Celebratory Technology to Orchestrate the Sharing of Devices and Stories during Family Mealtimes

2017. Hasan Ferdous, Frank Vetere, Hilary Davis, Bernd Ploderer, Kenton O'Hara, Rob Comber & Geremy Farr-Wharton
Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

Abstract

While the idea of "celebratory technologies" during family mealtimes to support positive interactions at the dinner table is promising, there are few studies that investigate how these technologies can be meaningfully integrated into family practices. This paper presents the deployment of Chorus - a mealtime technology that orchestrates the sharing of personal devices and stories during family mealtimes, explores related content from all participants' devices, and supports revisiting previously shared content. A three-week field deployment with seven families shows that Chorus augments family interactions through sharing contents of personal and familial significance, supports togetherness and in-depth discussion by combining resources from multiple devices, helps to broach sensitive topics into familial conversation, and encourages participation from all family members including children. We discuss implications of this research and reflect on design choices and opportunities that can further enhance the family mealtime experience.

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Citation

Ferdous, H. S., Vetere, F., Davis, H., Ploderer, B., O'Hara, K., Comber, R., & Farr-Wharton, G. (2017). Celebratory technology to orchestrate the sharing of devices and stories during family mealtimes. Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 6960–6972). New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. URL: https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025492, doi:10.1145/3025453.3025492

BibTeX

@inproceedings{10.1145/3025453.3025492,
author = {Ferdous, Hasan Shahid and Vetere, Frank and Davis, Hilary and Ploderer, Bernd and O'Hara, Kenton and Comber, Rob and Farr-Wharton, Geremy},
title = {Celebratory Technology to Orchestrate the Sharing of Devices and Stories during Family Mealtimes},
year = {2017},
isbn = {9781450346559},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025492},
doi = {10.1145/3025453.3025492},
abstract = {While the idea of "celebratory technologies" during family mealtimes to support positive interactions at the dinner table is promising, there are few studies that investigate how these technologies can be meaningfully integrated into family practices. This paper presents the deployment of Chorus - a mealtime technology that orchestrates the sharing of personal devices and stories during family mealtimes, explores related content from all participants' devices, and supports revisiting previously shared content. A three-week field deployment with seven families shows that Chorus augments family interactions through sharing contents of personal and familial significance, supports togetherness and in-depth discussion by combining resources from multiple devices, helps to broach sensitive topics into familial conversation, and encourages participation from all family members including children. We discuss implications of this research and reflect on design choices and opportunities that can further enhance the family mealtime experience.},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems},
pages = {6960–6972},
numpages = {13},
keywords = {smartphones, mealtimes, family, commensality, collocated interactions, collaborative use},
location = {Denver, Colorado, USA},
series = {CHI '17}
}