Few recent incidents made me think on the need for presence management. The first one was when a close friend who stays abroad was going through a stressful situation and could not be contacted for a long period. I kept thinking how to help the friend without intruding into her life or asking too many questions. Surprisingly there were hardly people who even knew that she is stressed. The second observation is based on gated communities in urban areas where neighbours are unaware of each other's presence and sort of live an isolated life.
I am assuming that a lot of us wants privacy, specially when we want to live independently without any lifestyle restrictions. But what does privacy means? Is there a difference between not being communicated to versus not being intruded into?
My project with S.Lab uses the essence of joint family and brings it back into the lives of family members who are living physically away from each other, with special focus on the elderly. What I see from the above two observations is that presence management is not just necessary among family members but also urban gated communities. We may not want the neighbours to peek into our lives, but we definitely want the assurance that if, and only if something goes wrong, we have someone beside us who 'might' be able to around, who would do something. But for that to happen we need to know who stays beside us. And then we need to know their general well-being, so that we know when to approach.
First of all the 'who' is difficult to find. How do we filter people who completely wants to live isolated?
Secondly, 'where' will these interaction take place? Could there be indirect channels that will help build conversations?
And the most important is 'how'.
Just some thoughts/insights: most gated communities already have community parks, blocks etc. But I can say from my personal experience that it is left for each individual to start a conversation, to be heard, to be seen. The culture of a small town/rural area where houses are closely knitted and leave space for others to have a general overview without the need to poke into another's life or even talking to them. It is this the missing link in the big multi storeyed buildings. Plus many of these residents have a tight schedule due to which they have very limited social interactions at the community level.
With community I mean housing colonies specially gated societies and the people living in it.
The question in my mind right now is how to approach these communities. What I mean is that the environment of a gated society is very closed for interaction. The community halls and parks serve very limited role. They let people mingle and converse. But what I am looking into right now is a place where can one gets introduced. The point is not to speak, but have the knowledge of someone's existence and well-being without trespassing their privacy.
There are works going on that is just dealing with presence management. There is funf.org that is more inito the development side of the story but very similar to what we are doing at S.Labs in terms of scope. There has not been much research into this aspect nor sufficient user studies to fall back on.
If future predictions of computing is to be believed, then research points at ubiquitous computing-wherein everything can theoretically be embedded with computer chips. But then what are the implications of being digitized to that extent? Still probing....
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