From MediaFranca

"Designing Pleasurable Products and Interfaces", University of Art and Design Helsinki.
note: this version is slightly longer that the presented verison that had a 4-page limit restriction.

MediaFranca: Ubiquitous computing for youth engagement.
Strategies using mobile devices for increased social agency

Abstract

Introduction

The decline of civic involvement has been well documented over the last 3 decades in Western societies ^[1] . Problems in this area seem to be particularly concentrated among youth, who appear less cohesive and disengaged than earlier generations. Special attention has been drawn to information and communication technologies (ICTs) in order to understand the role they have been playing in this crisis ^[2]. Although people can continuously access more and better tools for connecting people, this enhanced connectivity doesn't necessarily mean that people are increasing their sense of belonging to a community; it seems to be working —paradoxically— in the opposite direction. The openness of the networked space reinforces narrow group identities as archipelagos of disconnected islands ^[3], favoring atomized individualism.

Networking technology diminishes our sense of geographic distance. We feel closer to what seems to be more relevant and interesting to us although it could be on the other side of the world. As an exchange of this, we are less likely to engage in local relationships with our immediate surroundings. It has been argued that this cognitive distortion has made our local settings more irrelevant to us ^[4]. This might explain —in part— why young adults and teenagers are much more disengaged than earlier generations.

Young people have also shown to be aggressive early adopters of new technology but more interestingly, they have been able to subvert or re-appropriate new products as means of being reflective of their own identity and culture. Engaging youth is important because they have traditionally played a key role in civic life (civil rights, anti-war movements, antinuclear and environmental movements, etc.) raising important issues and bringing new ideas into the public debate. In this sense, a key goal of this work is to impress upon young adults their inherent civic presence as active stakeholders of their communities.

This paper explores design opportunities for taking advantage of the connective and associative power of communication technologies as strategies for injecting this power in local youth communities. This work focuses on how, from a design perspective, ICTs can engender new forms of sociality that traverse onsite and online environments by providing youth a public voice in space.

Related work

There has been a wide variety of research focused on promoting social interaction through mobile devices. Especially significant has been the TXTMobs project ^[5] that allows users to broadcast text messages to all subscribers. The Yellow Arrow project allows users to make explicit connections between physical places and digital content through the use of a yellow arrow sticker. These stickers are placed in urban settings as a way of saying "there's more here, a hidden detail, a funny story, a crazy experience" ^[6]. This project has been the first to explore the idea of geographical blogging. In the same line, the Foundcity project ^[7] provides a tool for creating personalized maps on the fly. Users can post and tag locations from their cellphones or from their computers. The Neighbornode project ^[8] consists of customizing and transforming wireless routers for the creation of wireless message boards opened to the public. This project strives for the creation of strong local ties among a community of neighbors. Additionally the Familiar Stranger Project ^[9] tries to strengthen people’s sense of belonging by providing visual cues of the user’s familiarity with an urban crowd. The core idea is to replace the feeling of anxiety in public places and instill comfort and even playfulness instead. Finally, research allows people to participate in city planning through the use of camera phones and web interfaces ^[10].

In our project we leverage social interaction as a strategy for youth engagement and design ubiquitous computing as a tool for increased social agency. Our focus lies in the relationship between public space —as a space for negotiation— and social interaction as a process of discovering the surrounding community.

Design Process

Our initial research inquiry was focused in understanding young adults’ needs and motivations in the consumption and production of digital media and how these practices become embedded in their daily routines. Interviews with teenagers focused in understanding their perceptions, patterns and behaviors in the use of technology as a mediator of their social relationships.

These interviews informed and shaped the next step of the research were participants were asked to craft posters depicting these relationships in detail. These poster-creation sessions, inspired by participatory design principles, where held as workshop sessions were participants were asked to take a reflective and critical stance in relation with their current use of technology. Participants were provided with an extensive set of clip art depicting people, activities, technological devices, general tools and iconic places. Besides the given clip art, participants were allowed to draw and write whatever necessary in order to express their idea.

The first session was held in a school with 13 to 16 year old participants who were asked to identify the different social groups they interacted with (different groups of friends, family, classmates, etc.). As a starting point, participants where asked to place themselves in the center of the diagram and from there draw their interactions. They were also asked to distinguish between positive and negative aspects of their current social relationships, taking a more critical stance.

The second and third poster sessions were held with first year college students. They were asked to depict their daily routine by marking frequented places in relation with their social interactions. Another experience was focused in understanding their level of local awareness and how information was accessed through the different settings along the day, defining flows, sources and trust relationships.

