Essay(Midterm Sketch)
Mobile Awkwardness
Jason Tseng
Niplus777@gmail.com
Abstract
In this paper I will discuss the pervasive awkwardness and tensions brought by the omnipresent usage of mobile phone, and propose some simple solutions to these phenomena.
As the technology progressing, mobile phone developers tend to integrate more and more new features and functions such as camera, touch screen, mp3 players or the capability to connect to internet, into current cell-phone, but very few efforts were put into reviewing the psychology aspect of the users and the emerging and existed emotional needs caused by the relatively new form of communication. Although there are lots of researches focusing on the social phenomena and social impacts brought by mobile phone, the results seem to have very few influences upon the development of cell-phone.
My intention here is to highlight the most often seen emotional needs pervading in modern communicational process, mainly focusing on the process of “using cell phone to talk to someone”; taking a micro perspective toward the process itself and to propose some potential solutions. Hopefully by doing so, I can provide some different thoughts and directions for the future development of cell phone.
Introduction
Having our mobile phone with us nowadays is not an option or a choice for most people anymore. We have to have our cell-phones with us in order to be reachable to our families, friends and business associates, otherwise people would consider us “inconsiderate” and “hard to keep in touch with”, which is an unaffordable disadvantage for most modern people to bear with. Even kids bring their phones with them to ease the anxious level of their parents of the thoughts that their kids might be “kidnapped” or “in danger”.
However, while people taking the company of their cell-phones for granted, the “side effects” emerged in many different aspects. As much as social and other aspects are important, the issue I’m going to talk about mainly focusing on the problems that pervading in the process of actually using the device.
My main argument here, is how people conform themselves to the technology and thus, creating some awkwardness and frustrations in the communicational process.
Concept+Methodology
The options we have when our phones ring are extremely limited: pick up and talk or reject the call. It may seems stupid to even argue about the options we have for someone who takes this fact for merited, nevertheless, if we look at the inherent differences between human beings and computer carefully, it will be clear that why I think this is an issue.
As human being, the way we communicate is analog, which means we have many different layers while interact with others. For example, when we bump into someone on the street, we may say hello, hug this person, shake hand, nods to him, or ignore this guy. Each option, again, has many different levels to send different messages, like say hello in a passionate tone or say hello in an antiseptic way. Not to mention we can easily come up with more options in this scenario.
On the other hand, when it comes to how computer works, it’s all about digital, which means 1 or 0; yes or no. Despite the fact that we can give computer orders to enable it reacting in different manners to different conditions, the essence of the smart machine is still digital.
There is no ambiguity inhere in computer, which is probably a good feature in many cases. But in the case of current cell-phone design, I found the digital feature of answering a phone is quite problematic. The interesting content of “example of mobile phone anti-social behavior” contest (Jan Chipchase 2008) is a good demonstration of how universal and pervasive these problems are. People around the world sharing their experiences of how they suffer from the limited options provided by cell-phone in many different ways, but at the mean time, because of the importance of it, they tend to bear with it and try to ignore the inconveniences and the problems.
Here I divided the behavior of using a mobile phone into three different segments to simplify and organize the problems: Making call / Answering / on a call /. In each category I will describe briefly about the problematic scenario and also provide my thought of potential solutions. It is not to say that these scenarios contain all the problems we are facing, but these are the pin points that I found haven’t been dealt with too much.
Making call: One of the most common seen problems of mobile phone is that it rings at an inappropriate timing or situation. For instance, it could be when someone in an important meeting or in the middle of a funeral. Once it happened, it could cause the tension of the environment and create anger and awkwardness between people in the surroundings. It is now a social protocol to turn your phone off or at least into vibrate mode when the surroundings is not suitable for picking up a call, and we tend to blame anyone, even stranger, who doesn’t obey the new social rule by staring and other non-verbal body-movements.(Berry, et al.2002). However, in our daily lives, the timings that one should switch his cell phone on/off happen frequently. It is human nature to forget and make mistake.
I think the true problem lies in the fact that in current cell phone usage, a caller has very few ways to know if it is a good timing for the receiver to pick up the call or not. The lack of information of receiver’s current status causes the pervasive awkwardness. My proposal is to provide a simple function for a caller to know his contact’s current status, just like what we have while using internet: MSN, IM or SKYPE. Any of these applications has an important feature: provide a little bit information about your current status to your friends, such as “away”, “on phone” or “busy”, so they would have a clearer idea of what you up to before actually talk to you. I can see very similar function works exactly the same way to help solving the problem we have. People often make calls from their contact list in their cell phone, if you can see “don’t call now, just text message me” right next to the name, you will probably have a better chance not to embarrass your friend.
