Time, Ownership and Awareness: The Value of Contextual Locations in the Home Kathryn Elliot, Carman Neustaedter and Saul Greenberg Department of Computer Science, University of Calgary Calgary Alberta CANADA T2N 1N4 Tel: 1-403-220-6087 {elliotk, carman or saul}@cpsc.ucalgary.ca Abstract. Our goal in this paper is to clearly delineate how households cur- rently 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 communi- cation and coordination of home inhabitants. Through contextual interviews, we identify five types of communicative information: reminders and alerts, aware- ness 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 in- habitants 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. 1 Introduction As computing devices become smaller, inexpensive and wirelessly interconnected, they will be embedded within our everyday environments [4,5]. In this new genre of ubiquitous computing, researchers suggest that the home can be augmented by mak- ing it more connected to other places, and more aware of its inhabitants [5,9,11]. The home can somehow display information so that people can access it anytime and anywhere. Example information includes the well-being of distant family members, schedules of home dwellers, weather forecasts, recipes, videos and music. Benefits touted for such pervasive information include increased feelings of connectedness to loved ones, better time management and more entertainment options [7,10,19]. Our own focus is in communication and coordination information for the home, i.e., information that people use to communicate and coordinate with household members (including themselves) and with the outside world, where the home serves as the communication center. We include within this category any communication item used within the home or taken from the home into the outside world. For exam- ple, notes, lists, newsletters, schedules, calendars, voice mail, email, snail mail, and instant messages are all pieces of home communication information. Cite as: Elliot, K., Neustaedter, C. and Greenberg, S. (2005) Time, Ownership and Awareness: The Value of Contextual Locations in the Home. In Beigl, M., Intille, S., Rekimoto, J. and Tokuda, H. (Eds) UBICOMP 2005: Ubiquitous Computing (Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, Sept 11-14, Tokyo, Japan), LNCS 3660, p251-268, Springer.