Research Findings

The sense of disconnection can be traced back to the rhythm in which a young adult’s life has been compartmentalized. In the majority of the cases, online relationships were dislocated from physical interactions since they were perceived as belonging to different social natures. In fact, they intersected only in very special cases.

While life of school students is partitioned by the different social circles they participate in, (school friends, out-of-school friends, family circuit, teachers and online friends) college students are absorbed in the transition to campus life. Their sense of physical dislocation was in many cases aligned to the fact that old friends were also experiencing dislocation. This transition encouraged social exploration in the pursuit of new connections and affiliations. Nevertheless, some students remained relatively isolated or within a small circle of friends. But practically in all cases their major need was finding opportunities for meeting people similar to themselves and with whom they could expand their social network.

Technology offerings are looked upon with suspicion and skepticism but are rapidly absorbed and re-appropriated suiting their particular needs. This is the case of IM and text messaging, which are tools of choice, while email is considered as a tool for old people. Also, they have strong multitasking skills: they can watch TV, do their homework, browse the web and chat with friends at the same time.

Finally, we generated a set of concepts from these findings which where presented to our participants. They where asked to discuss their feasibility in potential scenarios of use as well as the projections they could envision from the interactions with and through the product.

Design Concepts

MediaFranca is a platform for running publishing services in mobile devices. Rich media is posted with geographical metadata as users can access it through their cameraphones as augmented reality. This service provides users with geographically situated media that has been filtered by their contact network and preferred interests. Geographical posts can vary from self-narratives (such as traditional blog posts) or can include more conversational formats such as public statements, sign-ups, questionnaires or community notices.

Fig. 1. Different degrees of social proximity will determine the visibility of situated media. Peer filtering becomes a way of avoiding media pollution but also provides a pathway for exploring new relationships based upon trust. MediaFranca provides a way of maintaining current relations but also encourages exploring and building new ones.

Scenario A

Owen, a 24 year-old mechanic, is going for a bike ride with friends. As they arrive at the trailhead, their mobile device notifies them that there's an important message. A previous rider has left a warning about a challenging spot on the trail. After finishing his ride, Owen decides to leave an additional notice, suggesting people take enough water because refills are few and far between. He also takes the opportunity to invite riders on this trail to join him on the last Friday of every month for a massive ride promoting alternative transportation.

Scenario B

Travis, a first college year student, is having a coffee before class. He uses his phone to check what's going on around campus, he interacts with it as if he were taking a picture. Through the screen, he notices a video icon in the center of the hall. He selects it and learns it is from Greg, a 4th year engineering student. The video invites him to a concert Greg’s band will perform and offers links to some of the band’s songs. After listening to the song he decides to go to the concert and adds Greg as a contact.

Conclusions

Mediating artifacts can shape the way in which social interaction takes place. If media is situated in specific geo-social context viewers can easily track down further connections to the information. Physical interaction and situated communication raises the relevancy of the near, promotes further discovery of the immediate surroundings and strengthens the sense of belonging to a community. Civic engagement can be leveraged from this stronger sense of community as this system provides a space for raising issues that are relevant to their constituents.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the cooperation of the Neighborhood Academy School, for allowing me in their classrooms and also all the students who enthusiastically participated in the poster sessions. Also, I'm thankful to CMU freshmen who participated in the interviews and concept validation sessions as well as my advisers Shelley Evenson and John Zimmerman.

References

1. ↑ Putnam, R. D. (2000). Bowling alone: the collapse and revival of American community: Simon & Schuster.
2. ↑ Wellman, B. (2002). Little Boxes, Glocalization, and Networked Individualism. Digital Cities II: Computational and Sociological Approaches, 10–25.
3. ↑ Terranova, T. (2004). Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age: Pluto Press.
4. ↑ Mejias, U. (2005). Re-approaching nearness: Online communication and its place in praxis. First Monday, 10(3). http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue10_3/mejias/index.html
5. ↑ Institute for Applied Autonomy, (2004). TXTMobs http://www.appliedautonomy.com/txtmob.html
6. ↑ Counts Media (2004).Yellow Arrow: Map your world - Publish your life - Create your journey http://yellowarrow.net/
7. ↑ Geraci, J. (2005) Foundcity http://www.foundcity.net/
8. ↑ Geraci, J. (2005) Neighbornode http://www.neighbornode.net/
9. ↑ Paulos, E., & Goodman, E. (2004). The familiar stranger: anxiety, comfort, and play in public places. Proceedings of the 2004 conference on Human factors in computing systems, 223-230.
10. ↑ Goodman, E. (2005). ‘Created by everybody’: Engaging participation with mobile interfaces. Intel Corporation.