UbiSoc: Designing with a Social vs. Individual focus

In our breakout group, we elicited examples from others? work in ubicomp where designing with a social context focus reveals some current design assumptions for the individual.  We tried to also elicit strategies for how to encourage a social design focus, but some issues were raised without solutions.  

+ UI for devices where multiple people may need to access the same device, leading to problems in concurrent use and contention for shared resources.  This situation presents the classic CSCW dilemma:
- Could enforce an access control policy, where the computer decides who can use what, when, but that can sometimes feel very restrictive and frustrate what users want to do at certain times.
- Share awareness of who wants to access what, when, enabling social protocols to negotiate sharing, but that can reveal information that is potentially sensitive.

This discussion raised the TiVo design, which for simplicity lumps all users of a TV into a ?family?, grouping together any input or recommended program services to be shared by all users of the TV.  I later shared two favorite TiVo stories I?ve heard:
- After a college-age son returns home for Spring break and uses the TV, TiVo begins to recommend ?racy? shows appealing to a young male?s interests
- An English-speaking TiVo user was baffled about why TiVo kept recommending Spanish-speaking programs, until concluding that his Spanish-speaking house cleaner uses the TV while working in the home.

+ The programmable thermostat in the home is often programmed by one role of the family (often the father) but is routinely manually overridden by other family members.  One solution is that a shared goal (e.g., efficient use of energy) may need to have tailored motivations that are different for each individual (e.g., saving money, environmental benefits of conserving energy, comfort during waking hours at the expense of lesser comfort during sleep).

+ Being aware of status relationships within a social group.  Even the family dog is very discerning about the power relationships within a family (knows who to go to for certain requests and who to listen to in the end).  Challenge to build in this kind of discernment of roles and relationships in ubicomp technology and how it reacts to different people (especially if there are conflicting requests).

+ Current workaround?some role context is encoded in the way we socially give out contact info.  For example, we give out a work phone number, a home phone number, and perhaps a cell phone number to suggest what kinds of interactions would be appropriate for each number (even if they all get routed to the same device!)  Similarly, we often have several different email addresses or IM screennames that we selectively use in ways that appeal to role contexts.  This approach essentially turns individuals into a collective of different roles (even designing for the individual can have social implications).

+ Email seems to be designed around passing messages from one individual to another.  While email distribution lists have emerged, an email message is almost always from a single sender (some email messages are conceptually sent by an organization, but that seems like an expedient fiction).  This raised the question, how could a wedding invitation (which is implicitly extended from more than one person) be delivered by email?
+ Current email clients do not support tracking who else received the email message that I got (user has to track from memory based on who else was in the To: field).  In this sense, email clients overlook a social use of email.  

+ Observation from the research presented on phatic technologies?while deeply appreciated in sustaining the sociability of direct stakeholders, phatic interactions could be rather annoying to bystanders in the surrounding social context.  In the extreme, ?public displays of affection? are a phatic interaction done in a social context, which could get even more perplexing if a person in a public place is virtually ?making out? with a remote partner.  Phatic technologies would need to account for the social context to ensure that the participants can appropriately have phatic interactions in that social context.

+ Does ubicomp raise new questions in the tension between individual liberty vs. social good?

+ How do we measure individual and social costs and trade them off against individual and social benefits?

As you can see, most of the examples were drawn from the use of rather traditional technologies that could be considered pre-cursors of ubiquitous computing.  The point was to recognize how a design focus for the individual creates issues with technologies that we are familiar with in our own use to emphasize the need to project a social concern in the design of future ubicomp technologies.