Supporting interpersonal awareness over a distance

Social interaction and togetherness are keys to our quality of life and well-being. Interacting with friends and family members, exchanging information and experiences is important to everyone. Moreover, close social relationships between people lead to higher levels of satisfaction with one’s own life and raise an individuals self-esteem. In co-located groups and families communication occurs spontaneously. People communicate explicitly for example by verbally describing situations or instructions; and people communicate implicitly, nonverbally through expression and perception of emotions, activities, presence and appearance. Quite often, nonverbal implicit communication is used for negotiating the availability of people and detecting opportune moments for explicit verbal communication. Both ways of communication are necessary for a meaningful and successful interaction and play an important part in the feeling of belonging. In this book, we explore how human machine interfaces can be designed to support people who live far away from each other and try to keep in touch without feeling obliged to communicate. We use research through design methods to develop multimodal affective artifacts and enable people to exchange emotions, experiences and activities with loved ones. We support social interaction and communication by shifting digital interactions into aesthetic everyday objects that can ease usage and improve user experience. Especially older adults, people with disabilities and children can benefit from this approach, as digital software can be challenging to use and often misses the needs of these user groups. The presented systems and designs enable users to get information about activities of loved ones, to exchange memories or ongoing experiences, and express emotions and moods in various ways. With this book, we contribute towards enhancing social awareness and social communication between people living over a distance. We show that users feel a sense of belonging using new designs and technologies, can estimate availability of others and get engaged into storytelling. New design solutions create social awareness in an affective and unobtrusive way and eases interaction for users with limited technical experience.