RadioActive: Enabling Persistent Mobile Communications for Groups

Current mobile technology works well to connect individuals together at any time or place. However, general focus on one-to-one conversations has overlooked the potential of always-on group and community links. We hypothesize that asynchronous persistent audio is a superior medium to support scalable always-on group communication for mobile devices. To evaluate this claim, one must first have an adequate interaction design before its possible to investigate the qualities and usage patterns over the long-term. This design does not exist for mobile devices, and is non-trivial given the weaknesses of audio and the practical limitations of mobile devices. Our work takes the first step in this direction by creating and evaluating an initial design called RadioActive. RadioActive is a technological and interaction design for persistent mobile audio chat spaces. Our work focuses on strategies to navigate and structure large asynchronous audio discussions. In this paper we examine related work, describe our approach, highlight a conceptual framework for navigation, discuss our evaluations, and provide suggestions for future research. Copyright is held by the author/owner(s). CHI 2007, April 28 – May 3, 2007, San Jose, USA ACM 1-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx. Aaron Zinman