

    Joseph ‘Jofish’ Kaye

  3. Dept. of Communications, UC San Diego, San Diego, CA, USA

    Barry Brown & Shahram Izadi

Authors
  1. Abigail Sellen
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  2. Alex S. Taylor
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  3. Joseph ‘Jofish’ Kaye
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  4. Barry Brown
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  5. Shahram Izadi
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Correspondence to Abigail Sellen .

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    © 2009 Springer-Verlag London Limited

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    Sellen, A., Taylor, A.S., Kaye, J.‘., Brown, B., Izadi, S. (2009). Supporting Family Awareness with the Whereabouts Clock. In: Markopoulos, P., De Ruyter, B., Mackay, W. (eds) Awareness Systems. Human-Computer Interaction Series. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-84882-477-5_18

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    • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-84882-477-5_18

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    • Publisher Name: Springer, London

    • Print ISBN: 978-1-84882-476-8

    • Online ISBN: 978-1-84882-477-5

    • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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