Sharing Domestic Life through Long-Term Video Connections
Carman Neustaedter, Carolyn Pang, Azadeh Forghani, Erick Oduor, Serena Hillman, Tejinder K. Judge, Michael Massimi, and Saul Greenberg. 2015. Sharing Domestic Life through Long-Term Video Connections. ACM Trans. Comput.-Hum. Interact. 22, 1, Article 3 (March 2015), 29 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/2696869
Video chat systems such as Skype, Google+ Hangouts, and FaceTime have been widely adopted by family members and friends to connect with one another over distance. We have conducted a corpus of studies that explore how various demographics make use of such video chat systems in which this usage moves beyond the paradigm of conversational support to one in which aspects of everyday life are shared over long periods of time, sometimes in an almost passive manner. We describe and reflect on studies of long-distance couples, teenagers, and major life events, along with design research focused on new video communication systems—the Family Window, Family Portals, and Perch—that explicitly support “always-on video” for awareness and communication. Overall, our findings show that people highly value long-term video connections and have appropriated them in a number of different ways. Designers of future video communication systems need to consider: ways of supporting the sharing of everyday life rather than just conversation, providing different design solutions for different locations and situations, providing appropriate audio control and feedback, and supporting expressions of intimacy over distance.
