| INTEGRATING COMMUNICATION AND INFORMATION (2008) | |||||||||||||||
Abstract | |||||||||||||||
| Ubiquitous computing is not only influencing our lives, but our livelihoods. Indeed, traditional career choices and paths will require fundamental attitude adjustments. Visualizing personal social networks, the system allows users to model and arrange their own in maps of individual contacts and groups, along with the relationships among them. Over the past few years, we’ve seen a massive uptake in the use of cell phones, per-sonal digital assistants, and hybrid devices integrating phone, computer, and Internet services, communicating with one another, as well as with traditional computers. Along with the Internet, they are transforming our computational environ-ments into communication spaces. In light of this transformation, our research has sought to seamlessly integrate communication with the traditional informa-tion functions of computational devices. Which organizing principle might be adapted for designing and developing advanced user interfaces affording information and communication services in a single integrated system? Our research on communication patterns in the workplace points to models of personal social networks. We have found that people invest considerable effort in maintaining links with net-works of colleagues, acquaintances, and friends, and that these networks are a significant organizing principle for work and information. Here, we outline and analyze a study of workplace communication that informs our development efforts, describing our evolving software prototype, ContactMap, as well as recent user experiments with the system. | |||||||||||||||
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