Time, Ownership and Awareness: The Value of Contextual Locations in the Home

Our goal in this paper is to clearly delineate how households currently manage communication and coordination information; this will provide practitioners and designers with a more complete view of information in the home, and how technology embedded within the home can augment communication and coordination of home inhabitants. Through contextual interviews, we identify five types of communicative information: reminders and alerts, awareness and scheduling, notices, visual displays, and resource coordination. These information types are created and understood by home inhabitants as a function of contextual locations within the home. The choice of location is important to the functioning of the home, and is highly nuanced. Location helps home inhabitants understand time: when others need to interact with that information, as well as ownership: who this information belongs to and who should receive it. It also provides them with awareness of the actions and locations of others. These findings resonate and further elaborate on work by other researchers.