Awareness Systems

People go about their daily tasks with an in-built awareness of their social and physical environments. This awareness helps them to work cooperatively in groups, coordinate actions, and to maintain and enhance social communication with others. Networked technology has extended the reach of people's awareness to remote and distributed groups and provided access to a much larger social network than was previously feasible.

Awareness systems that are designed to support people to build up, maintain and make use of these extended networks are attracting the interest of industry, and include buddy lists in instant messaging, sustained audio-video links, active contact lists on mobile phones and so forth.

This book contains contributions from leading researchers in the field and looks at the design of awareness systems from theoretical foundations through to empirical studies and design concepts and will be of interest to practitioners and researchers in the field of HCI.

Awareness systems can be broadly defined as those systems that help people construct and maintain awareness of each others’ activities, context or status, even if the participants are not co-located. Originally intended for supporting people involved in the same activities at different locations, such systems are now used to support social interactions between any connected individuals and to support social relationships over sustained periods of time.

Providing an overview of the current state-of-the-art this book provides a theoretical foundation for the design and development of Awareness Systems. It offers a reflection on the field, tracking research progress from past visions to current trends and future challenges, while presenting a representative collection of design concepts in the area and helping to systematize evaluation practices. It will be welcomed by all those working in the area of Awareness Systems.