Answering:
When our phones ring, the limited options of Yes and No (pick up or reject a call) ignores some subtle emotional needs we have. For example, what if you want to take the important incoming call you are having but you need a little bit extra time, say 20 seconds, to prepare yourself? The answer is that you might miss the call if you do so, because the caller might lose his/her patience and give up, which sometimes could damage your opportunity or even career. Or what if you have to reject an incoming call but at the mean time you want to give the caller the assuredness that you got it and will call him/her back as soon as possible? What actually happens all the time is that people don’t want the callers know that they are rejecting the call because it’s considered rude, so they just ignore the call. In these situations, we suffer from the rigid form of mobile communication. The current technology in use ignores these potential needs and cause inconvenience and frustrations. The tendency to ignore the actual emotional needs is similar in the telephone answering system. The frustration comes from the rigid responds and commands from the computer; (press 1 if you…), which hinder you from talking to a customer service person. In both cases we have to conform ourselves to the limited options and “act as setting”. “In other words, the technical opportunity to become friendlier is also an opportunity to become unfriendly at a more decisive level………..What I wanted, in a direct sense, was relief from the (technological) disruption “ (Steve 2007)
The main reason of this problem is that under the constraining of the limited options, we have no way to express ourselves before picking up / hanging up a call. The lack of direct interaction causes both sides (the caller and the receiver) anxious. The caller wouldn’t know whether if the receiver rejected the call simply because it was not a good timing or it was because the receiver forgot to bring his phones. The receivers, on the other hand, have no way to tell the caller either “just a minute, I will pick it up” or “yes, I got it, I will call you ASAP”. Which is exactly what I want to propose: add these options. By providing either the assuredness of picking up or calling back, the direct interaction between both sides can help demolishing the uncertainty and thus comfort the anxiety level.
On a call
In this scenario, the emotional need works in the opposite way comparing to the last one. There are some cases in which instead of providing our current status, we rather want to fake or hide our positions. For example, while having an on-going unpleasant or unfavorable conversation; people tend to pretend having a decreasing signal problem in order to escape from the situation. The problem is that another side of the conversation can easily tell simply because it’s fake. Once the trick had been pierced, the relationship between two sides will only get worse.
My idea for this scenario is simple: why not make the “desired problem” real? If we can manually choose to decrease the signal, we can have the “legitimacy” to hang up any undesired conversation. To take the idea one step further, we can also provide a “background sound effect” function to enable the users to show different “inconvenient situations” to their counterpart. In other words, providing the excuses for hanging up a call, which is the option we don’t have now.
Related Work
James Auger, Jimmy Loizeau, Stefan Agamanolis, 2003, Iso-phone: a total submersion telephonic experience
This project was focusing on sensing the conversation and experiencing the human-to-human communication through mobile phone. The intention, according to the authors, is to “examine how tele-communications might exist from a perspective that priorities quality of experience over the design industry’s blinkered notion of efficiency, often represented in multi-modal, omnipresent services and portable products.” Although the end result of their project is more like a scenario than a actual proposal for future development, the main argument (human emotional needs’ priorities in current design) is strongly related to my on-going project.
Jenny Chowdhury, 2005 The popularity Dialer
This project is well famous among internet, the intention is enable you to order a fake phone call at a particular time to feel important, avoid a contact, or plan an excuse through their service. It worked exactly in the field that I am working on. The importance of the emotional need is highly emphasized. Actually this project is exactly why I pull off the “When in need” section while categorized the problem. It was even more popular than the authors have expected and became a service on-line until FCC ban their business. I think the popular of this project validate my argument.
Social Mobile
They claim their motivation on the index page of their website “we are interested in the frustration and anger caused by other people’s mobile phone”. Although it put a strong emphasis on the social aspect and invented five whole new different types of mobile, the argument on emotional needs should be dealt with is strongly connect to my concept. Their scenarios showed the same awareness of how technology shapes our behaviors and took it further by utilizing it.
On-going process
Implementation
Result
Conclusion
Reference: lists
Websites
Jan Chipchase 2008 “mobile phone anti-social behavior” event, http://www.janchipchase.com/blog/archives/2008/02/monday_morning.html#comments
Books
Barry Brown, Nicola Green, and Richard Harper (Eds) 2002,Wireless World: social and interact ional aspect of the mobile age
Steve Talbot, 2007 Devices of the soul”
Articles
Anthony Dunne, 1999, Hertzian Tales: Electronic Products, Aesthetic Experience and Critical Design.
