Understanding NUI-supported Nomadic Social Places in a Brazilian Health Care Facility Roberto Calderon, Sidney Fels Media and Graphics Interdisciplinary Centre University of British Columbia Vancouver, Canada rvca@interchange.ubc.ca, ssfels@ece.ubc.ca Jônatas Leite de Oliveira, Junia Anacleto Laboratório de Interacçâo Avançada Universidade Federal de São Carlos São Carlos, Brazil jonataslei@gmail.com, junia@dc.ufscar.br ABSTRACT We use the concept of third place as a lens to understand and catalogue the natural socializing practices of Brazilians within a chronic care hospital setting in order to understand natural practices that can be used on the design of NUI tech- nologies to support Brazilian sociability and communities. Third places, as introduced by Oldenburg, are places that lie in-between the seriousness of work and the privateness of home, where social links are exercised through inclusive and playful conversation. We performed an ethnographic study with a community of Brazilian health care professionals at a chronic care hospital. We observed that daily socializing, through constant playful conversation creates a sense of “to- getherness” that appears essential for problem solving and leads to more efficient work groups. We found that third places within the studied community happen as serendip- itous gatherings where personal and work stories are ex- changed. These gatherings occur in unexpected places and are nomadic in nature, thus, the third place location is fluid. NUIs and other ICTs can promote these gatherings by cre- ating “informational hubs” where people can come together to acquire, discuss and share information. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.5.3 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: Group and Organization Interfaces[Theory and models] General Terms Third place, Ethnography, Natural User Interfaces, Infor- mation and Communication Technologies. Keywords Third place, Ethnography, Natural User Interfaces, Infor- mation and Communication Technologies. 1. INTRODUCTION 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, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. IHC 2012 Cuiabá - MT Copyright 20XX ACM X-XXXXX-XX-X/XX/XX ...$15.00. Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) play an important role in redefining public spaces by multiply- ing the informational role of places and things [3]. Particu- larly, ICTs have had a great impact on the layout and func- tioning of public places where communities come together. Augmented by ICT these places now play unexpected roles (e.g. internet hubs, work spaces, etc.), and conversation is ei- ther augmented, or replaced, by personal computers, tablets, mobile phones and situated displays. As a result, very of- ten the role of these places is called into question. ICT also opens up the possibility for communities to shape, build and enhance their social life in unexpected ways by allowing communities to serendipitously create social and communal places where they didn’t previously exist [29]. The present paper focuses on understanding how a par- ticular set of these technologies, i.e. natural user interfaces (i.e. technologies that promote natural interaction with in- formation, like smart phones, tablets or gestural sensors), which are becoming common place in today’s world could be designed for a Brazilian community of health care profession- als to allow, enhance or promote serendipitous and playful conversation. We use the concept of third places as defined by Oldenburg (i.e. places that lie between the seriousness of the work place and the privateness of the home, where sociability is promoted through conversation and play) to analyse and catalogue how informal conversation naturally occurs in said community and the effects that ICTs have on their currently adopted social practices. We discuss an ethnographic shadowing study performed to document how members a community of health care pro- fessionals naturally socialize and create third places within their workplace. Through these investigations we aim at documenting the “Brazilian way” of creating communities, and the role of ICT for Brazilian sociability, amicability and community shaping. 2. BACKGROUND 2.1 NUI for social interaction Natural user interfaces (NUI) are a new generation of in- terfaces, e.g. multi-touch and gestural computing, that have gained broad interest within the HCI community [35]. Such interfaces are not new and the technical and usability re- search regarding them goes back to the 1980s [23]. What is new is the growing affordability of devices using these inter- faces and the increased accessibility to software development 76 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. IHC'12, Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems. November 5-9, 2012, Cuiabá, MT, Brazil. Copyright 2012 SBC. ISSN 2316-5138 (pendrive). ISBN 978-85-7669-262-1 (online). IHC 2012 Proceedings • Full Paper November 5-9, 2012 • Cuiabá, MT, Brazil