Intrusiveness Management for Focused, Efficient, and Enjoyable Activities

Abstract

When technologies for distributed activities develop, in particular the rapidly developing mobile technology, a larger part of our time will be spent connected to our various distributed contexts. When we meet physically we bring technology, both artifacts and services, which enable us to participate in these non-local contexts. Potentially this is a threat to focused and efficient activities due to the intrusiveness of the technology. Our aim is to contribute to the restoration of a number of the desirable properties of traditional local technology-free contexts. The intrusiveness itself is caused by at least four typical phenomena that have influenced current technology:

• Focus-demanding and clearly distinguishable artifacts like phones or PCs explicitly mediate interaction with the distributed context

• The functionality of services is traditionally based upon the assumption that communication is a deterministic flow of passive information, which for example, does not include information of the participants´ current context

• Services in general perform individually and without coordinated communication schemes

• The switches between contexts introduce a high cognitive load as each distributed context typically has its own system of characteristic objects and rules.

In the FEEL project, we have developed a system called “Focused, Efficient and Enjoyable Local Activities with Intrusiveness Management” (FEELIM) that constitutes an intermediate alternative between the technology-dense and technology-free environments, which addresses the problems cited above. This research is based on a collaborative and cooperative setting where problems of intrusiveness management are confounded by several users meeting and cooperating together as opposed to isolated users dealing with similar problems of interruption management (Chen 2004; Ho 2005).