James Auger, Jimmy Loizeau, Stefan Agamanolis, 2003, Iso-phone: a total submersion telephonic experience
Jason Tseng
Niplus777@gmail.com
Abstract
In this paper I will discuss the pervasive awkwardness and tensions brought by the omnipresent usage of mobile phone, and propose some simple solutions to these phenomena.
As the technology progressing, mobile phone developers tend to integrate more and more new features and functions such as camera, touch screen, mp3 players or the capability to connect to internet, into current cell-phone, but very few efforts were put into reviewing the psychology aspect of the users and the emerging and existed emotional needs caused by the relatively new form of communication. Although there are lots of researches focusing on the social phenomena and social impacts brought by mobile phone, the results seem to have very few influences upon the development of cell-phone.
My intention here is to highlight the most often seen emotional needs pervading in modern communicational process, mainly focusing on the process of “using cell phone to talk to someone”; taking a micro perspective toward the process itself and to propose some potential solutions. Hopefully by doing so, I can provide some different thoughts and directions for the future development of cell phone.
Introduction
Having our mobile phone with us nowadays is not an option or a choice for most people anymore. We have to have our cell-phones with us in order to be reachable to our families, friends and business associates, otherwise people would consider us “inconsiderate” and “hard to keep in touch with”, which is an unaffordable disadvantage for most modern people to bear with. Even kids bring their phones with them to ease the anxious level of their parents of the thoughts that their kids might be “kidnapped” or “in danger”.
However, while people taking the company of their cell-phones for granted, the “side effects” emerged in many different aspects. As much as social and other aspects are important, the issue I’m going to talk about mainly focusing on the problems that pervading in the process of actually using the device.
My main argument here, is how people conform themselves to the technology and thus, creating some awkwardness and frustrations in the communicational process.
Concept+Methodology
The options we have when our phones ring are extremely limited: pick up and talk or reject the call. It may seems stupid to even argue about the options we have for someone who takes this fact for merited, nevertheless, if we look at the inherent differences between human beings and computer carefully, it will be clear that why I think this is an issue.
As human being, the way we communicate is analog, which means we have many different layers while interact with others. For example, when we bump into someone on the street, we may say hello, hug this person, shake hand, nods to him, or ignore this guy. Each option, again, has many different levels to send different messages, like say hello in a passionate tone or say hello in an antiseptic way. Not to mention we can easily come up with more options in this scenario.
On the other hand, when it comes to how computer works, it’s all about digital, which means 1 or 0; yes or no. Despite the fact that we can give computer orders to enable it reacting in different manners to different conditions, the essence of the smart machine is still digital.
There is no ambiguity inhere in computer, which is probably a good feature in many cases. But in the case of current cell-phone design, I found the digital feature of answering a phone is quite problematic. The interesting content of “example of mobile phone anti-social behavior” contest (Jan Chipchase 2008) is a good demonstration of how universal and pervasive these problems are. People around the world sharing their experiences of how they suffer from the limited options provided by cell-phone in many different ways, but at the mean time, because of the importance of it, they tend to bear with it and try to ignore the inconveniences and the problems.Here I divided the behavior of using a mobile phone into three different segments to simplify and organize the problems: Making call / Answering / on a call /. In each category I will describe briefly about the problematic scenario and also provide my thought of potential solutions. It is not to say that these scenarios contain all the problems we are facing, but these are the pin points that I found haven’t been dealt with too much.
Making call: One of the most common seen problems of mobile phone is that it rings at an inappropriate timing or situation. For instance, it could be when someone in an important meeting or in the middle of a funeral. Once it happened, it could cause the tension of the environment and create anger and awkwardness between people in the surroundings. It is now a social protocol to turn your phone off or at least into vibrate mode when the surroundings is not suitable for picking up a call, and we tend to blame anyone, even stranger, who doesn’t obey the new social rule by staring and other non-verbal body-movements.(Berry, et al.2002). However, in our daily lives, the timings that one should switch his cell phone on/off happen frequently. It is human nature to forget and make mistake.
I think the true problem lies in the fact that in current cell phone usage, a caller has very few ways to know if it is a good timing for the receiver to pick up the call or not. The lack of information of receiver’s current status causes the pervasive awkwardness. My proposal is to provide a simple function for a caller to know his contact’s current status, just like what we have while using internet: MSN, IM or SKYPE. Any of these applications has an important feature: provide a little bit information about your current status to your friends, such as “away”, “on phone” or “busy”, so they would have a clearer idea of what you up to before actually talk to you. I can see very similar function works exactly the same way to help solving the problem we have. People often make calls from their contact list in their cell phone, if you can see “don’t call now, just text message me” right next to the name, you will probably have a better chance not to embarrass your friend.
