project title

Background: The way that family life is conducted, and role of media and digital technology in domestic routines have begun to emerge as important areas of research. Yet little is known about how families make themselves at home in the car and how they make use of media within the car or engage with each other through such media. In this respect, the car is a fertile environment for developing digital media technologies. It offers a novel site for designing human-computer interactions that extends beyond the ergonomics of driving into designing for the rich variety of practices that have been translated into automobiles. Road journeys can be sometimes stressful and sometimes enjoyable experiences for parents and children and developments in in-car media offer the potential to alleviate some of these stresses and enhance the enjoyment of travel. To develop appropriate media, we need a better understanding how families inhabit their cars and the routines of care, play, conflict, attention-seeking and the other forms of interaction that occur in this context.

Problem: The role of the car in transportation and its social and physical configuration makes this setting particularly challenging for design. It is a liminal space between departure and arrival, part of the world of the home and its routines and practices, but also outside of it. Automobility’s requirements are distinct from other workplace or leisure settings in which digital media are involved. Identifying the problems and potentials of car travel forms the core of this proposal.

Research question: The project will ask how family and home life is constituted in the car, with a particular emphasis on exploring the role and use of media in this setting. This will examine, firstly, how families, as car travellers, engage (and disengage) with one another, and, secondly, how in their routine production of family life they use and experience both traditional forms of car-based navigation, learning and entertainment media, as well as emerging forms of digital, wireless and location-sensitive technology. The research will therefore investigate the family car as a distinctive setting for media practices and document the varied domestic routines that take place during car journeys in order to develop insights for the future design of family-oriented, car-based media that are empirically grounded in examples of use.

Impact and contributions: The outcomes of this research will impact on several areas: 1) Design-relevant implications that follow on from understanding how (a) media are used in the car, and their impact on family life, and (b) family life in the car and the ways that the media used in it are connected to and entwined with the home. 2) A broader knowledge of the ways that media are used in vehicles, to inform the design of future technologies with respect to their usefulness and usability. 3) Understanding family life and media use in vehicles may have a broader economic and societal impact: car travel is expensive in terms of its financial and environmental costs. A deeper understanding of how family travel and its associated use of media might impact on journey type and duration may have a role in governmental policy implications on travel, or even offer opportunities for ‘design with purpose’ solutions that may have a positive impact on the ways that family travel is conducted. This project falls into the broad area of ‘Computer-Mediated Living’.

Keywords: Automobile, family, HCI, CSCW, mobile media, location, proximity, interaction.

Investigators and research environment

Dr Mark Perry is a senior lecturer in the Department of Information Systems and Computing (DISC) at Brunel, and also holds positions as a Visiting Professor at MobileLife, Stockholm University and as a Visiting Fellow at Bristol University, collaborating closely with these institutions. DISC is strongly research-led, with 87% of its academic staff classed as being internationally recognised or better in the last RAE exercise, with more than half ranked as ‘internationally excellent’. It was ranked top in the country by market share in UoA 37 (Library and Information Management), and is one of the largest centres for research in its field in Europe. Since 2001, its members have produced over 600 journal papers, obtained £15 million of grant income, with £12 million of this coming from the UK research councils. Dr Perry is a member of the People and Interactivity Research Centre, one of the largest research groups conducting Human Computer Interaction (HCI) research in the country with 15 academic members of staff. His research interests lie in the areas of HCI and CSCW, workplace studies, collaborative, mobile and ubiquitous computing. He has degrees in Psychology and Cognitive Science (BA Hons. and MSc, UWC Cardiff), and a PhD (Information Systems and Computer Science, Brunel University). Dr Perry has extensive experience within the HCI community, most notably as an Associate Chair (papers) for ACM CHI (the top international HCI conference) in 2007, 2009, and 2010. He is a Senior Member of the ACM. Specific to car-based interaction, he has been a member of the Programme Committee for the International Conference on Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications (AutomotiveUI’09 and ‘10) and chaired the ‘Backseat/Frontseat’ workshop on travel and mobile technology at Brunel (2005). Dr Perry has been engaged in user studies around mobile technology since 1998. His key early ACM ToCHI paper outlining the ways that people act when mobile (Perry et al. 2001) has been cited 356 times (scholar.google.com, accessed 09.09.2010). This submission follows a long history of application-relevant research, publishing on family and leisure-based technologies (e.g. Perry and Rachovides, 2007), the role of space in social collaborative interaction (e.g. Perry, Normark and Juhlin, 2010), and car travel (Laurier et al., 2008). Since 2002, he has successfully graduated 5 PhD students in these areas. Dr Perry has held research funding from a variety of organisations including the UK’s EPSRC, the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Vodafone Foundation, as well as a number of industrial sources.

