Being Social @ Work: Designing for Playfully Mediated Social Awareness in Work Environments

D.M. Vyas, M.R. van de Watering, A.P.W. Eliëns, G.C. van der Veer

Research output: Chapter in Book / Report / Conference proceedingChapterAcademicpeer-review

Abstract

Awareness within work environments should not be seen limited to important work-related information, activities and relationships. Mediating somewhat casual and engaging encounters related to non-work issues could also lead to meaningful and pleasurable experiences. This paper explores a design approach to support playfully mediated social awareness within an academic environment. Using ethnographic exploration and understanding the current and aspired practices, we provide details of two broad (and some times overlapping) categories of interaction for supporting and enhancing playfully mediated social awareness amongst staff members: 1) Self-Reflections and 2) Casual Encounters. We implement these two categories of interaction in an intelligent, asynchronous, large screen display called Panorama, for the staff room of our computer science department. Panorama attempts to mediate noncritical, non-work related information about the staff-members in an engaging manner to enhance social awareness within the department. We particularly emphasize on the soft design issues like reflections, belonging, care, pleasure and playfulness utilized in our design approach. The result of a two-phase assessment study suggests that our conceptualization of social awareness and the Panorama application has the potential to be easily incorporated into our academic environment.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationHOIT 2007: Home Informatics and Telematics: ICT for the Next Billion
EditorsA. Venkatesh, T. Gonzalves, A. Monk, K. Buckner
PublisherSpringer
Pages113-131
Number of pages19
ISBN (Electronic)9780387736976
ISBN (Print)9780387736969, 9781441944702
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2008

Publication series

NameIFIP — The International Federation for Information Processing book series (IFIPAICT)
PublisherIFIP
Volume241

Bibliographical note

Eliëns07b ISBN: 978-0-387-73696-9

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