Building social discourse around mobile photos: a systemic perspective

  • Authors:
  • Risto Sarvas;Antti Oulasvirta;Giulio Jacucci

  • Affiliations:
  • Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT, Finland;Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT, Finland;Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT, Finland

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Human computer interaction with mobile devices & services
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

Camera phones have been viewed simplistically as digital cameras with poor picture quality while neglecting the utility of the two key functionalities of mobile phones: network connection and access to personal information. This is the first HCI paper to examine mobile photos from a systemic perspective: how assignment of phases of mobile photo lifecycle to different platforms affects social discourse around shared photos. We conducted a 6-week user trial of MobShare, a tripartite system with dedicated functions and task couplings for a mobile phone, a server, and a PC browser. We analyze how MobShare's couplings and distribution of functionalities affected the observed types of social discourse that formed around mobile photos: in-group post-event discourse, self-documents and reports, greetings and thanks. Several central design issues arising from the systemic view are discussed: heterogeneity of environments, integration and distribution of functionalities, couplings and decouplings of interaction tasks, notification mechanisms, and provision of necessary UI resources for different tasks.