Abstract
We report a qualitative study of the use of physical space and wireless laptops by ten United States households. Although wireless laptops purportedly offer the opportunity and affordances to go “anywhere in the home,” laptops were generally used in a small set of particular places rather than moving fluidly through the home: wireless laptops were portable, but not mobile per se We present factors that influence laptop movement in the home. We also present a model of people’s use of space in the home, identifying a small set of favored places of long-term use and a larger set of kinetic places used for specific tasks. We discuss how the factors we have identified generally promote use of laptops in favored places and generally discourage use of laptops in kinetic places. We discuss how our findings are relevant to the design of technologies for the home.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Aipperspach, R.J., et al.: Ethno-Mining: Integrating Words and Numbers from the Ground Up. Technical Report No. EECS-2006-124, EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley (2005)
Becker, F., Steele, F.: Workplace by Design: Mapping the High-Performance Workscape. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco (1995)
Brown, B., O’Hara, K.: Place as a Practical Concern of Mobile Workers. Environment and Planning A 35(9), 1565–1587 (2003)
Brush, A.J., et al.: Designs for Home Life. In: SIG at CHI (2005)
Crabtree, A., Rodden, T.: Domestic Routines and Design for the Home. JCSCW 13(2), 191–220 (2004)
Edwards, W.K., Grinter, R.E.: At Home with Ubiquitous Computing: Seven Challenges. In: Abowd, G.D., Brumitt, B., Shafer, S. (eds.) UbiComp 2001. LNCS, vol. 2201, pp. 256–272. Springer, Heidelberg (2001)
Elliot, K., Neustaedter, C., Greenberg, S.: Time, Ownership and Awareness: The Value of Contextual Locations in the Home. In: Beigl, M., et al. (eds.) UbiComp 2005. LNCS, vol. 3660, pp. 251–268. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)
Fallows, D.: Growing Numbers Surf the Web Just for Fun. Pew Internet Reports (2006)
Frohlich, D.M., Dray, S., Silverman, A.: Breaking Up is Hard to Do: Family Perspectives on the Future of the Home PC. Int. J. Human-Computer Studies 54(5), 701–724 (2001)
Frohlich, D., Kraut, R.: The Social Context of Home Computing. In: Harper, R. (ed.) Inside the Smart Home, pp. 127–162. Springer, Heidelberg (2003)
Grinter, R.E., et al.: The Work to Make the Home Network Work. In: Proc. ECSCW (2005)
Hanson, J.: Decoding Homes and Houses. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1998)
Harper, R. (ed.): Inside the Smart Home. Springer, London (2003)
Kraut, R., et al.: The HomeNet Field Trial of Residential Internet Services. CACM 39(12), 55–65 (1996)
Luff, P., Heath, C.: Mobility in Collaboration. In: Proc. CSCW 1998, pp. 305–314 (1998)
Mallett, S.: Understanding Home: A Critical Review of the Literature. The Sociological Review 52(1), 62–89 (2004)
Mateas, M., et al.: Engineering Ethnography in the Home. In: Proc. CHI ’96, pp. 283–284 (1996)
McClard, A., Somers, P.: Unleashed: Web Tablet Integration Into the Home. In: Proc. CHI 2000, pp. 1–8 (2000)
Mercer, D.: Home Network Adoption: WiFi Emerges as Mass Market Phenomenon. Strategy Analytics (2006)
Nippert-Eng, C.E.: Home and Work: Negotiating Boundaries Through Everyday Life. University of Chicago Press, Chicago (1996)
O’Brien, J., et al.: At Home with the Technology: An Ethnographic Study of a Set-Top-Box Trial. ACM TOCHI 6(3), 282–308 (1999)
Oswald, F., et al.: The Role of the Home Environment in Middle and Late Adulthood. In: Wahl, H.-W., et al. (eds.) The Many Faces of Health, Competence and Well-being in Old Age: Integrating Epidemiological, Psychological and Social Perspectives, Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Patel, S.N., et al.: Farther Than You Think: An Empirical Investigation of the Proximity of Users to Their Mobile Phones. In: Abowd, G.D., Brumitt, B., Shafer, S. (eds.) UbiComp 2001. LNCS, vol. 2201, pp. 123–140. Springer, Heidelberg (2001)
Ryan, G., Bernard, H.R.: Techniques to Identify Themes. Field Methods 15(1), 85–109 (2003)
Schadler, T.: Laptops And Home Networks Transform Behavior. Forrester (2005)
Schilit, B.N., Sengupta, U.: Device Ensembles. IEEE Computer 37(12), 56–64 (2004)
Taylor, A.S., Swan, L.: Artful Systems in the Home. In: Proc. CHI 2005, pp. 641–650 (2005)
Venkatesh, A.: Computers and New Information Technologies for the Home. CACM 39(12), 47–54 (1996)
Vitalari, N.P., Venkatesh, A., Gronhaug, K.: Computing in the Home: Shifts in the Time Allocation Patterns of Households. CACM 28(5), 512–522 (1985)
Weiser, M.: The Computer for the 21st Century. Scientific American 265(3), 94–104 (1991)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2007 Springer Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Woodruff, A., Anderson, K., Mainwaring, S.D., Aipperspach, R. (2007). Portable, But Not Mobile: A Study of Wireless Laptops in the Home. In: LaMarca, A., Langheinrich, M., Truong, K.N. (eds) Pervasive Computing. Pervasive 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4480. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-72037-9_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-72037-9_13
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-72036-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-72037-9
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)