Demand in My Pocket: Mobile Devices and the Data Connectivity Marshalled in Support of Everyday Practice

Lord, Carolynne, Hazas, Mike, Clear, Adrian, Bates, Oliver, Whittam, Rosalind, Morley, Janine and Friday, Adrian (2015) Demand in My Pocket: Mobile Devices and the Data Connectivity Marshalled in Support of Everyday Practice. In: Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI '15. Association for Computing Machinery, pp. 2729-2738. ISBN 978-1-4503-3145-6

Preview

Text paper277.pdf - Published Version Download (334kB) | Preview

Abstract

This paper empirically explores the role that mobile devices have come to play in everyday practice, and how this links to demand for network connectivity and online services. After a preliminary device-logging period, thirteen participants were interviewed about how they use their iPhones or iPads. Our findings build a picture of how, through use of such devices, a variety of daily practices have come to depend upon a working data connection, which sometimes surges, but is at least always a trickle. This aims to inform the sustainable design of applications, services and infrastructures for smartphones and tablets. By focusing our analysis in this way, we highlight a little-explored challenge for sustainable HCI and discuss ideas for (re)designing around the principle of 'light-weight' data 'needs'.

Actions (login required)

View Item

Downloads