While much has been written on the age-based digital divide, more understanding of the relative importance of factors affecting use of the internet is needed. This paper analyses nationally representative data from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA) to understand older adults’ frequency of using the internet and reasons for not using it more. We examine the extent to which health, lifestyle, and sociodemographic correlate with the pronounced age gradient in not using the internet. We find that the reasons why people in the 80+ cohort did not use the internet more are not qualitatively different from the reasons people aged 50–64 or 65–79 did not use it more, but do differ between rare and regular users. We also find that of the myriad factors that are potentially relevant, only cognitive ability, educational attainment, and employment status were robustly associated with the age gradient in internet use.

Abstract The focus on managing problems that can arise for older adults has meant that extant HCI and Ageing research has not given the concepts of “age”’ and “ageing” the explicit theoretical attention they deserve. Attending to this gap, we critically examine a ten-year corpus of CHI publications through the lens of an existing typology that we have further developed to analyse how age is understood, interpreted, and constructed in the field of HCI. Our resulting multidimensional typology of age in HCI elucidates the distinctive characteristics of older adults considered when designing with and for this user group, but also highlights the need for a more critical, reflexive, social constructivist approach to age in HCI. Applying this approach, we explore age as a multidimensional system of stratification to better understand the phenomenon of the age-based digital divide.

The uptake of digital technology by older adults and service-providers has been partly driven by the pandemic but more recently by the erosion of in-person services because of increasing austerity and a harsher global economic climate. Against the backdrop of the UK’s cost of living crisis, we examine technology used frequently within five older adults’ households. Through two rounds of interviews and participant diaries, we show benefits and struggles of participants’ costly technology use, reflecting on what ‘cost of living’ means when technology designed to simplify older peoples lives, encounters problems. For HCI practitioners, we provide evidence of how personal smart devices can be better tailored to help older adults support themselves both economically and practically, during the cost of living crisis. We propose avenues for future research and design that better support indirect costs and reflect on how personal devices can be made self-sustaining, integrated and repairable.

The heterogeneity of Deep Learning models, libraries, and hardware poses an important challenge for improving model inference performance. Auto-tuners address this challenge via automatic tensor program optimization towards a target-device. However, auto-tuners incur a substantial time cost to complete given their design necessitates performing tensor program candidate measurements serially within an isolated target-device to minimize latency measurement inaccuracy. In this article we propose DOPpler, a parallel auto-tuning measurement infrastructure. DOPpler allows for considerable auto-tuning speedup over conventional approaches whilst maintaining high-quality tensor program optimization. DOPpler accelerates the auto-tuning process by proposing a parallel execution engine to efficiently execute candidate tensor programs in parallel across the CPU-host and GPU target-device, and overcomes measurement inaccuracy by introducing a high-precision on-device measurement technique when measuring tensor program kernel latency. DOPpler is designed to automatically calculate the optimal degree of parallelism to provision fast and accurate auto-tuning for different tensor programs, auto-tuners and target-devices. Experiment results show that DOPpler reduces total auto-tuning time by 50.5% on average whilst achieving optimization gains equivalent to conventional auto-tuning infrastructure.

Cloud datacenters capable of provisioning high performance Machine Learning-as-a-Service (MLaaS) at reduced resource cost is achieved via auto-tuning: automated tensor program optimization of Deep Learning models to minimize inference latency within a hardware device. However given the extensive heterogeneity of Deep Learning models, libraries, and hardware devices, performing auto-tuning within Cloud datacenters incurs a significant time, compute resource, and energy cost of which state-of-the-art auto-tuning is not designed to mitigate. In this paper we propose Trimmer, a high performance and cost-efficient Deep Learning auto-tuning framework for Cloud datacenters. Trimmer maximizes DL model performance and tensor program cost-efficiency by preempting tensor program implementations exhibiting poor optimization improvement; and applying an ML-based filtering method to replace expensive low performing tensor programs to provide greater likelihood of selecting low latency tensor programs. Through an empirical study exploring the cost of DL model optimization techniques, our analysis indicates that 26–43% of total energy is expended on measuring tensor program implementations that do not positively contribute towards auto-tuning. Experiment results show that Trimmer achieves high auto-tuning cost-efficiency across different DL models, and reduces auto-tuning energy use by 21.8–40.9% for Cloud clusters whilst achieving DL model latency equivalent to state-of-the-art techniques.