Dr Eric Laurier is a Senior Lecturer in the School of GeoSciences at the University of Edinburgh. Edinburgh’s  ‘Earth Systems and Environmental Science’ was ranked first in the UK in terms of the volume of international and world leading research (as tabulated by the journal Nature). In its breadth of research it covers both ‘Earth Systems and Environmental Science’ and ‘Geography and Environmental Studies’ and its combined RAE score demonstrated that 66% of the research carried out in the School as a whole was rated within the top two categories: "world-leading" and "internationally excellent". The School has 80 academic staff, 70 research fellows and 130 PhD students, and an annual research grant and contract income of £10 million. Dr Laurier’s research interests lie in the areas of workplace studies, mobility, technology and practical reasoning. He has a degree in Geography (BSc Glasgow) and a PhD (Human Geography, University of Wales). Dr Laurier has consistently worked in an interdisciplinary environment bridging computing science, natural science and social science. During the last twelve years he has been the Principal Investigator on four Economic and Social Research Council funded projects totalling £1 million. At Edinburgh he founded the Scottish Ethnomethodology Discourse Interaction and Talk group (SEDIT), which runs weekly data analysis sessions and brings together geographers, sociologists, psychologists computing scientists and architects. He has authored 50 articles, 32 in international peer-reviewed journals and given a number of conference plenaries. He currently supervises five PhD students one of whom is currently investigating rally driving and has been the external examiner on four doctoral theses on interaction in transport. Of particular relevance to this application he carried out a three year research project ‘Habitable Cars: the collective organisation of private car travel’ which opened up the area of life in the car and empirical material from that project has been presented at Microsoft Research Cambridge.

This research is explicitly cross-disciplinary and involves researchers from two very different academic backgrounds (Perry from Informatics and Laurier from Human Geography). Whilst they are employed at different institutions (Brunel and Edinburgh), the investigators have already worked and published together effectively, and this project will provide an added impetus to their collaboration. The student will be based at Brunel in London, and collaborative media (skype, email, shared document repositories, etc.) will be used for remote cooperation. Our existing research commitments mean that we also undertake frequent travel between London and Edinburgh, allowing face-to-face supervision for regular supervisory sessions.

Selected publications by Mark Perry as primary PhD supervisor (refereed, last 10 years)

Subramanian, S., Perry, M., Beckett, S. and O'Hara, K. (to appear) WaveWindow: Supporting performative gestural interaction in a public setting. Proc. ACM ITS 2010, Saarbrücken, Germany.

Perry, M., Normark, D. and Juhlin, O. (2010) Laying waste: object ownership, accountability, shared responsibility and social control. Space and Culture, 3, 75-94.

Engström, A., Juhlin, O., Perry, M. and Broth, M. (2010). Temporal hybridity: Mixing live video footage with instant replay in real time. Proc. ACM CHI 2010, Atlanta, GA., USA.

Perry, M. (2010) Socially distributed cognition in loosely coupled systems. AI and Society, 1-14 (prepublished, DOI: 10.1007/s00146-010-0267-5).

Perry, M., Juhlin, O., Esbjörnsson, M. and Engström, A. (2009). Lean collaboration through video gestures: co-ordinating the production of live televised sport. Proc. ACM CHI 2009, Boston, Mass., USA, April 04-09, 2279-2288. *Nomination for best paper award.

Kanis, M., Brinkman, W-P. and Perry, M. (2009) Designing for positive disclosure: What do you like today? International Journal of Industrial Ergonomics, 39 (3), 564-572.

Laurier, E., Lorimer, H., Brown, B., Jones, O, Juhlin, O., Noble, A., Perry, M., Pica, D., Sormani, P., Strebel, I., Swan, L., Taylor, A.S., Watts, L. and Weilenmann, A. (2008) Driving and ‘passengering’: notes on the ordinary organization of car travel. Mobilities, 3(1), 1-23.

Kanis, M., Perry, M. and Brinkman, W-P. (2008) Minimal connectedness: exploring the effects of positive messaging using mobile technology. ACM CHI 2008 (AltCHI), Florence, Italy, April 5-10, 2513-2522.

Perry, M. and Rachovides, D. (2007) Entertaining situated messaging at home. CSCW, 16(1-2), 99-128.

Taylor, A.S., Harper, R., Swan, L., Izadi, S. Sellen, A. and Perry, M. (2007) Homes that make us smart. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 11 (5), 383-393.

