Communication Appliances: Shared Awareness for Intimate Social Networks

In the context of a three-year longitudinal participatory design project with six multi-household families in Sweden and France, we collaboratively developed and tested a series of "communication appliances" in their homes. Each prototype enabled family members to share a particular type of information, including hand-written notes, candid photographs, sounds and video. These commmunication appliances were designed to be as simple as possible, yet open to reinterpretation and exploration by their users. We conclude with a discussion of the requirements necessary for creating such communication appliances in the real world.