People versus Information: The Evolution of Mobile Technology

Abstract

Abstract. This reports research on users' attitudes towards and use of GSM devices and discusses the implications these have for the future evolution of hand-held devices. It argues that current usage patterns suggest that there is unlikely to be a widespread convergence of information accessing devices and person to person communication devices. It also argues that the latter devices and their associated applications could provide much richer opportunities for communication behaviours than is currently available, and that therefore design efforts within the mobile HCI community should focus on this rather than on information use applications. Introduction Mobile HCIIf one looks back at the history of mobile HCI, one can see that certain assumptions have underscored the research undertaken within its auspices. Expressed very simply, it has been the case that the research questions have to do with information usage. This in turn has split into two main research topics: access to information when remote and away from an office, and, on the other hand, interaction with information on the hand held devices themselves. The one has to do with the constraints of interaction over distance [e.g. 24], the other with constraints of interaction on small scale devices [e.g., 14,23]. More recently, this basic dichotomy has been supplemented with a concern for how interaction with people (or other users if you will) may be combined with information access. This has taken many forms, ranging from location-based services applications through to how different user groups bring themselves together with the use of distinct types of information, such as provided by games and sports [2,12]. Throughout the history of mobile HCI there have of course been various tangential research activities that don't fit so easily within these basic assumptions and subsequent strands of research activity. My own early work on location-based services, for example, was one such activity [9]. Here we had neither a clear idea of what information may be interacted with nor how that might augment person to person communications. There are many other curios within the research literature. But these tangents notwithstanding, mobile HCI has remained and is essentially about human-information

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