Software support for intimate social networks

Together with colleagues from the INSITU group in Orsay, I have been working on the design of communication technologies for the home environment for several years. This work, which started with the interLiving project, showed how difficult it is to deploy these technologies outside our labs in domestic settings. It also stressed the importance of providing families with simple ways of creating and managing the various networks they use to communicate with relatives, friends and colleagues.

Our observations show that these intimate social networks are usually built on a small number of people and households. As the information exchanged is usually of private matter, the supporting technologies should ensure security and confidentiality of the communications. Networks used by family members might overlap. However, transitivity between them is usually not welcomed (e.g. kids don't like when their mother tells someone else what they told her). Finally, these networks are dynamic. Simple interfaces and interaction techniques should be provided so one can easily reconfigure them.

During his PhD under my supervision (2003 - 2007), Emmanuel Nars worked on the design of a software infrastructure adapted to these social networks [1, 2]. Part of his work was later integrated into the Núcleo toolkit. Something should probably be done to bring these ideas into new light...

References

[1] E. Nars. A group communication infrastructure. In NordiCHI '04: Proceedings of the third Nordic conference on Human-computer interaction, pages 429–432, November 2004. ACM. [ACM] [Google]

[2] E. Nars. Support informatique à des communications de groupe. Thèse de Doctorat, Université Paris-Sud, Orsay, France, Septembre 2007. 185 pages. [Google]