Hancock makes a range of claims but the most important is this: if a machine ‘learns,’ then, eventually, it will become ‘self-aware.’ It is self-awareness, he argues, that will distinguish machines...

To accelerate the training of Deep Learning (DL) models, clusters of machines equipped with hardware accelerators such as GPUs are leveraged to reduce execution time. State-of-the-art resource managers are needed to increase GPU utilization and maximize throughput. While co-locating DL jobs on the same GPU has been shown to be effective, this can incur interference causing slowdown. In this article we propose Horus: an interference-aware and prediction-based resource manager for DL systems. Horus proactively predicts GPU utilization of heterogeneous DL jobs extrapolated from the DL model's computation graph features, removing the need for online profiling and isolated reserved GPUs. Through micro-benchmarks and job co-location combinations across heterogeneous GPU hardware, we identify GPU utilization as a general proxy metric to determine good placement decisions, in contrast to current approaches which reserve isolated GPUs to perform online profiling and directly measure GPU utilization for each unique submitted job. Our approach promotes high resource utilization and makespan reduction; via real-world experimentation and large-scale trace driven simulation, we demonstrate that Horus outperforms other DL resource managers by up to 61.5 percent for GPU resource utilization, 23.7-30.7 percent for makespan reduction and 68.3 percent in job wait time reduction.

This paper draws attention to new complexities of deploying artificial intelligence (AI) to sensitive contexts, such as welfare allocation. AI is increasingly used in public administration with the promise of improving decision-making through predictive modelling. To accurately predict, it needs all the agreed criteria used as part of decisions, formal and informal. This paper empirically explores the informal classifications used by caseworkers to make unemployed welfare seekers 'fit' into the formal categories applied in a Danish job centre. Our findings show that these classifications are documentable, and hence traceable to AI. However, to the caseworkers, they are at odds with the stable explanations assumed by any bureaucratic recording system as they involve negotiated and situated judgments of people's character. Thus, for moral reasons, caseworkers find them ill-suited for formal representation and predictive purposes and choose not to write them down. As a result, although classification work is crucial to the job centre's activities, AI is denuded of the real-world (and real work) character of decision-making in this context. This is an important finding for CSCW as it is not only about whether AI can 'do' decision-making in particular contexts, as previous research has argued. This paper shows that problems may also be caused by people's unwillingness to provide data to systems. It is the purpose of this paper to present the empirical results of this research, followed by a discussion of implications for AI-supported practice and research.

This article examines some of the mystique surrounding AI, including the interrelated notions of explainability and complexity, and argues that these notions suggest that designing human-centered AI is difficult. It explains how, once these are put aside, an HCI perspective can help define interaction between AI and users that can enhance rather than substitute one important aspect of human life: creativity. Key to developing such creative interactions are abstractions and grammars of action and other notions; the article explores the history of these in HCI and how they are to be used in the contemporary interaction and design space, in relation to AI. The article is programmatic rather than empirical though its argument uses real-world examples.

Mobile and ubiquitous computing researchers have long envisioned future worlds for users in developed regions. Steered by such visions, they have innovated devices and services exploring the value of alternative propositions with and for individuals, groups and communities. Meanwhile, such radical and long-term explorations are uncommon for what have been termed emergent users; users, that is, for whom advanced technologies are just within grasp. Rather, a driving assumption is that today’s high-end mobile technologies will “trickle down” to these user groups in due course. In this paper, we open the debate about what mobile technologies might be like if emergent users were directly involved in creating their visions for the future 5–10 years from now. To do this, we report on a set of envisioning workshops in India, South Africa and Kenya that provide a roadmap for valued, effective devices and services for these regions in the next decade.

