-Tactics and Concepts for Highly Mobile People

– Integrate the communication mechanism in the physical home and in everyday
life
– Explore the role of context-­‐data for supporting the communication
The mobile phone was the focal point at this stage as smart phones were moving steadily
into the market and Bang & Olufsen were new in the arena of mobile phones.
The aim with the prototype was to support the communication between close relatives.
New communication resources also potentially impose new communication obligations,
as pointed out by Hindus et al (Hindus, Mainwaring, Leduc, Hagström, & Bayley, 2001).
New designs for communication also lead to new obligations that may not be desirable
when on vacation. That is why we designed the communication mechanism in a way,
which fits into the daily routines of the context of either the home or while travelling.
Figure 13: Graphics on the picture frame
Figure 12: Sending a picture
The intention was to support awareness of the relatives while they are traveling and to
give the travelers a medium to communicate their experiences with their family and
friends and for the receivers’ to communicate back to the travelers in a way that fits their
everyday life in the home. This was done through uploading pictures to Picasa with a
smart phone (See Figure 12: Sending a picture) that gave feed to the prototype HiT.
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