1 Introduction

Research is increasingly drawing attention to the fact that designing technologies for the home is and should be a very different kind of undertaking from designing for the workplace. Work within the field of Human–Computer Interaction shows how the relationships, roles and activities of people within the home differ strongly from those in the workplace (e.g. Hutchinson et al., 2003; O’Brien and Rodden, 1997; Plaisant et al., 2006; Taylor and Swan, 2005). Other studies highlight the fact that the value of information technology in the home must be thought of more broadly and quite differently from technology in the workplace, such as in a more open-ended, less task-focused way (e.g. Gaver et al., 2006; Sellen et al., 2006b). This means not only that some office-based technologies may be simply inappropriate in a home environment but also that there may be unexpected difficulties when transferring such technologies across domains. For example, transferring networking technology from the office to the home has uncovered a host of novel difficulties and problems (Sheehan and Edwards, 2007). In addition, because relationships amongst individuals in the home are significantly different from relationships in the workplace, notions of privacy, security and identity are also fundamentally different in the two contexts. For example, the meanings of “privacy” in the home, particularly in the context of adolescent children, are richly interwoven with other issues such as the expression of identity in a family setting (March and Fleuriot, 2006).

One implication of this is that awareness systems too, with their early roots in workplace domains, should be conceptualized and developed differently for home settings. There have been, of course, in recent times, many interesting research projects which have begun to examine and build awareness systems for the home. Many have explored lightweight and inventive ways of connecting extended family members across households. Such projects include concepts which involve transmitting quite abstract kinds of data through simple tactile gestures (Hindus et al., 2001; Hutchinson et al., 2003; Strong and Gaver, 1996) or through messaging (Hutchinson et al., 2003; Romero et al., 2007). Others have looked at the use of simple movement sensors within the home to connect elderly people with their distributed families (Consolvo et al., 2004; Mynatt et al., 2001). Common to these systems is that they aim to help bind friends and family together remotely and help people who are geographically separated feel more connected. Such systems also tend to involve ambient, situated devices that are interacted with in a peripheral way within the home environment.

The work reported here takes a somewhat different tack in focusing on how household members might connect with their own homes through an awareness device. Additionally, we focus on the use of location information of family members outside the house as a way to do so. Using this approach, we aim to deepen our understanding of the potential of technology to provide awareness of location and how this is transformed and used within the domestic environment. Thus one goal of this research is to build on previous work in awareness systems to further define what supporting awareness might mean for home life and to open up new kinds of technical possibilities as a result.

However, the results of this research also have implications more generally for ubiquitous computing or “Ubicomp” (Weiser, 1991). The use of location data in developing location-based services and devices is of course an extremely active area of research within the Ubicomp community. Here, the technical problems involved in tracking individuals and devices have generated a rich body of research (e.g. Anderson and Muller, 2006; Chen et al., 2006), as has the potential for new applications based on an awareness of one’s own and others’ geographical position (e.g. Brown et al., 2005; Harper et al., 1992; Romero et al., 2007). Studies of these systems have generated a range of issues for design, in particular how location awareness can conflict with privacy needs (e.g. Consolvo et al., 2005; Iachello et al., 2005). In studying how a different kind of location-based system, namely one situated in the home, is used, we additionally hope to offer a new perspective on the kinds of issues that Ubicomp has become concerned with. For more details of this discussion, see Brown et al. (2007).

The research we report in this chapter focuses on a device called the “Whereabouts Clock” (from here on referred to as “the Clock” or “the WAC”). The WAC is distinct in some sense in that it blurs the boundaries between awareness systems in the home and tracking applications. Specifically, we deliberately designed the WAC to offer less functionality than many existing tracking systems – communicating location with less accuracy than existing systems (such as GPS systems) and displaying information only within the home environment. In this sense, the WAC was more like a low-bandwidth awareness system than a tracking system. Further, similar to many of the home awareness systems we have discussed, the WAC was also designed as a situated device, to be attended to at a glance and in the periphery of attention within the home environment.

We present results from a field trial of the Clock with five families (26 users) over a total period of 6 months. As we will show, awareness, at least as demonstrated through the Clock, was not really about communicating geographical location or even activity. Rather it was about displaying information to support what families already know about each other and already share. More specifically, the value of the Clock came as much from the reassurance that knowing things are as one expects them to be as it did from dealing with exceptions or changing plans. This, we argue, is part and parcel of family life. Part of the “work” of being a family is to know what goes on and to know how things are. With the WAC, families were able to use location information to demonstrate their care for and attention to each other.

Drawing on this we argue that the design of awareness systems needs to take into account what awareness might mean in a family context. This study shows that awareness is a multi-faceted concept, playing into many important aspects of family life. It also shows how location awareness, as part of family life, is an emotional and moral affair as much as it is a tool for coordination or practicality. This opens up new technological possibilities for supporting home and family life.