Answering:When our phones ring, the limited options of Yes and No (pick up or reject a call) ignores some subtle emotional needs we have. For example, what if you want to take the important incoming call you are having but you need a little bit extra time, say 20 seconds, to prepare yourself? The answer is that you might miss the call if you do so, because the caller might lose his/her patience and give up, which sometimes could damage your opportunity or even career. Or what if you have to reject an incoming call but at the mean time you want to give the caller the assuredness that you got it and will call him/her back as soon as possible? What actually happens all the time is that people don’t want the callers know that they are rejecting the call because it’s considered rude, so they just ignore the call. In these situations, we suffer from the rigid form of mobile communication. The current technology in use ignores these potential needs and cause inconvenience and frustrations. The tendency to ignore the actual emotional needs is similar in the telephone answering system. The frustration comes from the rigid responds and commands from the computer; (press 1 if you…), which hinder you from talking to a customer service person. In both cases we have to conform ourselves to the limited options and “act as setting”. “In other words, the technical opportunity to become friendlier is also an opportunity to become unfriendly at a more decisive level………..What I wanted, in a direct sense, was relief from the (technological) disruption “ (Steve 2007)
The main reason of this problem is that under the constraining of the limited options, we have no way to express ourselves before picking up / hanging up a call. The lack of direct interaction causes both sides (the caller and the receiver) anxious. The caller wouldn’t know whether if the receiver rejected the call simply because it was not a good timing or it was because the receiver forgot to bring his phones. The receivers, on the other hand, have no way to tell the caller either “just a minute, I will pick it up” or “yes, I got it, I will call you ASAP”. Which is exactly what I want to propose: add these options. By providing either the assuredness of picking up or calling back, the direct interaction between both sides can help demolishing the uncertainty and thus comfort the anxiety level.
On a call
In this scenario, the emotional need works in the opposite way comparing to the last one. There are some cases in which instead of providing our current status, we rather want to fake or hide our positions. For example, while having an on-going unpleasant or unfavorable conversation; people tend to pretend having a decreasing signal problem in order to escape from the situation. The problem is that another side of the conversation can easily tell simply because it’s fake. Once the trick had been pierced, the relationship between two sides will only get worse.
My idea for this scenario is simple: why not make the “desired problem” real? If we can manually choose to decrease the signal, we can have the “legitimacy” to hang up any undesired conversation. To take the idea one step further, we can also provide a “background sound effect” function to enable the users to show different “inconvenient situations” to their counterpart. In other words, providing the excuses for hanging up a call, which is the option we don’t have now.
Related Work
James Auger, Jimmy Loizeau, Stefan Agamanolis, 2003, Iso-phone: a total submersion telephonic experienceThis project was focusing on sensing the conversation and experiencing the human-to-human communication through mobile phone. The intention, according to the authors, is to “examine how tele-communications might exist from a perspective that priorities quality of experience over the design industry’s blinkered notion of efficiency, often represented in multi-modal, omnipresent services and portable products.” Although the end result of their project is more like a scenario than a actual proposal for future development, the main argument (human emotional needs’ priorities in current design) is strongly related to my on-going project.
Jenny Chowdhury, 2005 The popularity Dialer
This project is well famous among internet, the intention is enable you to order a fake phone call at a particular time to feel important, avoid a contact, or plan an excuse through their service. It worked exactly in the field that I am working on. The importance of the emotional need is highly emphasized. Actually this project is exactly why I pull off the “When in need” section while categorized the problem. It was even more popular than the authors have expected and became a service on-line until FCC ban their business. I think the popular of this project validate my argument.Social Mobile
They claim their motivation on the index page of their website “we are interested in the frustration and anger caused by other people’s mobile phone”. Although it put a strong emphasis on the social aspect and invented five whole new different types of mobile, the argument on emotional needs should be dealt with is strongly connect to my concept. Their scenarios showed the same awareness of how technology shapes our behaviors and took it further by utilizing it.On-going process
Implementation
Result
Conclusion
Reference: lists
Websites
Jan Chipchase 2008 “mobile phone anti-social behavior” event, http://www.janchipchase.com/blog/archives/2008/02/monday_morning.html#comments
Books
Barry Brown, Nicola Green, and Richard Harper (Eds) 2002,Wireless World: social and interact ional aspect of the mobile age
Steve Talbot, 2007 Devices of the soul”
Articles
Anthony Dunne, 1999, Hertzian Tales: Electronic Products, Aesthetic Experience and Critical Design.
James Auger, Jimmy Loizeau, Stefan Agamanolis, 2003, Iso-phone: a total submersion telephonic experience
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