Using Digital but Physical Surrogates to Mediate Awareness, Communication and Privacy in Media Spaces

Greenberg, S. and Kuzuoka, H. (2000)
Using Digital but Physical Surrogates to Mediate Awareness, Communication and Privacy in Media Spaces. Personal Technologies, 4(1):182-198. Elsevier, January.

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Abstract

Digital but physical surrogates are tangible representations of remote people, typically members of small intimate teams, positioned within an office and under digital control. Surrogates selectively collect and present awareness information about the people they represent. They also react to people's explicit and implicit physical actions: a person's explicit acts include grasping and moving them, while their implicit acts include how they move towards or away from the surrogate. By responding appropriately to these physical actions of people, surrogates can control the communication capabilities of a media space in a natural way. Surrogates also balance awareness and privacy by limiting and abstracting how activities are portrayed, and by offering different levels of salience to its users. The combination of all these attributes means that surrogates can make it easy for intimate collaborators to smoothly move from awareness of each other to casual interaction while mitigating privacy and distraction concerns.

Exploring different surrogate designs and how they work together can be straight-forward if a good infrastructure is in place. We use an awareness server based on a distributed model-view-controller architecture, which automatically captures, stores and distributes events. We also package surrogates as physical widgets or phidgets with a well-defined interface; this makes it easy for a programmer to plug a surrogate into the awareness server as a controller (to generate awareness events), or view (to display events that others have produced), or both. Because surrogate design, implementation and use is still a new discipline, we also present several issues and next steps.

Bibtex entry

@ARTICLE { 2000-Surrogate.PersTechnology,
CLASS = { JOURNAL },
AUTHOR = { Greenberg, S. and Kuzuoka, H. },
TITLE = { Using Digital but Physical Surrogates to Mediate Awareness, Communication and Privacy in Media Spaces },
JOURNAL = { Personal Technologies },
YEAR = { 2000 },
VOLUME = { 4 },
NUMBER = { 1 },
PAGES = { 182-198 },
MONTH = { January },
PUBLISHER = { Elsevier },
}