2 Related Work

This work draws on the substantial body of research in the social sciences that investigates home and family life. Broadly, our ideas have been influenced by research that takes seriously the “work” put into the social organization of the family home. The underlying basis of this position is that family homes are not magically ordered places but rather places that take work to craft and sustain. Time, and often thought and care, is put into tidying, cleaning, feeding, planning, coordinating and generally ordering the household and its inhabitants so that it comes to feel like a home, at least to those who live there (e.g. Cowan, 1983; DeVault, 1994; Martin, 1984; Wood and Beck, 1994). Even a family’s forms of talk – their negotiations, arguments, teasings, displays of affections and so on – play into this “doing” of family and home (Aronsson, 2006). Key here is the idea that the home’s order is not always intentionally worked on. In a prosaic fashion, it is the everyday domestic chores, routines and so on that give shape to a home or, more specifically, the home as an idea or ideal (Douglas, 1991). Home is thus actively produced, a practical accomplishment of the ordinary and taken-for-granted doings and comings and goings of its members – their rituals and rhythms, if you will (Gubrium, 1988; Highmore, 2004).

As we have suggested, the presented work can be similarly located in research within the Human–Computer Interaction and UbiComp literature that has gradually sought to examine home and family life in detail. To list just a few examples, there is relatively early work on social communication practices in the home (Hindus et al., 2001) and similarly focused research from Crabtree and Rodden (2004) in which they examine domestic communication routines. Grinter and colleagues (2005) have tended to concentrate on, in the main, the practicalities of technology adoption and use in the home, but their studies of home networks do reveal how family members can understand and orient themselves towards technology in different ways. Recently, a small trend has emerged in studying aspects of home life that are culturally specific (e.g. Bell and Dourish, 2007; Woodruff et al., 2007). Although distinct in many ways, what this range of work has in common and what we broadly aim to incorporate in this chapter is a careful consideration of how technology plays into the social organization of the home, how, in short, it can both shape and be shaped by the social context it is situated in.

With regard to the underlying design of the technology, the WAC sits at the cross-section of location-based services and situated displays. As well as a longstanding research topic, there are now a number of commercial location-based services available in the marketplace, many of which provide a variety of ways of monitoring children and friends. For example, many cellphone service providers and operators are now leveraging location information as value-added services for their customers. Sprint’s FINDME and Helio’s Buddy Beacon (Hamilton, 2007) allow people to locate other cellphone users in the same network cell. Other social networking systems, such as Dodgeball (www.dodgeball.com), use text messaging to help people locate friends who are geographically nearby without relying on operator support. Some of these systems have a fringe following of dedicated users, but most are far from widespread. Many factors have impacted the broad adoption of these systems, including privacy concerns, technical issues, lack of a user base and more general usability issues with the technology.

Location and user tracking are also prevalent areas of research in the Ubicomp and mobile computing literature. An early example was the Active Badge system, originally concerned with the ways in which the capture of real-time location information could support life within office buildings (Harper et al., 1992). More recently, with advances in wireless networks, many different kinds of applications have been developed, but more centred on the consumer than on the office or the mobile worker. Some use location as a way of delivering context-sensitive information to tourists and shoppers (Brown et al., 2005). Others are more properly called “tracking applications” in that they focus on the delivery of location information itself. Popular applications here include ways of supporting gaming, friendship and family (Smith et al., 2005). Further, because of the potentially sinister connotations of “tracking” or “monitoring”, much of this research is preoccupied with aspects of privacy (Iachello et al., 2005). Common to all of these applications is that location information is typically delivered to the same hand-held devices that generate that information (such as to cellphones or PDAs).

In contrast, the situated display literature reports an altogether different set of concerns, many of which have to do with the use of large displays designed to support community, whether it be in corporate life or urban settings (O’Hara et al., 2003). A few have explored ways of presenting information about location, but these do not normally relate to real-time data, confining themselves instead to calendar-based information, where, for example, grandparents are offered views of events affecting their grandchildren (Mynatt et al., 2001).

The separation of these two literatures can be linked to the different affordances being leveraged in each case: for the location-based services literature, it tends to be about the production and display of accurate information “on the hoof”, where having that information in hand is paramount. For the situated display literature, the topic is how the persistent and “at-a-glance” display of information provides benefits in locations where the information is public or shared and is stable through time. In this research, the WAC brings these two sets of concerns together by combining the use of situated displays that afford persistent, at-a-glance access to information with the dynamic, real-time production of that information.

3 Designing a Location Awareness System for the Family

The idea of a clock displaying location rather than time is one that fans of Harry Potter will instantly recognize. In J.K. Rowling’s books, the “Weasley” family has a magic clock with hands for each member of the family indicating their location or state. Partly inspired by this vision, we became convinced that designing a situated device with clock-like properties had some compelling affordances that helped to turn a “tracking” system into something more akin to a situated awareness device. The clock metaphor thus guided many of the major design decisions:

First, we wanted the WAC to be a situated display designed to be located in a place in the home (like the kitchen) where it becomes part of the routine of family life, much as a clock does. We wanted the interface to let families see information “at a glance”; that is, without time spent turning the device on or changing the settings to view its status. This meant that the WAC’s display would be “always on”, persisting in the periphery of vision in the way that information on a clock persists.

Again, as with a clock, we wanted the WAC to broadcast information to anyone in sight of the device (as opposed to a watch, for example, which is a personal device). However, although we wanted such information to be “publicly available” within the house, we decided that it should not be viewed remotely. This decision was one of our attempts to deal with the privacy issues that plague location-based systems and meant that only people entitled to be in the home would be able to see the device. This would act as a crude, yet very straightforward, form of access control, which we thought would help to allay families’ concerns about privacy (even though, as we discuss later, this concern was perhaps overplayed in our design).