Spinelli, G., Perry, M., and O’Hara, K. (2005) Understanding complex cognitive systems: the role of space in the organisation of collaborative work. Cognition, Technology and Work, 7, 111-118.

Perry, M., Dowdall, A., Lines, L., and Hone, K. (2004) Multimodal and ubiquitous computing systems: supporting contextual interaction for older users in the home. IEEE ToIT in Biomed., 8 (3), 258-270.

Condon, C., Perry, M. and O'Keefe, R.M. (2004) Denotation and connotation in the human-computer interface: The ‘Save as...’ command. Behaviour and Information Technology, 23 (1), 21-31.

Love, S. and Perry, M. (2004) Dealing with mobile conversations in public places: some implications for the design of socially intrusive technologies. Proc. ACM CHI 2004, Austria, April 24-29, 1195-1198.

O’Hara, K., Perry, M., Churchill, E. and Russell, D. (Eds.) (2003) Public and situated displays: social and interactional aspects of shared display technologies, Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer CSCW series.

Perry, M. (2003) Distributed Cognition. In Carroll, J.M. (Ed.) HCI Models, Theories, and Frameworks: Toward an Interdisciplinary Science. p.193-223. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers.

Perry, M and O’Hara, K. (2003) Display-based activity in the workplace. Proc. Interact 2003–IFIP TC13, Zurich, Switzerland, 1-5 September, 591-598.

Perry, M. (2003) (IS)4: Is Information Systems Interesting in Itself? EJIS, 12 (3), 231-234.

O’Hara, K., Perry, M. and Lewis, S. (2003) Social coordination around a situated display appliance. Proc. ACM CHI 2003, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, 5-10 April, 65-72.

Brown, B. and Perry, M. (2002) Of maps and guidebooks: designing geographical technologies. Proc. ACM DIS2002. London, UK, 25-28 June, 2002, 246-254.

O’Hara, K., Perry, M., Sellen, A.J. and Brown, B. A. T. (2001) Exploring the relationship between mobile phone and document use during business travel. In Brown, Green, Harper (Eds) Wireless World: social and interactional implications of wireless technology. p.180-194. Springer Verlag.

O’Hara, K. and Perry, M. (2001) Shopping anytime, anywhere. Proc. ACM CHI 2001, Seattle, Washington. 31 March - 5 April, 345-346.

Perry, M., O'Hara, K., Sellen, A. Harper, R. and Brown, B.A.T. (2001) Dealing with mobility: understanding access anytime, anywhere. ACM ToCHI, 8(4), 323-347.

Introduction and research background

Family life has become an increasingly important area of interest for computing, both for research (e.g. Crabtree and Rodden, 2004; Neustaedter, Brush and Greenberg, 2009) and as a commercial marketplace for product developers (e.g. 3Com’s Audrey and O2’s Joggler appliances). With respect to this particular call for proposals, Microsoft’s own research groups have been looking closely at computer-mediated living for some time, in understanding the complex routines and dependencies of home life, as well as developing and evaluating advanced prototypes that are sensitive to the nature of the setting. Indeed, it has long been recognised that the development of appropriate and relevant home-based computer systems requires a different approach to design from that of traditional work-based computer systems, and Microsoft has led this move (e.g. Sellen et al. 2006; Swan et al., 2008). One of the features of this research is that it has focused its gaze on the home, an understandably important domain of interaction for everyday family life. Nevertheless, the home is not the only locus of family activity, and other domains of enquiry remain largely unexamined. The car is one such important locale, and we propose examining how family life is played out within this site, and between it and the home. The car is not a marginal site for study. UK citizens spend up to two hours a day in their cars, and, in the short term, this appears unlikely to decrease, making this a productive site for developments in mobile computing and location-based systems: in 2006, 60% of journeys were made by car in great Britain (Department for Transport, 2007), with an average of 430 trips made and a distance of 3653 miles covered per person. In England, road traffic is expected to rise by 27% by 2015 (ibid.). The same trend is broadly true for other developed countries (ibid.), and this direction of change is increasingly evident across developing countries, with China and India undergoing particularly rapid change.

