ComSlipper: an expressive design to support awareness and availability
From ThesisWiki
Contents |
Authors
Chun-Yi Chen, Jodi Forlizzi, Pamela Jennings
Overview
The ComSlipper is an augmented everyday object that allows the wearer to use body gesture and tactile manipulation to feel and express emotions and availability to distance loved ones. The project seems to have grown out of an interest in awareness and presence, and the target group chosen for this was couples in an intimate relationship living at a distance.
The authors did research about current products, created a framework of awareness based on user research, and prototyped a solution. The ComSlipper takes the form of a normal slipper but it is augmented to allow certain foot-based gestures and touches to send a signal to a corresponding pair of slippers at a distance. Output includes warmth, vibration, and light.
Reflection
I think it's interesting that this is an everyday item, augmented with new capabilities, rather than a completely new object. That duality does raise issues though -- does the person have to have two pairs of slippers, one for when they aren't available? The authors note that not much work has been done with everyday devices acting as both ambient and interactive objects. This notion of ambient + interactive has come up numerous times. Ideally ambiance is not only output.
The authors make reference to Erving Goffman's work, which I had brought up before in relationship to phatic communication. Anything involving presence can no doubt draw from Goffman. I'm interested in availability, but not as a sole theme. I'm also interested in how presence is maintained in absence -- when one person is not available -- which is particularly important when people are separated by space and time on completely different schedules.
The strongest strength of the expressive language afforded by the ComSlipper is it's integration into existing gestures, perhaps even communicating without explicit "sending". Each pattern is tied to a particular meaning or emotion, which might end up being limiting. In other works I've seen how abstract and ambiguous communication may have more adaptive use as people create their own meaning based on context. Of course I suppose there's nothing stopping them from doing that here either, the input and output is still fairly ambiguous.