Lastly, we wanted the WAC to display only coarse-grained information (i.e. it shows only that a family member is at “home”, at “work”, at “school” or in an unlabelled region meaning “out” or “elsewhere”). We reasoned that for much of family life, precise location is not necessary: planning a meal, knowing someone is on their way home or being reassured a child is at school can be done with a relatively crude indication of location. Precise information might also be more intrusive of people’s privacy. While this aspect is not necessarily clock-like, we felt it to be an important aspect of its design. The WAC in a sense gives as little information about location as possible, rather than striving for accuracy or richness in what it communicates.

In developing the WAC, we iterated through a number of different interfaces and physical forms in order to produce a prototype that families would be drawn to and want to have in their homes. An important step was an internal trial with an early version of the Clock that we tested with our own work group (Sellen et al., 2006). Another key step was to take early versions of the Clock home to try out over extended periods of time in our own households. As a result of this early testing, we made many refinements both to the underlying technology and to the design. However, the essential nature of its design, including the use of the clock metaphor, remained unchanged.

Figure 18.1 shows the final design of the WAC. The Clock itself is displayed on a tablet PC with touch input encased in a box made to look similar to that of a mantelpiece clock. The tablet is wirelessly connected via a GSM modem to a cellular network. In addition, a small physical “flap” hides softkeys for controlling both the volume of the Clock’s chimes and the brightness of the display; a moving “pendulum” also showing signal strength. The Clock interface presents an animated representation of family location where members of the household are represented by icons linked to the location of their cellphones. Because we wanted engagement with the device to require minimal effort on the part of users from day to day, users have only to switch on their cellphones and the bespoke application starts running. When this happens, each user’s icon appears bright and animated (appearing to “float” within each zone). If a user switches off either the application or the phone, their icon fades and becomes static. The WAC uses GSM cell ID available on cellphones to provide the location data. In this version, participants used Windows Mobile Smartphones running a custom client application (usually in addition to their own phones).

Fig. 18.1
figure 18_1_182498_1_En

Whereabouts Clock in its case (a), the interface (b), close-up of message window (c)

Full size image

When at home, work or school, users need to first register or label these zones on their phones through a simple menu in the phone application. Upon registration, the Smartphone application records the underlying cell tower IDs within the proximity for that particular zone. Whenever the phone is switched on, the application continually scans for cell towers in range and maps the ID with strongest match onto a registered zone (indicating it as “out” if no zone has been registered for that ID). Updates are sent via SMS to the WAC display whenever the application determines that a person has moved from one registered zone to another. When this occurs, the Clock chimes to draw the attention to the move. After registering or labelling certain key locations using the phone as one of the three named zones, there is no further need to interact with the application. However, users were told that if they wanted they could change at any time what places they had set for the three different labels of “home”, “work” and “school”. For example, they could re-register any place as “school”.

A final feature of the Clock was the ability for family members to send text messages from their cellphones to the Clock at home, a feature we added as a result of our initial trials. When a new text message arrives, the first couple of words rotate around the icon of the person who sent it and its arrival is signalled by the sound of a cuckoo clock. People at home can then touch the icon, and a window appears showing the whole message, time it was sent and labelled location from which it was sent. With this window open, users can also look back at past messages and delete unwanted ones. As a final part of the design, to include family members without cellphones (such as small children), we added icons which could be moved by hand and which played random animations and sounds when touched.

4 Trial Method

Our approach was to deploy the Clock into only a few households and observe its use over an extended period of time in order to see how households might adapt to and appropriate this new technology. We installed the Clock in five family homes for a period of at least 1 month with each family. Two of the families were particularly enthusiastic about the technology, so we left the Clocks with them for 2 months. In total, we ended up studying 26 family members with use ranging anywhere from 4 to 9 weeks. Households were selected from the local Cambridge area in which at least three members of the family owned cellphones and which had established practice of “texting” (or sending SMS messages) via their cellphones to each other. The households we selected cut across socioeconomic class and were idiosyncratic in many respects:

  1. •

    Household A consisted of two parents with two boys, aged 11 and 13, and a lodger in his twenties. All had cellphones. The mother worked at a local school in Cambridge. The father, a vicar, lived 3 days a week in his parish vicarage in north London (an hour’s drive away), but the main family home was in Cambridge. The youngest son was in boarding school during the week in Cambridge, coming home only on weekends. The other son attended the local secondary school. The Clock was installed in the Cambridge house.

  2. •

    Household B consisted of two parents with two boys aged 11 and 18 and one daughter aged 17, all living at home. The mother worked in teaching support and part-time for a local charity, and the father worked as an aerospace manager, having a long commute to and from work. The children were all at school. All three, but particularly the eldest two, were very active and relatively independent from the rest of the family.

  3. •

    Household C consisted of two parents (a nurse and an IT consultant) and four children, a young boy aged 9, an older boy aged 12 (who lived with his mother outside the home we studied), a daughter aged 15 and a daughter aged 17, who had just started university in a different town, but who came home outside term time.

  4. •

    Household D was a family of five: two parents, two daughters and one son (aged 13 and 15 years and 10 months, respectively). The father worked full-time in technical support at a small company and the mother part-time from home, welding parts onto circuit boards. Compared to the rest of the households, this family had the most unvaried routine. The daughters attended a nearby school and reported no extracurricular activities. The mother spent most weekdays at home looking after her young son and housekeeping.

