Exploring the Design and Use of Peripheral Displays of Awareness Information Edward S. De Guzman 1 , Margaret Yau 1 , Anthony Gagliano 1 , Austin Park 1 & Anind K. Dey 1.2 1 Department of Computer Science Univ. of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA Email: edwardd@cs.berkeley.edu 2 Intel Research, Berkeley Berkeley, CA 94704 Email: anind@intel-research.net ABSTRACT Peripheral displays allow users to monitor an information source while focusing on a separate primary task. In this paper, we present our work investigating what form peripheral displays of awareness information from instant messaging programs may take and the role these displays could have in existing communication practices. We describe several prototypes of tangible, aesthetic displays of awareness information. A focus group involving users of instant messaging software revealed that the awareness information component of the software (such as sounds or flashing windows) is often used to trigger communication through more heavyweight means such as telephone or face-to-face conversation. Categories & Subject Descriptors: H.5.2 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: User Interfaces; H.5.3 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: Group and Organization Interfaces – asynchronous interaction General Terms: Design; Human Factors Keywords: Awareness, peripheral display, instant messaging, computer-mediated communication. INTRODUCTION Awareness has been defined as “the state of knowing about the environment in which you exist; about your surroundings, and the presence and activities of others” [10]. Various types of information from different sources can provide a sense of awareness. For example, looking up the Dow Jones Industrial Average can provide someone with an awareness of the nation’s economy while glancing at the window can tell one the weather outside. Evidence showing that background awareness for both co-located and distributed groups can increase work productivity and efficiency [6] led researchers in the Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) community to build systems to support awareness among groups. Dourish and Bly’s Portholes [3] project provides awareness for distributed group members through low framerate video. The importance of awareness of the presence and activities of others goes beyond team members of a project group. For example in a domestic environment, family members may want to be aware of each other’s whereabouts and activities. While awareness information can take many forms, from numerical data to video streams to human observation, there are also various methods of obtaining awareness information. Within the domain of remote presence, one can become aware of the location or activity of another by calling him/her on the phone, sending/reading an email, or watching a video stream of the remote person’s location. We classify these methods as “heavyweight” methods in that they usually require the user’s full attention, making it difficult to fully concentrate on a separate task at the same time. In contrast, we describe “lightweight” methods of obtaining awareness information as methods that allow monitoring of information and the splitting of attention among one or more other tasks. Examples of these methods, such as glancing at a co-worker’s desk, hearing someone’s footsteps entering a room, or smelling a familiar cologne, often take advantage of one or more human senses. The situation may arise where a person cannot directly observe and/or interpret evidence of presence or activity left by others. For example, suppose Bob is a project team member working at home. He would not be able to hear the shuffling of papers of another team member, Charlie, as he walks into his cubicle in the office. Research in providing technological support for abstracting data from a raw stream and presenting it to a user in a lightweight fashion has resulted in the creation of peripheral displays. In the previous example, Bob may have a peripheral display application running in the corner of his desktop at home. When a microphone on Charlie’s desk picks up evidence of activity, the application would produce a flashing visual effect on Bob’s desktop. As a lightweight method of obtaining and presenting awareness information, peripheral displays can be used to monitor an information source while allowing a user to continue work on a separate primary task. The work described in this paper focuses on the exploration of various forms of tangible peripheral displays of awareness information that operate “off the desktop” and are embedded in everyday physical objects in the user’s environment. The information source for our peripheral displays are instant messaging (IM) applications such as AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) and Yahoo! Messenger. These software programs allow exchanges of short text messages between Copyright is held by the author/owner(s). CHI 2004, April 24–29, 2004, Vienna, Austria. ACM 1 - 58113 - 703- 6/04/0004.