Paper presented at PRESENCE 2003, 6-8 October 2003, Aalborg, Denmark. Affective Benefits in Communication: The development and field-testing of a new questionnaire measure J. v. Baren 1 , W. IJsselsteijn 1 , N. Romero 1 , P. Markopoulos 1 , B. de Ruyter 2 1 Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands 2 Philips Research, Eindhoven, The Netherlands Email: w.a.ijsselsteijn@tue.nl Introduction A recent focus of research in HCI and CSCW, influenced by previous work in Media Spaces 1 and Portholes 2 , as well as current trends in ambient intelligence, are awareness systems for use in personal settings – either home or mobile. Here, lightweight, emotional, informal forms of communication are being facilitated by systems that help people to effortlessly maintain awareness of each other’s whereabouts and activities. Examples include the work by Hindus et al. 3 and Markopoulos et al. 4 . In line with Marc Weiser’s notion of calm computing 5 , such systems can typically be always-on, yet be very gentle or calm in terms of attentional demands. The aim of awareness systems is often simply to stay in touch, i.e. to be reassured about the well-being of others, to let others share your experiences, to let someone know you’re thinking of him/her, or to create opportunities for synchronous communication. In other words, for this type of communication, the informational content of the message is of secondary importance to the emotional, relational content that is being transmitted. Most existing communication means have been developed to support the transmission of information rather than emotion, i.e., communication is content-oriented rather than connectedness-oriented 6 . Awareness systems are specifically aimed at enriching the communication for emotional purposes, thus strengthening existing social bonds and enabling new kinds of interactions. To assess the value of such systems, new evaluation methodologies sensitive to affective characteristics of communication are needed. Traditional assessments of communication media have often included social presence measurements 7 . Although highly relevant for assessing synchronous communication, specifically systems aimed at providing transparent immediacy, it is less appropriate for evaluating asynchronous awareness systems. An important affective benefit of awareness systems will be a sense of connectedness. Connectedness is a positive emotional experience which is characterised by a feeling of staying in touch within ongoing social relationships. This is quite similar to the concept of “affective awareness” described by Liechti & Ichikawa 8 : “a general sense of being close to one’s family and friends. It seems that affective awareness is best achieved when people are engaged in shared experiences, especially when these experiences affect their emotional state”. The ASTRA project The goal of the ASTRA project is to develop and evaluate a prototype that helps distributed family members to stay in touch with each other. We want to show that although CMC tools cannot replace face- to-face communication, they can help people to maintain and even strengthen their social relationships. Building on the user requirements gathered through both a user study and a literature study, we developed a system that supports the sharing of pictures, drawings and/or short handwritten messages. Messages can be recorded by a simple and easy-to-use mobile device including a digital camera and writing pad. These messages will be shown on displays in the homes of both the sender and the receiver(s). These home