  5. •

    Household E consisted of two retired parents and one 18-year-old son living at home. Two WAC-enabled phones were also given to this family’s 22-year-old daughter and her boyfriend, who lived together several miles away. The father spent much of his time at home, while the mother walked the household dog several miles each day and spent time gardening, either at home or in a garden allotment some distance from the house. The son was in the last year of high school and also worked part-time. The daughter worked locally and would visit several times a week after work and before returning to her boyfriend’s. The boyfriend worked in a city 1 h away by train and often returned home late.

On the first visit to the households, the WAC was installed and family members were shown how to use it. In addition, they were provided with an instruction and trouble-shooting sheet. Data were gathered through a series of interviews at approximately 1 week intervals, which we scheduled with as many members of each family present as possible. On these visits, the families were asked questions about how they had used the Clock, how they felt about being tracked and whether they had sent text messages to the Clock. In addition, printouts of the sent messages provided a focus for further discussion. Questions were also directed at how, if at all, the Clock and messaging facility interleaved with household activities and routines. In the final interview, we asked all family members to imagine different possibilities for a whereabouts device, seeking comments and criticisms and directions for novel design ideas. All interviews were audio taped for later review and the interviews transcribed.

5 Results

The results of the trial can be viewed in a number of different ways. On the one hand, if this had been simply a test of a new prototype technology, the results were encouraging. Generally, we found each household made substantial use of the Clock, although family members did at times forget to carry their extra cellphones with them or to keep them charged. On average, participants’ phones were tracked on 72% of trial days, ranging from a minimum of 47% to a maximum of 80% of trial days. In addition, each family member sent on average 1.6 messages per week to the Clock during the trial. However, perhaps a better testament to the use of the Clock was some families’ distress at losing the Clock at the end of the trial. As one family put it: “We’re going to miss it” – the Clock had become an almost integral part of their routines.

Having said that, the technology was not always as robust and reliable as we hoped – in particular, sometimes family members were seen to move in and out of different zones due to technical problems. As we will discuss later, these problems sometimes caused needless anxiety. The families also commented on various ways in which the design of the Clock could have been improved. For example, there was general agreement on how useful it would be to be able to send messages back from the Clock to individual people. This is a design feature which we could easily incorporate into future versions of the Clock.

Overall, however, the Clock proved to be a much more valued and compelling technology for the trial families than we had anticipated. Therefore, if we had been purely in the business of trying to develop a new product, we would have a strong case to make for pursuing this basic concept, albeit with the need to improve the robustness of the technology and to tweak the design.

But the lessons from this trial run deeper than this. In particular, by looking at the various ways in which the Clock was used and the reasons why it was valued, we can start to unpack the concept of “awareness” for families, at least in the ways that the Clock enabled it. As we will discuss in this section, awareness of other family members’ movements supported not only coordination but also a set of values more emotive in nature. Awareness was also intimately connected to feelings of reassurance, connectedness and togetherness for these families. Aspects of identity and social touch came into play as well. All of these issues highlighted by the Clock, as we will argue, cause us to be more precise about what we mean by awareness and what aspects of family life are really at stake when we design such devices.

5.1 Unpacking Awareness in a Family Context

5.1.1 Coordination and Communication

The focus of most work on awareness emanating from workplace domains has been to support coordination and communication within the context of collaborative tasks. By conveying information about activity to one another, users can work more collaboratively, for example, when working remotely with one another (Dourish and Bellotti, 1992) or when planning and coordinating activities (Nardi et al., 2000). Because of this, we fully expected the WAC to be used in the coordination and management of family activities. Indeed household members spoke of the ways in which they could better plan activities such as preparing meals by being able to see when someone was on their way home. In one case, a father reported how the WAC had informed him of his wife’s early return home when he had expected her to miss dinner. This allowed him to offer an affectionate gesture by having dinner ready for her when she walked in the door. Households also made a number of references to what Household E called “put-the-kettle-on” movements on the Clock. Here, household members leaving a region or moving into HOME on the Clock (before they had physically arrived) would prompt those at home to put the kettle on for tea. Important here was an awareness of the household’s rhythms: movements were “read” in different ways depending on the time of day and knowledge of the household routines. Trisha, the mother in Household E, captured this in describing an example of Clock use related to her son, Jon:

A few times Jon has not left a message and around about quarter to six-ish I’ve seen his photo move up to HOME and I‘ve thought “ooh, Jon is coming home,” and I’ve had a cup of tea ready for him before he’s even walked in the house.

Significantly, with the coarse granularity of position that the Clock communicated (not least to mention the underlying positioning algorithm), we noted that nearly all these readings of the Clock were “fail safe” – in that if they were wrong, the cost would be very low (such as a kettle boiled in vain). However, the messaging feature of the Clock was often used in coordination tasks when more precise information might be needed or in order for someone to account for their location on the Clock. Messages such as: “Just at the train station. X”; “In a meeting 4 next few hours”; “M11 accident, taking back roads” and “Jus walkin down road now. Sum1 stick kettle on;-p” fell squarely in this category. The last of the messages above also illustrates that not only could people reading the Clock use this information to plan activities but also those sending messages home could try to direct other people’s activities more explicitly. Thus with the messaging, we saw a number of “calls to action” such as “Mum phone”; “Shopping done help please” and “Time for bed”.

Inasmuch as activities such as making tea, making a meal or helping with shopping can be thought of as “collaborative tasks”, the Clock functioned in a way that one might expect it to do so in a work environment. Here awareness of others’ activities helped with issues such as the timing and planning of activities, and in doing so, could be seen to help some of events in the household to run more smoothly. However, the next four categories of use are more interesting in that they are not about tasks and also because they were talked about as more significant.

