Putting Systems into Place: A Qualitative Study of Design Requirements for Location-Aware Community Systems Quentin Jones 1 , Sukeshini A. Grandhi 1 , Steve Whittaker 2 , Keerti Chivakula 1 , and Loren Terveen 3 1 New Jersey Institute of Technology 3 University of Sheffield 2 University of Minnesota {qjones,sg49,kkc2216}@njit.edu s.whittaker@sheffield.ac.uk terveen@cs.umn.edu ABSTRACT We present a conceptual framework for location-aware community systems and results from two studies of how socially- defined places influence people’s information sharing and communication needs. The first study identified a relationship between people’s familiarity with a place and their desire for either stable or dynamic place-related information. The second study explored the utility of various system features highlighted by our conceptual framework. It clarified the role of place information in informal social interaction; it also showed that people valued, and were willing to provide information such as ratings, comments, and event records relevant to a place. These preliminary findings have important implications for the design of location-aware community systems. In particular, they suggest that such systems must integrate information about places with data about users’ personal routines and social relationships. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.5.3 [Group and Organization Interfaces]: Computer- Supported Cooperative Work. General Terms Design, Experimentation, Human Factors. Keywords Ubiquitous/Pervasive Computing, Virtual Communities, Location Based Services, Context Aware Computing, Diary studies, Semi-Structured Interviews, P3-Systems. THE WEASLEY’S CLOCK Harry liked this clock. It was completely useless if you wanted to know the time, but otherwise very informative. It had nine golden hands, and each of them was engraved with one of the Weasley family’s names. There were no numerals around the face, but descriptions of where each family member might be. “Home,” “school,” and “work” were there, but there was also “traveling,” “lost,” “hospital,” “prison,” and, in the position where the number twelve would be on a normal clock, “mortal peril”(Harry Potter and the Goble of Fire, P. 151) [26]. 1. INTRODUCTION People, acting individually and collectively, actively structure their environments. They create specialized types of places – the office, home, coffee shop, museum, school, etc. – to support a variety of activities [10] and constrain possibilities for action and communication. Several observations about how places structure activities are relevant:  A shared physical environment promotes informal social communication [19][32]. Physical proximity increases the likelihood of impromptu social conversations; many organizations exploit this in the design of their workplaces, e.g., by designing shared public spaces where people can “bump into each other.”  The design of a place simultaneously encourages certain activities and discourages others [2][11].  Places act as “social” filters. That is, different types of places attract certain people, making these places feel familiar and safe for some people but not others. A place thus serves as a setting both for friends to meet opportunistically and for like- minded strangers to have opportunities to get to know one another [30]. Milgram’s [22] notion of the “familiar stranger” shows that recurring co-presence in a place has consequences even when people never meet.  Harrison and Dourish [13] imported the notion of a place (“a space, which is invested with understandings of behavioral appropriateness, cultural expectations”) into CSCW research. They drew analogies from work in architecture and urban planning for the design of collaborative virtual environments. However, until recently, the ability of designers to incorporate the concept of physical places into systems was quite limited. Purely online communities could be restricted – either formally or by social convention – to form “community networks” [28][8] that deal only with information relevant to a particular locality – e.g., a university – and restrict access to people associated with that locality – e.g. students and faculty of a university. New technological developments have changed this picture. Widespread adoption of technologies such as the Global Positioning System (GPS), 802.11, Bluetooth, and RFID enable the design of systems that link information and communication to the actual physical locations of people and places. A number of systems have explored this possibility since the Active Badge [31] was first prototyped. For example, various systems have enabled individuals and groups to associate text notes with locations [20] [7]. Use scenarios include indexing items from one’s personal to- do list to physical locations – e.g., grocery items to purchase at a grocery store – and tagging places such as restaurants and museums with ratings and recommendations that can be shared by multiple users. Other systems have extended the status information to awareness, through the display of the location of Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. CSCW’04, November 6-10, 2004, Chicago, IL, USA. Copyright 2004 ACM 1-58113-000-0/00/0004…$5.00.