Technological support for augmenting the relationship that people establish with remote places has been studied fairly little as the primary focus in telepresence studies is the connection between people. This paper addresses the design challenge for supporting "active place presence" at home. A prototype, Hole in Space, was created to explore the design challenge. A longitudinal study of how an urban couple appropriated the prototype was conducted over the duration of seven months. The paper elaborates on how the Web-mediated design influenced place presence and outlines several aspects that need to be considered when designing for active place presence at home.

This paper reports on how asynchronous mobile video messaging presents users with a challenge to doing 'being ordinary'. 53 participants from three countries were recruited to try Skype Qik at launch for two weeks. Some participants embraced Skype Qik as a gift economy, emphasizing a special relationship enacted through crafted self-presentation. However, gift exchange makes up only a small proportion of conversation. Many participants struggled with the self-presentation obligations of video when attempting more everyday conversation. Faced with the 'tyranny of the everyday', many participants reverted to other systems where content forms reflected more lightweight exchange. We argue that designing for fluid control of the obligations of turn exchange is key to mobile applications intended to support everyday messaging.

The term ‘conceptual designing’ refers to an activity that various practitioners already undertake, but for which we lack a clear definition. This article provides that definition and uses an example of a design concept called ‘Manhattan’ to present how exactly this type of process happens. We define conceptual designing as a constructive framing and re-framing activity, which is mediated by and targeted at the creation of new design concepts. Conceptual designing as an approach is valuable for addressing the fuzziness and ambiguity typical of research that explores novel areas with new partners, methods and resources. It is by no means a new phenomenon, and the main contribution of the article is the clarification of conceptual designing as a particular approach to designing and researching. The approach embraces openness, resource-construction and collaboration. We conclude that conceptual designing can be especially useful in research and design projects that bring different kinds of people, organizations, technologies and domains together into the forming of new well-founded proposals for development. The presentation of conceptual designing in this paper is written with an intention to provide designers and researchers with terminology and concepts that they may use to structure their work as well as to become more resourceful in reflecting upon their projects.

Planning a wedding is arguably one of the most complicated collaborative tasks people ever undertake. Despite the commonplace use of technologies in "wedding work," little research has looked at this from an HCI perspective. Based on an interview study, we illustrate how technology is used to deliver the sought-after fantasy and a practical, yet entertaining, affair. We identify four ways that technology helps people do this: (a) by allowing much of the practical planning work to become "invisible;" (b) by easing navigation through the delicate rules of family configurations made manifest in the guest list; (c) by helping create a spectacle-like event that adroitly balances excess and realism; and (d) by documenting the wedding in ways that allows re-experiencing the magic after the event. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of this pursuit on social graphs, place, and photography, contributing to the literature on technology and major life events.

In this paper, we present a study of WhatsApp, an instant messaging smartphone application. Through our interviews with participants, we develop anthopologist Tim Ingold's notion of dwelling, and discuss how use of WhatsApp is constitutive of a felt-life of being together with those close by. We focus on the relationship "doings" in WhatsApp and how this togetherness and intimacy are enacted through small, continuous traces of narrative, of tellings and tidbits, noticings and thoughts, shared images and lingering pauses; this is constitutive of dwelling. Further, we discuss how an intimate knowing of others in these relationships, through past encounters and knowledge of coming together in the future, pertain to the particular forms of relationship engagements manifest through the possibilities presented in WhatsApp. We suggest that this form of sociality is likely to be manifest in other smartphone IM-like applications.

Web-based technologies are often built to capitalize on the flexibility and fluidity that is supported by the internet, with the value of 'access anywhere' underpinning a blurring of boundaries across home and work. Yet the home is well known in HCI to have a unique set of qualities that can use-fully be drawn upon when designing to support domestic life. In this paper we ask what it means to design domestic web-connected technologies, placing the aesthetic and material properties intrinsic to the home and home life at the centre of our design exploration. We present three concepts that were selected and prototyped from a broader process of research-through-design: Tokens of Search provides tangible handles to web resources; Hole in Space connects the home intimately to a remote place; and Manhattan enables the tangible exploration of events in the community, putting the home at the centre. Discussions in the paper consider not only how aesthetics is articulated in the material and digital properties of the artefacts, but also how a consideration of the properties of the home can create a potentially new design space to explore.