5.1.2 Reassurance

While coordination is perhaps the most obvious use of an awareness technology, the Clock was distinctive in that the most remarked upon benefit was the reassurance it provided for family members, and further emphasizes the differences between technologies for the workplace and for the home. Families regularly described, in both explicit and implicit ways, the Clock as reassuring:

So I just come in and you know, “yep, everybody’s in the right place. All’s right with the world”, you know, just at a glance… It’s just umm, it is just nice. It’s not checking up on people. It’s just a nice little reassurance. Everyone’s where they should be and everything’s right, or at least their phones are in the right place [laughs]. I mean, you know, you can take these things too far… but you’re not using it as a security device like that.

The WAC invoked not simply a reassurance of family members being at the right place at the right time, but also an overriding sense that everything was going to routine, that all was well. As expressed above there is a sense “that everything’s right” in looking at the Clock and seeing that everyone is where they should be. Rachel, the mother in Household C, expressed, evocatively, something similar in talking about her eldest daughter away at university:

When you can’t visualize where your offspring are, you have this ridiculous sense of anxiety that’s just bubbling very quietly. […] I think in some way the Clock helps me think “yes, they’ve definitely got there, and they’re definitely there now, and they’re on their way home”.

The Clock, then, appears to put Rachel at ease, providing reassurance of her distant daughter’s whereabouts. Again, it was not that the Clock did this by providing precise geographical coordinates. As Rachel put it, the Clock was simply an additional tool for visualizing – a means of gleaning just enough information, as it were. Something we had not expected was how the Clock’s chimes also played into this sense of reassurance. The Clock would be glanced at or approached when it chimed to see who it was that had moved and where they had moved from and to. Indeed, families spoke of being drawn almost compulsively to the Clock because of the chimes it made – parents who spent large portions of their days at home felt particularly strongly about the chimes. Meg, for instance, chose to place the Clock in her living room so that she could easily glance over to it whenever it chimed:

There’s just some sort of thing where you’ve got to see what – you know, it makes that noise that someone’s moved and you just have to look. I don’t know why. You just have to look.

Whatever be the underlying motivations, it appears reassurance came from being able to see the family as active and from seeing a family’s movements to be in keeping with known-about routines. The coarseness of the location works, so to speak, because the ways of seeing or reading the Clock are deeply enmeshed with what family members already know and indeed have rights to know. What we see through the use of the Clock is that family members are able to intuit a state of affairs using relatively crude types of information. It is unclear in the design of the Clock whether more details or a higher level of accuracy in location would have provided a greater degree of reassurance. This led us to reflect on the fact that location is not purely a set of geographical coordinates; it is not valued for how precise those coordinates can be, but rather how location fits into the “family geography” of where the family is or more particularly, where the family should be.

5.1.3 Connectedness and Togetherness

Tied closely to the sense of reassurance associated with the Clock was another salient theme that emerged from our interviews, that of connectedness and togetherness. Much of this aspect of awareness clearly came from the graphical representation of each family member and the fact that the family was shown to “be together” at least in the sense of sharing the same display, when much of the time they were, in reality, not in the same place.

Whilst having the Clock, family members spoke of how it helped them to feel connected to those out of the house. In Meg’s glances at the Clock (noted above), for example, she gained a sense of what other family members were “up to” and, in turn, gained a sense of connection with them. For Trisha (mother in Household E), the persistently displayed information also provided a way of feeling connected to those who were out. In her words, “It just keeps you that little bit closer all the while.”

Other households adopted a more purposeful approach to using the Clock as a means of connection. For Household A, distributed across three different “homes”, the mother, Jo, expressed a particular sense of how the Clock allowed her to feel connected to her family even when they were apart. She talked about how seeing the family members together on the Clock presented everybody being in the same place even when they were not – a virtual sense of everybody together. The Clock explicitly connected family members who while at homes in different parts of the country were still connected with what Jo saw as their real home.

This fleeting yet emotive aspect of the Clock was reiterated time and again in our interviews. In a fashion reminiscent of displayed family photos, the Clock provided a recurrent visual reminder of a family’s togetherness. Indeed, the temporal rhythms that the Clock visualized brought out these moments of togetherness – particularly at poignant times such as dinner time. As Dan, the father in Household C put it, seeing everybody “nestling” together at the top of the Clock each night (even though some of his children were in different homes) gave him a strong sense of family unity.

One issue was that the reverse was also true in that it could instil moments of anxiety and separation from family members. Householders reported feeling worried when others in the household appeared where they should not be or were moving when they should be in one place. These feelings were elevated when, on occasion, the positioning algorithm would find itself on an edge and “flutter” between two different locations.

5.1.4 Expressing Identity

So far we have noted important ways in which household members came to see or “read” the WAC. We also found participants giving thought to how they were represented on the Clock to others – in other words, how they expressed their identity to others. This aspect of the Clock’s use emphasizes how awareness is not just about the interpretation of data as a viewer or a receiver of information, but it is also about one’s accountability to others. In other words, awareness is, in some sense, a two-way street.

