Designing to Support Social Connectedness: The Case of SnowGlobe

In recent years, an interesting class of communication systems has emerged: Social Awareness (SA) Systems. These systems aim at increasing people’s sense of social connectedness by providing them with peripheral awareness of information about people from their social network (e.g. presence, availability, activities). The interaction principles of these systems are based on the paradigms of Ubiquitous Computing (Weiser, 1991) and, more recently, Ambient Intelligence (Aarts & Marzano, 2003). These paradigms envision electronic devices woven into the fabric of our daily life and activities, smoothly moving back and forth between background and foreground of the users’ attention. Therefore, SAsystems are complementary to more traditional communication technologies and services, e-mail or social networking services, which demand dedicated user attention and engagement. In general, SA-systems are considered to support people’s social well-being by stimulating their sense of social connectedness. A review of the existing work in this domain, such as Presence Lamp (Pedersen & Sokoler, 1997), GustBowl (Keller, van der Hoog, & Stappers, 2004), and the ASTRA project (Romero et al., 2007), shows that formal evaluation of social connectedness is complex, and designers and researchers are not always successful in determining the effects of their designs. The goal of the present study is to create a deeper understanding of how design and interaction features of an SA-system affect social connectedness. In the present study, a theoretical understanding of social connectedness is used to ground the design decisions and to structure the evaluation. In this study, we use the definition for social connectedness as described by van Bel, IJsselsteijn, and de Kort (2008): The momentary affective experience of belonging to a social relationship or network. Social connectedness can be the outcome of subtle events in one’s peripheral area of attention, or it may be caused by explicit acts, such as by making a phone call or visiting a friend. The construct is described by five dimensions which can be used to inform the design and evaluation process of an SAsystem. Based on this conceptual understanding of social connectedness, an SA-system called SnowGlobe was designed. The system supports interpersonal awareness by communicating each other’s movement in their living rooms. It also enables users to actively nudge each other; when shaking one SnowGlobe, DesIgn Case stuDIes