Together anywhere, together anytime

Abstract

This report describes the process of the graduation project of Xu Chen. The project was carried out for Philips Consumer Lifestyle Netherlands on TA2 project and under supervision of the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering at the Delft University of Technology. TA2, Together Anytime, Together Anywhere, is a large integrated multimedia project funded by European Union FP7. The main task of this graduation project is to look into the human factors in ambient intelligence, namely strategic design for “Connected Lobby” on how to enhance family “togetherness” while taking into account of people’s privacy. This thesis focused especially on investigating on the possibility of balancing “togetherness” and “privacy” through computer-mediated communication. A new design approach was explored in the project to guide the strategic product planning process from expressing user’s latent experience by combining semantic differential scaling (SDS) experiment into user research. A context model was generated, providing the possibility of balancing “togetherness” and “privacy” through three factors in seven different usage contexts. A design part followed the exploratory phase. A strategic design guideline on control scheme, namely how to use ambient awareness system to trigger people to communicate was generated. The concept of “smart awareness assistant” was developed and a renewed “Connected Lobby” interface was designed and tested. The “smart awareness assistant” could trigger the family members to share the meaningful moment with each other at the right time, and filter the unwanted information exchange when the user is not available to communicate, which could enhance family “togetherness” through balancing “awareness” and “privacy”.