Despite the commonplace nature of car travel, there have been few published empirical studies of what happens during journeys (even in terms of the driving itself), and still less exploring the use of car-based interactive technology beyond the functional exception of technology for drivers, such as the ergonomics of cockpit design and adaptive cruise control (e.g. Young and Stanton, 2004). A few exceptions in the literature exist, examining children's experiences of car travel (Barker, 2009) and talk within cars in route negotiation (Haddington and Keisanen, 2008), although these are highly specific in their focus. Design concepts derived from empirical data have also looked at supporting the car as a mobile habitat, providing in-car concepts to support working parents (e.g. Eardley, Hyams and Sellen, 2004). Some recent work has begun to look at media technologies that impact on driver performance, such as adaptation to mobile phone demands and media player use in traffic (e.g. Esbjörnsson, Juhlin and Weilenmann, 2007; Salvucci et al., 2007), but this is limited in its scope with regards to augmenting the travel experience. Similarly, there are studies on the use of location-based technology in the car (Leshed et al., 2008), but this is focused primarily on wayfinding and skirts issues relating to social interaction within and outside the vehicle. In terms of interaction design, the Backseat Playground project has provided some guidance on designing for a mixed focus of attention in the car, integrating travel with device use (Brunnberg & Juhlin, 2006), but this has work has so far been limited to relatively immersive gaming by passengers.

The physical layout of the car affects how families are configured with respect to those travelling with them. In cars, typically all the seats are forward facing, usually in two parallel rows. This physical arrangement, in which the family members are not facing each other, creates an almost unique social dynamic between them as front and back seat passengers (see, for example, fig.1 below). It both supports and inhibits particular types of social interaction, and is likely to affect the motivations and abilities of those family members to engage in ongoing collaborative or individual activities. For example, eye contact may be accomplished using the rear view mirror between a parent in the front and children in the back seat. Other factors that are likely to affect interaction between family members include the journey length and journey type. Short journeys, for example, inhibit activities that exploit ‘dead time’ (cf. Perry et al., 2001), whilst going on holiday vs. going to school may encourage different behaviours within the car. Different start and end points for the car’s occupants (such as ‘drop offs’) may also encourage shifts in the forms of behaviour within the vehicle as socio-spatial configurations change. Similarly, different reasons for travel (even along the same routes) may also result in different forms of behaviour within the vehicle, with, for example, mobile technologies being used for utilitarian or pleasure purposes depending on whether a child is travelling to, or from, school.

Figure 1. In-car spatial configurations

Car travel should also be seen in terms of the broader set of activities that the family as travellers are involved in; thus, when going shopping, this may involve driving from home to an out of town car park, a range of other activities getting to and at the shopping centre, and then returning home by car. Consequently the travel experience may not be just about what is appropriate for the car, but is also shaped by this broader activity context, potentially impacting on the artefacts that can be used and are useful. Thus the interaction of the car with wider sets of travel activities also needs to be considered in understanding family travel motivations. Some factors of relevance that come to bear on media use in cars include the following:

These issues form the context for this proposed research.

Methodology

Beyond the ergonomic and cognitive processes of driving and the use of mobile technologies by mobile professionals, little is known about the activities of people travelling (Sheller and Urry, 2004), and this is central to the development of any technology or tool intended for travellers. As a consequence, the research will be driven by developing a clear understanding of behaviour within cars, and will involve data collected from a number of family car-based travel episodes, including, for example, shopping trips, holiday travel, sports events, the school run and lifts. Data collection itself will be broadly based on video-ethnographic techniques (e.g. Suchman and Trigg, 1991; Hindmarsh and Heath, 2007), supplemented through the use of interviews to provide contextual detail and give coverage where researcher access and video data collection is limited. Technologies as diverse as GPS maps, in-car DVDs, handheld devices allowing internet access, and mobile telephones offer users the opportunity to experience travel differently to the ways that they might previously have taken a trip, and they are likely to have an impact on how they plan for, and conduct follow-on activities after such trips. The research will therefore examine traveller’s activities both within the car during their journeys, as well as exploring behaviour around the journey itself (i.e. planning for travel, packing and unpacking the car, and prior and follow-on travel episodes).

The collection of in-car data is central to our research programme. We will utilize a multi-camera recording technique to film inside the car (paired cameras capturing activities on the front and back seats) including media use (when visible), adding context to this data with a forward-facing camera to capture emergent road phenomena. As a novel twist on this, we will augment the video footage with mapped GPS data  , allowing us to directly plot the progress of the vehicle and match this to the video data, allowing us to examine where vehicles are in space as the in-car family interactions take place. Video data will be supplemented where appropriate with interview recordings and observational notes generated by the PhD student. Video data will be stored digitally and indexed, and its analysis will cross-reference additional ethnographic data collated, alongside any GPS location data obtained from the car journeys taken.