For example, common was the way in which households appropriated the Clock’s three location labels, HOME, WORK and SCHOOL, to control how they were seen and to suit their particular needs. Household E (where neither parent worked) presented perhaps the most extreme example of this. All but the son, Jon, labelled places in unexpected ways; the daughter assigned both her boyfriend’s house and family house as HOME, and the local train station, where she picked her boyfriend up after work, as SCHOOL. The mother, who was not working, used SCHOOL to refer to her walking the dog (registering several spots along her usual walk as SCHOOL). She also used WORK to refer to gardening either in the garden attached to the house or in the family’s garden allotment some distance from their home. While at home, the retired father would regularly use his cellphone to register himself as either at WORK or HOME depending on what he was doing.

Striking, here, was the ease with which they incorporated these inflexible labels into their household routines. We gave only minimal instructions to families on how to assign different geographical locations to the three available labels. Even so, all but one of the households used the labels to designate something else, or assigned multiple geographical locations to one label, and did so with no apparent problems or need for technical assistance. These adaptations were often based on subtle use of geographical location. Registering two different gardens as the single label WORK and an activity (dog walking) rather than a distinct place to SCHOOL seemed, if anything, a somewhat playful use of the Clock for Household E’s mother, Trisha (a self-professed technophobe). It was also dealt with in stride by the rest of the family who knew what these labels meant and had no difficulty knowing where she was or what she was doing. Arguably, it was the coarseness of detail on the Clock that prevented the complexity from being overwhelming. It would seem the detail was sufficient to allow for a rough idea of location to be simply deduced. As several of our participants reported, if more detail was required, other channels of communication were available, such as a text message to the Clock or a phone call.

Indeed, some family members went as far as to use their reported location as a way of identifying their activities and expressing them to others. The father in Household E, Ted, moved himself on the Clock between WORK and HOME – re-registering his location each time he moved from using his computer to watching television – not unlike the use of availability messages in Instant Messaging. However, it also actively asserted a sense of social position or what might be termed, rather grandly, identity. Ted, if you like, was demonstrably composing his position vis-à-vis his family. This marking of social position in the home parallels the practice of broadcasting identity we have written about previously (Sellen et al., 2006). But it also shows how awareness systems can be as much a way of allowing people to express themselves, as they can be a way for people to interpret the actions of others.

5.1.5 Social Touch

A final recurring use of the Clock worth noting amongst the households relates to what we have in the past referred to as “social touch”, where technology is used as a channel through which family members express affection for one another (Sellen et al., 2006). In this way, family members demonstrate their awareness of others and in doing so display the ties that bind them together.

Many of the examples of coordination we have described have strong elements of social touch, such as having a cup of tea or a meal ready for someone when they come through the door. However, this showed itself most explicitly in the messages family members sent to the WAC. There were obvious examples such as “Good morning all;-p” and “Nite nite every1. Cold nite here. B careful on the roads 2moro.” In other cases, messages would be sent for some other purpose but would incorporate an element of social touch, a flourish, if you like, denoting one’s thought for others. A particularly nice example of this was sent by Peter, the lodger staying at Household A. His message is to one of the family’s young sons: “Harry, there 's some hot chocolate in my cupboard if you 'd like some. Hope you 're not feeling too poorly, Peter ”. Peter is clearly making a thoughtful gesture in offering his hot chocolate to Harry. Interesting for us is his use of the Clock to do so. As with the “fail safe” use of the Clock for coordination, it appears such messages are not critical and have no immediate function. Instead, they simply add a distinct feel to a family and the relationships its members have with one another. From this perspective, it is worth noting that some of the households were far more emotionally demonstrative in their messaging on the Clock. Households A and E, for example, routinely sent messages appearing to supplement the “all is OK” status suggested by the display of people’s whereabouts. On occasion, then, we saw the messaging via the Clock, perhaps unsurprisingly, weaves its way into family relations, playing its part in the emotional repartee between family members; as with so many practical things in the home, the Clock came to offer a resource for playing out its social organization.

5.2 Privacy

A final important aspect of the results has to do with privacy and the attitudes that the trial families expressed in response to this issue. Any tracking or location-based application inevitably raises a number of concerns with regard to potential of invasion of people’s privacy. In part, this is due to the increasing ways in which our lives are tracked electronically and considerable public worry about how such information could be abused (Iachello et al., 2005). Privacy measures thus have featured prominently in location awareness prototypes. In the design of the WAC, we sought to address these concerns through both the fixed single location of the Clock, at home, and the limited coarse-grained information it shared.

At the very least, privacy concerns did not seem to inhibit the family’s usage of the Clock. Indeed, despite repeated questioning, none of the families reported being concerned about a loss of privacy. In part, participants’ comments led us to believe that the coarse-grained resolution of the tracking information helped considerably. One teenager put it this way:

Yeah, so a lot of my friends have said “So your parents are checking up on you” like. I said nah this is not that. It’s not accurate enough. It doesn’t tell you exactly where I am so I can go places and they won’t know where I am.

But further than this, our repeated questioning around privacy was met with puzzlement by the families. As they explained, the Clock displayed information that they already shared. Thus the WAC was not seen as intruding any further into what they already knew or needed to know. Even questions about access to the Clock from outside the home failed to provoke worries about privacy. When asked about losing a phone that could display the Clock’s information, Kris phrases this point well:

Well you get over don’t you? It’s the same thing as losing your phone anyway. And anyway, would it really matter? They don’t know who it is, they don’t know what “home” means, they don’t, you know it doesn’t bear any relation to anybody else that doesn’t know.