For over 40 years the notion of the file, as devised by pioneers in the field of computing, has been the subject of much contention. Some have wanted to abandon the term altogether on the grounds that metaphors about files can confuse users and designers alike. More recently, the emergence of the 'cloud' has led some to suggest that the term is simply obsolescent. In this paper we want to suggest that, despite all these conceptual debates and changes in technology, the term file still remains central to systems architectures and to the concerns of users. Notwithstanding profound changes in what users do and technologies afford, we suggest that files continue to act as a cohering concept, something like a 'boundary object' between computer engineers and users. However, the effectiveness of this boundary object is now waning. There are increasing signs of slippage and muddle. Instead of throwing away the notion altogether, we propose that the definition of and use of files as a boundary object be reconstituted. New abstractions are needed, ones which reflect what users seek to do with their digital data, and which allow engineers to solve the networking, storage and data management problems that ensue when files move from the PC on to the networked world of today.

As the Kinect sensor is being extended from gaming to other applications and contexts, we critically examine what is the nature of the experience garnered through its current use in gaming in the home setting. Through an exploratory study of family experiences with Kinect in gaming, we discuss the character of the experience as one that entails users reveling in absurdity of movement that is required by the Kinect sensor. Through this analysis, we liken the 'third-space' defined by Kinect-based gestural interaction to that of Bakhtin's mocking gaze in the contexts of carnivals. This is followed by remarks on the implications this re-specification of understanding Kinect-enabled interaction has for the term 'natural' and relatedly the emphasis on the 'user' as 'the 'controller' in HCI. Remarks will be made on the implications of this for the application of the Kinect sensor to distributed gaming and other non-gaming interaction spaces in the home.

research-article On the naturalness of touchless: Putting the "interaction" back into NUI Authors: Kenton O'hara Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UKView Profile , Richard Harper Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UKView Profile , Helena Mentis Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UKView Profile , Abigail Sellen Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UKView Profile , Alex Taylor Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UKView Profile Authors Info & Claims ACM Transactions on Computer-Human InteractionVolume 20Issue 1March 2013 Article No.: 5pp 1–25https://doi.org/10.1145/2442106.2442111Published:11 April 2013Publication History 72citation2,167DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations72Total Downloads2,167Last 12 Months94Last 6 weeks9 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

Material artifacts are passed down as a way of sustaining relationships and family history. However, new issues are emerging as families are increasingly left with the digital remains of their loved ones. We designed three devices to investigate how digital materials might be passed down, lived with and inherited in the future. We conducted in-home interviews with 8 families using the devices to provoke discussion about how technology might support (or complicate) their existing practices. Sessions revealed families desired to treat their archives in ways not fully supported by technology as well as potential tensions that could emerge. Findings are interpreted to detail design considerations for future work in this emerging space.

People are amassing larger and more diverse collections of digital things. The emergence of Cloud computing has enabled people to move their personal files to online places, and create new digital things through online services. However, little is known about how this shift might shape people's orientations toward their digital things. To investigate, we conducted in depth interviews with 13 people comparing and contrasting how they think about their possessions, moving from physical ones, to locally kept digital materials, to the online world. Findings are interpreted to detail design and research opportunities in this emerging space.

We present findings from the deployment of a mobile application, Take and Give, which allows users to place image files in a virtual folder or 'Pocket' on a mobile phone. This content can be viewed by a set of 'Buddies', who can, if they wish, attempt to take ownership of a file for themselves, following which they can keep it, delete it, or place it in the Pocket of someone else. There is only one version of each file, creating a twist on traditional sharing technologies. We report findings from a three week trial of the application in an office space, and describe how Take and Give provided a means of self-presentation and supported a sense of awareness, mutual attentiveness and connectedness. Our findings suggest that the taking of unique content can be an engaging form of sharing and can facilitate awareness and connectedness between people.

