Putting Systems into Place: A Study of Design Requirements for Location-Aware Community Systems

Samer Karam, Sukeshini A. Grandhi, Quentin Jones, Loren Terveen and Steve Whittaker. Putting Systems into Place: A Study of Design Requirements for Location-Aware Community Systems. Poster at UbiComp04

A poster to present a conceptual framework on how socially-defined places influence people’s information sharing and communication needs. The authors argue that system design must factor in userrs’ activities and social networks, alongside place. They present the P3-Systems conceptual framework organizes the design space and location-aware systems into mainly People-Centered and Place-Centered systems. People-Centered systems employ user location to support awareness, while Place-Centered systems link virtual spaces to physical locations.

From the findings of the study some implication for design can be extracted:

• Place alone does not determine information needs; user routines and social relationships must be integrated
• While people are willing, to share their location information with others, for a seamless user experience the relationships between users, places, and their social networks will have to be simultaneously taken into account.

A full paper was later published:
Jones, Q., Grandhi, S. A., Whittaker, S., Chivakula, K., and Terveen, L. 2004. Putting systems into place: a qualitative study of design requirements for location-aware community systems. In Proceedings of the 2004 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (Chicago, Illinois, USA, November 06 – 10, 2004). CSCW ’04. ACM Press, New York, NY, 202-211.

Relation to my thesis: Study on the type users’ social networks and activity beyond place as determinant location information. I inspired myself from the people/place-centered distinction of location-aware systems for UbiComp06. The authors also categories location-aware systems accoding to absolute/relative positioning, user activity/virtual space, and synchronous and asynchronous

The here a reference to Context-Aware Experience Life Sampling Methods (CAES) that I should dig into to run my second experiment:
Intille, S. S., Tapia, E. M., Rondoni, J., Beaufin, J., Kukla, C., Agarwal, S., Bao, L., and Larson, K., (2003). Tools for Studying Behavior and Technology in Natural Settings. UbiComp 2003.

as well as:
Jones, Q., Grandhi, S. A., Whittaker, S., Chivakula, K., and Terveen, L. 2004. Putting systems into place: a qualitative study of design requirements for location-aware community systems. In Proceedings of the 2004 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (Chicago, Illinois, USA, November 06 – 10, 2004). CSCW ’04. ACM Press, New York, NY, 202-211.