It was only when we suggested radically more open designs – such as sharing location information with everybody on the Internet (“like MySpace” as one family put it) – that we could get families to object. As for the possibility of hackers, or malicious access to the tracking information provided by the WAC, again it was pointed out to us that the level of detail the Clock provided was only something that really made sense to those who knew a household’s routines, namely close family and friends.

While not to downplay the tensions and pressures of family life, the reactions we received around privacy reflect the fact that family life is built significantly around shared awareness, without which much of the everyday coordination of the family (eating, driving children around, sharing costs and so on) would be impossible. As Martin (1984) describes so astutely, the knowledge and the control of a household’s comings and goings are concerns continually being brokered, but, nevertheless, the very idea of home is built upon knowing and controlling just such matters. While it is possible that the families we studied were atypical, or indeed that the trial failed to encompass events where violations of privacy did arise, it could also be that privacy is more of a concern for us as researchers than it is of practical concern to families.

6 Awareness and Family Life

The results of this trial do two things: on the one hand, they highlight aspects of awareness that in many ways go beyond the concept as originally defined and explored in workplace contexts. This builds on and complements existing work on awareness systems in home contexts. On the other hand, the Clock and the way in which awareness played out within the family context offer us a lens through which we can begin to better understand what families are about. Despite its relatively primitive technical features, the practices we saw involving the Clock highlighted particular aspects of a family’s routines and how the monitoring and the accountability of these routines are important elements in a family’s ongoing sense of itself.

In technical terms, it should be evident that the version of the WAC we deployed incorporated a very basic capacity to support location awareness. The Clock’s reliance on cell towers to locate users (or more specifically their phones) meant its accuracy was limited at best, and often not something to be rigidly relied on. The Clock’s interface, with its coarse-grained representation of people’s whereabouts, added a further degree of ambiguity. Indeed, by providing only two bits of information, as we described earlier, its resolution was crude.

Mindful of these technical limitations, we were struck by how our study’s participating families readily incorporated the Clock into their routines. As we have noted, our early expectation was that the Clock would offer households a means of “seeing” and subsequently acting on exceptions to routines: when someone was not where they should be, was late to school or home and so on. Instead, the Clock was quickly incorporated into broader household patterns; householders would glance towards it in their routine movements around their homes and during their regular comings and goings. As indicated above, a casual reassurance was had from almost all of the household’s parents by looking at the Clock at particular times of day and, sometimes, orienting their movements around the Clock’s chimes. A form of being aware of family members’ whereabouts seeped into and on occasion transformed the daily routines of our participating homes.

In considering this incorporation of the WAC into household routines, we came to see the Clock as providing more than merely location awareness. The families did not seem to be simply checking on where, geographically, any one person was in their glances towards the Clock. It seemed they were also locating family members with respect to their household rhythms. For example, when family members looked at the Clock to see another’s whereabouts, they in a sense “read” what this meant about the recipient, taking into account what they knew and understood about that family member’s context.

In one example reported to us, the mother of Household A, Jo, cycled home after work over a bridge that crossed a local river. This area she had previously labelled as SCHOOL as this was the regular site where she practiced rowing. SCHOOL was therefore known by the family to mean “Mum is rowing”. Yet as she cycled home that night, the brief appearance of her on the Clock as being in the region of SCHOOL was not interpreted by the rest of the family as rowing, but rather as where in particular she was on her route home from work.

Awareness through the Clock thus fed into, if you like, a sense of being aware, of knowing family members’ whereabouts in terms of not just where but also for what, when, with whom and so on. In a recent paper at UbiComp 2007, we used the phrase location-in-interaction to distinguish the simple physical location of people from how location is worked up as a category in social interaction (Brown et al., 2007). A similar distinction can be made in reflecting on awareness vis-à-vis the clock. We saw different forms of awareness made manifest through the WAC, which were not dictated by a specific attribute like physical or geographical location. Rather, awareness was worked up through family members actively interleaving the many and sometimes competing traces or threads of their everyday routines. Awareness was a mental geography, so to speak, of a home’s members and their rhythms. In other words, the WAC reflected and supported an awareness of a “geography” that was not so much physical as it was in the collective “minds” of each family.

It is this last point that returns us to the issue that we began this chapter with: trying to understand awareness in terms of its importance for people in particular places (in this case, families in homes). From what we saw of the WAC in our study, it appears that the Clock was incorporated into an awareness of what it is to be a family, of the expectations its members have and of the ideas they have of how to coordinate, connect, express identity and ultimately reassure each other through these acts. Indeed, the Clock appeared to play into all of the things that family members undertake anyway as a matter of course. This is why Kris, when asked whether it would be problematic if she lost her phone, merely shrugged it off. If a stranger were to find it, it would not be a problem as “they don’t know what ‘home’ means, they don’t, you know, it doesn’t bear any relation to anybody else that doesn’t know.” In short, the WAC provided for a form of awareness that emerges through one being in a household and coming to know how location, time and routines interleave in unique and distinctly meaningful ways.

7 Implications

Finally, it is interesting at this point to reflect on the early history of the topic of awareness within Human–Computer Interaction and to examine how far we have come. Dourish and Bellotti provided one of the earliest papers on the topic (Dourish and Bellotti, 1992), coming strictly from a work-oriented perspective and highlighting the importance of awareness as a topic in developing and designing collaborative work tools. For them, awareness was “an understanding of the activities of others, which provides a context for your own activity.” This definition was, at the time, a succinct way of describing the concept, and the paper was influential in calling attention to aspects of awareness that need to be supported in order to successfully enable the accomplishment of group work. Much of the research that followed in that decade and beyond assumed a similar, task-focused approach.