This paper presents findings from a field study of 24 individuals who kept diaries of their web use, across device and location, for a period of four days. Our focus was on how the web was used for non-work purposes, with a view to understanding how this is intertwined with everyday life. While our initial aim was to update existing frameworks of 'web activities', such as those described by Sellen et al. [25] and Kellar et al. [14], our data lead us to suggest that the notion of 'web activity' is only partially useful for an analytic understanding of what it is that people do when they go online. Instead, our analysis leads us to present five modes of web use, which can be used to frame and enrich interpretations of 'activity'. These are respite, orienting, opportunistic use, purposeful use and lean-back internet. We then consider two properties of the web that enable it to be tailored to these different modes, persistence and temporality, and close by suggesting ways of drawing upon these qualities in order to inform design.

Photographic mementos are important signifiers of our personal memories. Rather than simply passive representations of memories to "preserved" memories, these photos of the past are actively displayed and consumed in the context of everyday behaviour and social practices. Within the context of these settings, these mementos are invoked in particular ways in order to mobilise particular social relations in the present. Taking this perspective, we explore how photo mementos come to be used in the everyday social setting of sharing meal providing a resource that can be mobilised for particular social relations in these settings. Rather than a simple concern with nutritional consumption, the shared meal is a social event and important cultural site in the organisation of family and social life with culturally specific rhythms, norms, rights and responsibilities. We present a system - 4 Photos - that situates photo mementos within the social concerns of these settings. The system collates photo mementos from those attending the meal and displays them at the dining table to be interacted with by all. Through a fieldwork deployment of the system we explore the social work performed by invoking these personal memory resources in the context of real world settings of shared eating. We highlight particular features of the system that enable this social work to be achieved.

With emerging opportunities for using Brain-Computer Interaction (BCI) in gaming applications, there is a need to understand the opportunities and constraints of this interaction paradigm. To complement existing laboratory-based studies, there is also a call for the study of BCI in real world contexts. In this paper we present such a real world study of a simple BCI game called MindFlex®, played as a social activity in the home. In particular, drawing on the philosophical traditions of embodied interaction, we highlight the importance of considering the body in BCI and not simply what is going on in the head. The study shows how people use bodily actions to facilitate control of brain activity but also to make their actions and intentions visible to, and interpretable by, others playing and watching the game. It is the public availability of these bodily actions during BCI that allows action to be socially organised, understood and coordinated with others and through which social relationships can be played out. We discuss the implications of this perspective and findings for BCI.

As more technologies enter the home, householders are burdened with the task of digital housekeeping-managing and sharing digital resources like bandwidth. In response to this, we created and evaluated a domestic tool for bandwidth management called Home Watcher. Our field trial showed that when resource contention amongst different household members is made visible, people's understanding of bandwidth changes and household politics are revealed. In this paper, we describe the consequences of showing real time resource usage in a home, and how this varies depending on the social make up of the household.

We present findings from a field study of Wayve, a situated messaging device for the home that incorporates handwriting and photography. Wayve was used by 24 households (some of whom were existing social networks of family and friends) over a three-month period. We consider the various types of playfulness that emerged during the study, both through the sending of Wayve messages and through the local display of photos and notes. The findings are explored in the context of the literature on play, with the aim of identifying aspects of Wayve's design, as well as the context in which it was used, that engendered playfulness. We also highlight the role of play in social relationships, before concluding with design implications.

While it can be a delicate and emotionally-laden topic, new technological trends compel us to confront a range of problems and issues about death and bereavement. This area presents complex challenges and the associated literature is extensive. In this paper we offer a way of slicing through several perspectives in the social sciences to see clearly a set of salient issues related to bereavement. Following this, we present a theoretical lens to provide a way of conceptualizing how the HCI community could begin to approach such issues. We then report field evidence from 11 in-depth interviews conducted with bereaved participants and apply the proposed lens to unpack key emergent problems and tensions. We conclude with a discussion on how the HCI design space might be sensitized to better support the social processes that unfold when bereavement occurs.

