Promoting Intergenerational Communication Through Location-Based Asynchronous Video Communication Frank Bentley 1 , Santosh Basapur 1 , Sujoy Kumar Chowdhury 2 1 Motorola Mobility Applied Research Center Libertyville, IL USA {f.bentley, sbasapur} @motorola.com 2 Missouri Western State University St. Joseph, Missouri USA schowdhury@missouriwestern.edu ABSTRACT We describe the design and field evaluation of the Serendipitous Family Stories system, a web and mobile service that allows for videos to be saved in user-specified real-world locations, shared with friends and family, and then serendipitously discovered as those people approach the location of a story. Through a twenty-participant field evaluation, we discovered how this new form of location- based asynchronous communication can be used to strengthen family relationships by encouraging communication across generations and enhancing users’ relationships with everyday places in their lives. Author Keywords Intergenerational communication, video sharing, mobile, reminiscing, storytelling, evaluation ACM Classification Keywords H.4.3 Communications Applications H.5.1 Multimedia Information Systems H5.m. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI): Miscellaneous General Terms Design, Experimentation, Human Factors INTRODUCTION Sharing stories is a core part of being human. People reminisce and discuss stories from their past with family, friends, neighbors, and new acquaintances. A story is a performance that brings together family members and creates lasting memories [11]. Stories serve as a way to get to know others and to build stronger ties through these shared memories. Traditionally, stories are told face-to-face, and through our research we’ve found that holidays, family parties, and other in-person get togethers are still the main occasion for the telling of stories from a family’s history. However, families are moving apart from each other. As of 1993, 43% of American adults lived more than an hour away from their parents [10]. This number is growing as the workforce becomes more mobile and retirement destinations increasingly attract older adults to locations far from family. As it has been shown that communication decreases when families move apart [12], we see a need for new communications tools to keep family members connected. We are interested in connecting older adults to their children over a distance through the sharing of location- based video stories. We believe that the visual nature of video, which allows recipients to literally see their older relatives, combined with the serendipity and asynchronous nature of location-based discovery together form a strong platform for the sharing of memories. This experience then encourages recipients to be aware of places of family importance in their own lives and to initiate communication about these family stories across generations. By making the creation, sharing, and receiving of video narratives simple, we hoped to turn seniors into creators of mobile media and to engage the whole family in the process of creating, viewing, and talking about family history. We have observed use in daily life through our study and are encouraged by the ways our participants became more aware of their family history and the lives of their relatives as well as the increase in communication reported during the month of use. RELATED WORK This system draws on work from a variety of disciplines. Intergenerational communication has been studied in anthropology and gerontology domains. Mobile video use and storytelling have been explored in ethnographic-style studies as well as through the fielding of new experimental systems in this space. We will introduce this work to better ground the design of our system in the research that preceded it. Intergenerational Communication Treas’ study in 1975 [24] explored a concept he termed “intimacy at a distance” in that older adults preferred to keep their own homes and have specific scheduled times of interaction with their adult children. He found that married 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. UbiComp ‘11, September 17–21, 2011, Beijing, China. Copyright 2011 ACM 978-1-4503-0630-0/11/09...$10.00.