Since that time, as HCI has made forays outside the of the work context and into domains such as the home, what we see is that the concept of awareness begins to take on a variety of different meanings. This research and other projects concerning more with the inter-connection of family and friends begins to reveal awareness as a richer and more diverse topic. The trial we report in this chapter, for example, has shown that awareness is an important concept above and beyond the accomplishment of shared tasks. Furthermore, it shows that awareness is more than simply supporting the mutual understanding of the activities of other people. Rather, when we begin to consider and explore aspects of awareness within the context of family life, it begins to emerge under many different guises and in many different roles. Awareness is not an abstract category but rather a lived process of relationship to others that is experienced by family members.

This manifests itself in the ways in which the WAC was used for processes of coordination and communication of short-term family activities: putting the kettle on for a homecoming family member or using the messaging function to arrange a pickup at the railway station. In some ways, these collaborative tasks of “doing family” resemble activities found in the workplace, and the families’ use of the WAC bears resemblance to the uses of awareness technologies that others have observed in the workplace.

However, one important implication of this work is that awareness as is played out in family life may be more about the confirmation of what families already know about one another than it is about conveying or imparting information that is not known. Reassurance, we found, was key to why the Clock was valued in the families we studied. Thus, unlike a groupware tool where the sharing of the moment-by-moment communication of activities can help a group work towards a goal, with the WAC, what can be gleaned in a moment (or a glance) is instantly interpreted with respect to a wealth of intimate knowledge about how things ought to be.

A second implication of this study is that awareness in family context is bound up with the demonstration and display of a family’s emotional connectedness with one another. Here, the WAC was used not always as an indication of family members’ various locations but as a symbolic representation and reminder of their togetherness in a conceptual if not a physical sense. Awareness in this way takes on a new meaning. The graphical representation of each person in the family sharing a single display reinforced ideal notions of the family as a unit, impinging itself and drawing attention to itself visually. Likewise, the examples of parents who liked to see that all their children were “home”, even if those homes were distinct geographical places, give us a new twist on awareness. It highlighted families’ feelings of togetherness, showing how awareness can be just as much about emotional ties as it is about information. This is bolstered by the many examples of social touch: the WAC gave families new ways to show their affection for one another and also to be seen to be showing their affection. Awareness in this sense is about doing something demonstrable and visible to all the family and can provide insight into what it means for a family to consider themselves to be a family and the ways in which that sense of identity is made visible.

Third, the ways in which the Clock was used by family members to express something about themselves and account for themselves also show that awareness is not simply about how these displays are “read”. Equally, they are about how people “write” to them. In other words, there were many examples of how different families appropriated the labels of the Clock to indicate to others something about their normal routines. Furthermore, family members showed their sensitivity to this by sending text messages to justify, reassure or otherwise make themselves accountable for actions which were out of the ordinary, which indicated something new about their status and so on.

Finally, there are important implications about privacy that this work helps to explicate. Whilst “tracking” has negative connotations and conjures up visions of abuse (or at the very least, intrusion), in the context of family life it takes on a different meaning. Here, tracking or location awareness finds its place within a broader context of awareness as being right and proper aspects of home life. It is right and proper for parents to know and care about where their children are, just as it is right and proper for children to be accountable for their actions. While there will always be tensions within the family as to what those accountabilities should be and where one draws the line, it is clear that the boundaries within a family unit are fundamentally different from those in working life, or even amongst friends. What we can therefore generalise from past studies of awareness in work domains with regard to privacy controls or guidelines is therefore questionable. The trade-off between awareness and privacy within family and home life needs to be understood on its own terms.

8 Conclusions

In this chapter we have focused on how a particular technology – the Whereabouts Clock – was integrated into family life. An extensive trial with the Clock in five households uncovered how it supported not just coordination and awareness, as commonly associated with location awareness systems, but rather reassurance, connectedness, expression of identity and social touch. These were not so much functional benefits as they were emotive ones– a feeling, as one of our participants put it, that “all is right with the world”. The WAC supported these values without generating privacy concerns. It did this, in part, because of the coarse-grained information it communicated – an example of “less is more”, offering enough functionality to fit with users’ practices but not more than they needed or were comfortable with.

More generally, we have argued that the use of the Clock helps to elucidate aspects of awareness which go beyond and present a more diverse perspective on what awareness might mean and how technology can support it. We extend approaches that have been understood as “location-based computing” and “situated displays” by uncovering and emphasizing the ways in which families use and make sense of the WAC as part of being a family. In particular, we have shown that the complexities of family life are such that supporting it will involve technology embedded as much in the moral, emotional and caring aspects of family life as in the functional or technical. It is here we see the most interesting set of new challenges.

Beyond this, the results of this analysis, we hope, have offered a way of understanding what families and households are about. In this sense the Clock and its deployment have given us an excuse to examine a handful of households in some detail and to reflect on the practices that bind them together and make them tick. As such, we hope to have shown how situated awareness devices, such as the WAC, can serve as probes to help uncover and elucidate aspects of family life that are at once intuitively familiar and yet profoundly rich and complex.