Shake2Talk is a mobile messaging system that allows users to send sounds and tactile sensations to one another via their mobile phones. Messages are created through gestures and then sent to the receiver's phone where they play upon arrival. This paper reports a study of the Shake2Talk system in use by six couples, and begins to uncover the types of messaging practices that occur, and the values and meanings that users ascribe to these messages.

This paper offers an exploration of the attitudes of older adults to keeping in touch with people who are important to them. We present findings from three focus groups with people from 55 to 81 years of age. Themes emerging from the findings suggest that older adults view the act of keeping in touch as being worthy of time and dedication, but also as being something that needs to be carefully managed within the context of daily life. Communication is seen as a means through which skill should be demonstrated and personality expressed, and is understood in a very different context to the lightweight interaction that is increasingly afforded by new technologies. The themes that emerged are used to elicit a number of design implications and to promote some illustrative design concepts for new communication devices.

In this paper we describe VPlay, a multi-touch tabletop application that allows users to mix and manipulate multiple video streams in real-time. Our aim is to explore how such an interactive surface can support and augment practices around VJing - a form of video performance art that is becoming increasingly popular in nightclubs and other music events. We conclude with observations from a field deployment, which highlight some initial thoughts and reflections on our design rationale.

In this paper, we describe the design and ethnographic study of a phone developed so as to allow people to glance at each other, rather than simply message or voice call. Glancephones work through having a form factor that allows them to be placed upright when a user wants to be available for glancing, and support a web-based application that allows glances, bitmap images, to be taken and sent to a remote viewer on request, via GPRS connections. Glancephones were originally invented to allow callers to see if it is appropriate to call or interrupt and thus act like normal glances in face-to-face situations. Ethnographic studies of the use indicate that people prefer using the devices not to support greeting sequences, however, but to enable others to glance at them. It was found that Glacephones were used to draw attention to oneself, not to encourage better control of interruption and greeting sequences. The paper uses this data to remark on the concepts of human expression that underscore much of the research reported in Mobile HCI, and it proposes Bourdieu's concepts of habitus and relatedly, distinction, as explanatory tools for this and other evidence about expression enabled by mobile and other technologies of communication.

SenseCam is an automatic wearable camera, often seen as a tool for the creation of digital memories. In this paper, we report findings from a field trial in which SenseCams were worn by household members over the course of a week. In interviews with these users, it became apparent that the way in which SenseCam images were played back, the manner of which might be described as a stilted movie, affected the values that were realised within them. The time-lapse nature of the image stream led participants to romanticise the mundane and find sentimentality in unexpected places, and was particularly effective at portraying personality and play. In so doing, SenseCam images enlivened the visual recording of everyday scenes. These values influenced what the participants sought to capture and view, and have implications for technologies that might support lifelogging or the development of user-generated content.

This paper reports the trial of a wearable data capture device, SenseCam, as a resource for digital narratives and uses data from the trial to reflect on the models of the 'mind' that underscore HCI. More particularly, over a period of one week, 5 participants and 2 researchers used SenseCams to capture digital traces of their experiences, and used the same to create 'story telling' materials for presentation at a workshop at the end of the trial. The study found that all users delighted in the devices, but found that the traces that SenseCams produced were not analogues to their own memory. Instead, SenseCam data presented a picture of daily lives which was at once different to the one recollected by participants and yet brought a sense of wonder, depth and felt-life that was strangely enriching; furthermore, SenseCam data enabled participants to create artistic and evocative stories about prosaic activities that would not normally merit being recounted; and finally, SenseCam data could be used to tell parables about 'life' and hence about the characters in those parables. The paper will comment on the implications these findings have for digital narrative technologies, on concepts of memory prosthesis devices, the sociology of memory and for the concept of mind that underscores HCI.

