Managing social batteries is crucial in highly interactive environments such as open-plan offices. To support both the internal self-management of one's own social battery and the external coordination of interactions with others, we designed Sotate, a device that visualizes social batteries. Sotate uses a gauge-style LED display to represent a user's social battery level and physical placement to indicate when the user is engaged in recharging activities. Our three-week field study with four groups revealed that participants used social battery representations not only to reflect their internal states, but also to intentionally express non-literal states to manage external communication. We also found that explicitly marking the beginning and end of recharging made recharging activities more deliberate and reflective, and that colleagues relied on simple, immediately interpretable cues rather than precise numerical values when coordinating interactions. These results highlight design considerations for systems that support the management of internal states associated with social interaction.

While the rapid exchange of messages in instant messaging (IM) is useful for maintaining convenient and continuous communication, it can simultaneously diminish recipients’ opportunities to reflect on and emotionally engage with individual messages. This paper introduces Adilet, a system that represents the process of composing and receiving delayed messages through a physical device, designed to enhance message awareness, perceived value, and reflective engagement. Adilet allows users to ensure the status of writing, sending, and receiving messages and approximate total writing time. A field study with four groups of two close partners demonstrated that Adilet improved message quality by increasing participants' awareness on both writing and reception. Furthermore, consistent awareness of message presence and clues about message content enhanced anticipation. Our findings suggest further implications for designing communication systems that support deeper and more valuable emotional exchange by improving message value and recognition in close relationships.

In open-plan offices, face-to-face (F2F) interruptions frequently occur to facilitate collaboration and cooperation with colleagues. We designed Pati & Bellio to support the coordination of F2F interruptions in open-plan offices. Pati is a partition-style personal device that visualizes availability for F2F interruptions and Bellio is a shared interface that allows users to send notifications to their colleagues from a distance. Our three-week in field study with four groups of participants reveals that examining the process of F2F interruptions helps determine the importance of the interruption, and the physical distance provided by Pati and Bellio naturally allowed time to prepare for conversations. We also identified how the visualized availability is considered after an interruption begins. Our findings imply considerations in designing systems to support coordinating social interaction in work environments.

Accumulating a life history is a valuable resource for understanding self and reflecting on personal historical experience, which could be developed through diary writing. To facilitate the recording of past events in a diary, we designed and implemented Rebulb, a system that enables users to engage with reflective questions about proud moments and document memories evoked for accumulating one's life history. Our four-month field study with three participants showed that users intentionally and spontaneously recalled vague and wide memories during their daily activity and then concretized these memories by writing them down in a journal. The study also revealed that regardless of whether the memories were positive or negative, the current state of the user played a crucial role in how these memories were processed and reflected upon. Our finding imply consideration in designing a tool for supporting the recall and documentation of past experiences.

The remote communication within intimate groups can be challenging due to lack of or excessive of non-verbal messages, which lack physicality. In this paper, we introduce Stubbi, a device designed to enhance remote text and voice communication in small intimate groups by enabling the exchange of simple physical movements. Each group member is equipped with Stubbi, which consists of three stubs that represent each person and enable the expression of physical movements through height changes and rotation. Our in-lab study involving six groups of three friends revealed that Stubbi effectively maintained the flow of IM conversations by increasing attentiveness and responsiveness. Additionally, in group voice calls, the exchange of personified messages through physical movements of the stubs assisted group interactions, such as turn-taking. Our findings suggest faurther implications for designing interactive systems that can support improved remote communication by seamlessly connecting IM and voice call conversations for small intimate groups.

The abundance of easily captured digital media and storing everything "just in case" has made it difficult for people to revisit them and have a rich reminiscence experience. To reinstate this value, we developed Slide2Remember, a wall photo frame enabling people to re-encounter their histories of digital photos and music. By physically sliding the device's front cover, users can hear songs that they had listened to in the same period when the photo was taken. From our four-week in-field study with 7 participants, we showed how Slide2Remember supported narrative remembering experiences of past moments and found detailed roles of each medium in the recall of life events. Moreover, the sliding interaction encouraged participants to begin their retrospection with anticipation and curiosity. Our findings imply considerations for providing a new recalling experience by overlaying one digital possession type over another and ways to encounter past data in everyday living spaces.