Ambient telephony Research and design of a social connectedness product

Ambient telephony Research and design of a social connectedness product

Greefhorst, J.J.

Langeveld, L.H. (mentor)
De Ridder, H. (mentor)
Dadlani, P. (mentor)

Industrial Design Engineering

Industrial Design

Design for Interaction / Integrated Product Design

2010-07-01

Executive summery Phase 1: Design research - starting on page 11 This project deals with two very different stakeholders within Philips Research, namely the ambiPhone project team and the Human Interactions & Experience group. The ambiPhone team consists mainly of people from the Digital Signal Processing group and is responsible for the technological development of the system. The Human Interactions & Experience group focuses on doing research on User System Interactions, amongst which social interaction. For this project the setting of modern communication behavior and development is very important. Mobile phones and the internet are already in the main stream of communication. In the near future the development of the Machine 2 Machine (M2M) communication and therefore the economical exploitation of sensors will play a very important role in the ICT industry. With this in mind, the focus is on the possibility and opportunity for contact. This is an aspect of social connectedness that can very well be combined with the ambient telephone system. Phase 2: Context mapping - starting on page 25 11 people were asked to participate in a context mapping study. In this study participants were asked to draw their houses in order to simulate in home communication behavior. This confirmed that; communication consist of the factors share effort and control. People are very sensitive to these factors, finding the right balance between these factors is the main hurdle that any communication media has to master. Phase 3: Ideation - starting on page 33 The insights found suggest that using people’s mobile phone as a user interface seems the logical answer to the initial questions. It enables user’s remote control of the system, different types of connections are possible, people can always go back to a more private handheld conversation and it matches the current communication behavior perfectly. The mobile phone and M2M communication is going to play an even more important role over the coming years. Using the collective signals available due to the increase in sensorial implementations and mobile internet people’s social context can be assessed. This can be used to better understand the possibilities and opportunities to contact people. These ideas are conceptualized in the form of a request function and an intimate light connection. The request function assists people in making contact with other people by monitoring location, movement and the surroundings of people. The intimate light connection uses this information in order to create light representations in the other person’s living room. Phase 4: Validation - starting on page 43 The ideas developed in the previous page needed to be validated with users. Therefore a prototype was build for the ambient telephony idea, and a video and story boards were made to represent the social features. A study was conducted in the Experience Lab with 12 participants. These were observed while using the product and asked to reflect on the ideas presented. The outcome concerning the ambient telephony confirms the ideas on using people’s mobile phone as an UI. It also suggests that a clear origin of sound results in a participants focusing on the device. This disturbs the feeling of freedom to move and talk naturally as people talk towards the device. People tend to talk louder than normally. Regarding the social features, users stated that they needed to experience the system in order to give more complete feedback. The request function was considered a context aware reminder. This is appreciated but not related to the product anymore. The Light representations are seen as both an indication of availability and as an intimate light connection.(50:50) Not all the representations are appreciated. The system should give an indication of the others situation but not expose details, as not to violate people’s privacy. The surroundings are considered reasonable anonymous, it is a way of telling something about something but not using someone’s information. Phase 5: Product behavior - starting on page 59 In consultation with the ambiPhone team it was decided that the system would be a singular device and not a configuration with satellites. This is contradictory to the user feedback but a consumer insight from business perspective states that people do not want wires running through their house, which is consistent with the ambient lifestyle philosophy. The system uses the mobile phone signals surrounding the person you want to connect to in order to assess that personas surrounding. This is used to create color representations in the form of light within people’s living room. These colors are based on the light spectrum running from IR-UV or hot- cold. The basic color emotion association contrast is non culture dependant and creates a framework from which the user can easily understand the meaning of the representations of the product. Phase 6: Validation 2 - starting on page 71 Another prototype was build for the light features in order to conduct experiments with 6 people in their houses. The prototype was experienced in combination with a movie and storyboard in order to bring the context of the product to life. The feature was seen as applicable in two very different ways; an emotional and a practical implementation. This matches the possibility and opportunity for contact aspects of social connectedness. Concerning the practical, people think that it can help them to more smoothly create a connection with their relations. It can be used to create a more aware way of managing communication as it creates awareness of what is already known about the other person. However there is doubt about the accuracy of the representation. For the emotional implementation is more difficult to understand what the effect is of the emotional implementation. In order to fully reflect on this a fully functioning prototype should be tested over a longer period of time. The feature is appreciated by some users because it reminds you of the other and lowers the distance there is between people. However the continuous incoming data stream is also considered very obtrusive and stressful by a part of the participants, as it raises more questions. Phase 7: Product development - starting on page 81 The behavior as described and tested earlier is the outline of the product. This outline determines most of the components but the main component is still unclear, the housing. The appearance of the product should fit several form considerations namely; fitting the Philips Lifestyle product portfolio, ambient technology principles, acoustic properties, light dynamics and the user feedback received during the second user study. This insight was used to create several clay models. One of these models was selected to be further detailed into a product design. Phase 8: Epilogue – starting on page 97 Although more testing and development is needed, both the ambiPhone and the Social Colors show potential to be implemented into the market. For the ambiPhone user feedback is needed on the experience of different sound configurations for ambient phone conversations while doing mindless chores. For the Social Colors a completely working model will have to be tested over a longer period of time. Only this way can the effects of this type of product on people’s state of mind really be researched.

Ambient telephony
social connectedness

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:7643d87c-ce66-40aa-be40-09114375efd3

Campus only

Student theses

master thesis

(c) 2010 Greefhorst, J.J.