Food is a central part of our lives. Fundamentally, we need food to survive. Socially, food is something that brings people together-individuals interact through and around it. Culturally, food practices reflect our ethnicities and nationalities. Given the importance of food in our daily lives, it is important to understand what role technology currently plays and the roles it can be imagined to play in the future. In this paper we describe the existing and potential design space for HCI in the area of human-food interaction. We present ideas for future work on designing technologies in the area of human-food interaction that celebrate the positive interactions that people have with food as they eat and prepare foods in their everyday lives.

In this article, we examine the containment of clutter in family homes and, from this, outline considerations for design. Selected materials from an ethnographically informed study of home life are used to detail the ways in which families contain their clutter in bowls and drawers. Clutter, within these containers, is found to be made up of a heterogeneous collection of things that, for all manner of reasons, hold an ambiguous status in the home. It is shown that bowls and drawers provide a “safe” site of containment for clutter, giving the miscellany of content the “space” to be properly dealt with and classified, or to be left unresolved. The shared but idiosyncratic practices families use to contain their clutter are seen to be one of the ways in which the home, or at least the idea of home, is collectively produced. It is also part of the means by which families come to make their homes distinct and unique. These findings are used to consider what it might mean to design for the home, and to do so in ways that are sensitive to the idiosyncratic systems of household organization. In conclusion, thought is given to how we design for people's ideas of home, and how we might build sites of uncertainty into homes, where physical as well as digital things might coalesce.

Mobile search is becoming an increasingly important user activity. In this paper, instead of investigating the most efficient and effective ways of providing search results, the answers, we consider the value of giving access to previous queries, the questions, relating to a user's location. By exposing what other people have searched for, the aim is to provide useful insights into a location's character. To consider the value of the approach we deployed two mobile probes in a large-scale field study involving 391 participants. Our experiences suggest that presenting users with other people's in situ queries influences their information seeking interactions positively.

In this paper we elucidate the patterns of behavior of home movie makers through a study of 12 families and a separate focus group of 7 teenagers. Analogous to a similar study of photowork [13], the goal is to provide a deeper understanding of what people currently do with video technologies, balancing the preponderence of techno-centric work in the area with appropriate user-centric insight. From our analysis, we derive a videowork lifecycle to frame the practices users engage in when working with video technologies in the home, and uncover two broad types of video usage therein. This has implications for how we conceive of and devise tools to support these practices, as we discuss.

There is much interest in providing effective mobile search tools. Our focus is the value of in-situ sharing of users' mobile search activity. The QnotA prototype displays other people's queries about locations in an attempt to both provide users with an enriched sense of the places they visit, and to accommodate the limited input and output capabilities of many mobile platforms. We present the prototype and user experiences it affords. A study has been performed which allowed us to gather logged usage data and subjective participant information via diary and interview protocols. We report on findings that give insights as to the use and usefulness of the approach.

In this paper, we report, first of all, the discovery of a particular kind of emerging social practice involving the exchange of multimedia content on mobiles that we label 'trafficking'. Second, the iteration of a design solution to extend these practices to include the trafficking of broadcast TV content 'segments'. Third, the implications this had for basic assumptions in the interaction design afforded by the two primary OS's in the mobile handset domain. And, fourth, the legal and business inhibitors-enablers that affected not only this research but which are likely to affect all attempts to stretch the capacity of mobile devices and mobile interaction design to afford new ways of 'trafficking' multimedia content.

This paper will describe a novel interaction technique that allows mobile phone users to create and share contextualised media packages between their personal, BlueTooth enabled camera phones, and situated public displays. Unlike other solutions to this problem, the one presented in this paper does not require any specialist software or hardware on the user's handset. We believe this technique has the potential to revolutionise how people donate and retrieve digital media files without incurring any direct cost.

