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.

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.

We present findings from a study of Tokens of Search, a system comprising physical RFID "tokens" that point to web content, and a wooden tray fixed to a small screen, which can be used to access that content. Three families lived with the system for a month, as an exploration of how tokens might be used as resources for practical action. Our findings highlight existing web practices and their individual and collective nuances; tokens were employed in the creation of short-term collections and long-lasting mementos, their physicality giving bookmarking a visibility that could be used to attract attention, serve as reminders, and make observable progress through tasks. However, while all families saw the potential for shared use, only one used it this way in earnest. We reflect on design choices that were expected to encourage collaboration, and the need to support key users such as parents when establishing joint practices.

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.

This paper develops vocabulary to discuss the phenomena related to the new design paradigm, which considers designing as a situated and constructive activity of meaning making rather than as problem solving. The paper studies how design projects proceed from the fuzzy early phases towards the issues of central relevance to designing. A central concept is framing, and it is elaborated with examples from two case studies. Several aspects of framing are explicated, exploratory, anticipatory and social framing, and related concepts of 'focusing', 'priming', and 'grounding' are explained. The paper concludes that understanding designing as a situated and constructive making of meaning has bearings on how designing needs to be supported.