We will recruit participants from as diverse a user-population as possible, including different family life stages (young, teens, older), existing media use profiles, ethnic backgrounds, income brackets, travel types and frequency. Using a ‘follow and film’ mobile methodology, The PhD student will carry out a series of car journeys, travelling with family groups, where convenient over the course of a week on their trips, collections and stop offs. They will also ask each of these families to subsequently video-record typical journeys without a researcher present. Selection of appropriate days and travel episodes for self-recording will be carried out in consultation with the researchers. The video streams will be ongoingly captured, synchronised and reviewed by the student to select out clips for further analysis. This corpus of naturalistic data will provide us with a valuable resource into for analysis of in-car interaction and an insight into the ways that media and interactive media are used in car travel. Prior to this video data collection, the participants will be interviewed to gain a deeper understanding of the broader context of the families, the reasons for their travel and the opportunities that travelling brings them. Following the video-recording, they will be interviewed again to explore particular features of the journeys and any follow on activities undertaken. In addition to interviews, video transcriptions and their subsequent analysis, participants will be briefed about the nature of their participation and the uses to which this data will be put.

Taking Dourish’s (2006) point about the role of the social sciences in developing implications for design, the thesis will not explicitly attempt to develop design recommendations or technology ‘solutions’. Our intention is to develop an analysis of the cultural, social and technological organisation of activity in the car that can be used and is structured in such a way so as to speak to and inform design, but which, in itself is not proposing a set of design solutions. Examining how shared operative practices shape, reproduce and transform (ibid.) action in the car will allow us to understand better what is happening, why they take place in the ways that they do. Empirical findings on naturally occurring practices will provide support for designers in building useful and usable artefacts in this setting. This is not to say that we are uninterested in designing artefacts, and we anticipate working closely with the industrial co-supervisor (Dr Alex Taylor at Microsoft Research, Cambridge has agreed to this) and designers at Microsoft Research in developing computer-mediated systems for use within vehicles as both design probes (see for e.g. Perry and Rachovides, 2007) to inform this research and in any candidate commercialisable concepts that emerge over the project’s course.

References (for author references, please see above)

Barker, J. (2009) 'Driven to distraction?': children's experiences of car travel. Mobilities, 4(1), 59-76

Crabtree, A. and Rodden, T. (2004) “Domestic routines and design for the home”, CSCW, 13(2), pp. 191-220.

Department for Transport (2007) Transport statistics bulletin: National Travel Survey 2006. London: Stationery Office.

Dourish, P. (2006) Implications for Design. In Proc. ACM CHI 2006, Montreal, Canada, 541-550.

Eardley, R., Hyams, J. and Sellen, A. (2004) In car concepts to support working parents. In Proc. ACM CHI, Vienna, Austria, 1547.

Esbjörnsson, M., Juhlin, O. and Weilenmann, A. (2007) Drivers using mobile phones in traffic: an ethnographic study of interactional adaptation. Int. Journal of Human Computer Interaction, 22(1), 39-60.

Haddington, P. and Keisanen, T. (2008) Location, mobility and the body as resources in selecting a route. Journal of Pragmatics, 41(10), 1938-1961.

Hindmarsh, J. and Heath, C. (2007) Video-based studies of work practice. Sociology Compass 1(1), 156–173.

Leshed, G., Velden, T., Rieger, O., Kot, B., and Sengers, P. (2008) In-car GPS navigation: engagement with and disengagement from the environment. In Proc. ACM CHI, Florence, Italy, 1675-1684.

Neustaedter, C., Brush, A.J. and Greenberg, S. (2009) 'The Calendar is Crucial': Coordination and Awareness through the Family Calendar. ACM ToCHI, 6(1), 6-48.

Salvucci, D.D., Markley, D., Zuber, M. and Brumby, D.P. (2007) iPod distraction: effects of portable music-player use on driver performance. In Proc. ACM CHI, San Jose, California, USA, 243-250.

Sellen, A., Harper, R., Eardley, R., Izadi, S., Regan, T., Taylor, A. S., and Wood, K. R. (2006) HomeNote: supporting situated messaging in the home. In Proc. ACM CSCW, Banff, Canada, 383-392.

Sheller, M. and Urry, J. (2004) The city and the car. In Miles, Hall and Borden (Eds.) The city cultures reader, 2nd edition. London: Routledge.

Swan, L., Taylor, A.S. and Harper, R. (2008) Making place for clutter and other ideas of home. ACM ToCHI, 15(2), 1-24.

Suchman, L. and Trigg, R. (1991) Understanding Practice: Video as a Medium for Reflection and Design. In Greenbaum & Kyng (Eds.) Design at Work: Cooperative Design of Computer Systems, p. 65-90. Hillsdale: LEA.

Young, M. S. and Stanton, N. A (2004) Taking the load off: investigations of how Adaptive Cruise Control affects mental workload. Ergonomics, 47(8), 1014-1035.