In this paper we describe a field trial designed to investigate the potential of remote, situated messaging within the home. Five households used our "HomeNote" device for approximately a month. The results show a diversity of types of communication which highlight the role of messaging both to a household and to a place. It also shows the ways in which these kinds of messages enable subtle ways of requesting action, expressing affection, and marking identity in a household -- communication types which have received little attention in the research literature. These in turn point to new concepts for technology which we describe.

In this paper, we demonstrate how ethnographic fieldwork studies can be used to inform the design of third generation mobile phones. We draw on a field study of teenage mobile phone users and, specifically, their participation in gift-giving practices to design the user interface and form of a concept mobile phone. The concept device is designed to support teenagers' social practices through a novel multimedia messaging system and the augmentation of the phone's address book. We report on the process adopted to design the concept and briefly describe preliminary reactions from potential users. To conclude the paper, we comment on the lessons we have learnt in applying ethnographic findings to design.

In this paper, we present an overview of the data collected from an ethnographic study of teenagers and their use of mobile phones. Through the data, we suggest that teenagers use their phones to participate in social practices that closely resemble forms of ritualised gift-giving. Such practices, we claim, shape the way teenagers understand and thus use their phones. We go onto show that this insight into everyday, phone-mediated activities has practical implications for mobile phone design. Using an example, we describe how teenagers' gift-giving practices can inform design, providing an initial means to conceptualise future emerging technologies

This paper presents detailed examples of document use and re-use, through an ethnographic study of the knowledge work associated with road safety audit in a civil engineering consultancy The paper incorporates some detailed observation of practices, conversations, and other activities occurring around document re-use in everyday work. It outlines some aspects of the everyday use and re-use of engineering documents in the practical accomplishment of everyday knowledge work as the first stage in considering how these activities can be technologically supported.

The rapid and accelerating move towards use of mobile technologies has increasingly provided people and organizations with the ability to work away from the office and on the move. The new ways of working afforded by these technologies are often characterized in terms of access to information and people anytime, anywhere. This article presents a study of mobile workers that highlights different facets ofaccessto remote people and information, and different facets ofanytime, anywhere. Four key factors in mobile work are identified: the role of planning, working in "dead time," accessing remote technological and informational resources, and monitoring the activities of remote colleagues. By reflecting on these issues, we can better understand the role of technology and artifacts in mobile work and identify the opportunities for the development of appropriate technological solutions to support mobile workers.

We report on an examination of work practice in a knowledge-based, document-intensive organisation and describe the role of paper in that work.We show how such an examination can provide a resource for (1 ) the dclcrnlinalion 01 sys(cm design modifications that can bc undcr[akcn in the short term; (2) (hc (tctermination of entirely new systems design requiring longer term research and development; and (3) helping to specify where paper will ctmlinuc 10 Ix! uwd in Iu(urc cloCUlllCl}l-rCl iltC[l work praclicc.

We show how an ethnographic examination of the International Monetary Fund in Washington, D.C. has implications for the design of tools to support collaborative work.First, it reports how information that requires a high degree of professional judgement in its production is unsuited for most current groupware tools.This is contrasted with the shareability of information which can 'stand-alone'.Second, it reports how effective re-use of documents will necessarily involve paper, or 'paper-like' equivalents.Both issues emphasise the need to take into account social processes in the sharing of certain kinds of information.

This paper reports findings from ongoing examinations into the social organization of research laboratories. Two case studies are discussed, and it is suggested that although there are differences between the two sites, commonalities are shown in their hierarchical nature and in the status of researchers. It is argued that researchers form a professional group with all that entails in terms of rights and privileges. More generally it is argued that the social organization of research laboratories is resistant to change. The consequences of this on the testing and development of systems that have the potential to transform hierarchical relations is briefly discussed and how this resistance and its causes differentiate research laboratories from other work places remarked.

The paper reports findings from a sociological examination of the use of ‘active badge’ location information systems in two research laboratories. The use, distribution and control of location information is examined in reference to the social roles individuals have in what will be called the ‘moral order’ of workplaces. Suggestions for subsequent versions of location systems are made, and the use of sociological methods in design remarked.