Moustafa Zouinar, Natalia La Valle, Laurence Pasqualetti
France telecom Division R&D
moustafa.zouinar@rd.francetelecom.com
laurence.pasqualetti@rd.francetelecom.com
natalia.lavalle@rd.francetelecom.com
Marc Relieu, Ecole Nationale Supérieure
des Télécommunications
marc.relieu@eurecom.fr
Video Observation and Analysis of Everyday
Life in Homes
Studying the home has become an active research area, particularly
since the development of new computing paradigms such as Ubiquitous
Computing and Ambient Intelligence. These paradigms, which
are about embedding computing technologies in the everyday
environement of users so that technology becomes « invisible
» and less attention demanding (Weiser, 1991 ; 1993
; 1994), has been generating a growing body of research and
industry initiatives aiming at designing ubiquitous or ambient
systems for the home. However, the design of such systems
requires an in-situ understanding of the local, temporal,
spatial, pragmatic and social organization of everyday life
in the domestic space, in order to assess the relevance of
Ubicomp and Ambient Intelligence paradigms and its consequences
for the home. Interesting attempts at developing this understanding
in relation to these paradigms are emerging (Crabtree and
Rodden, 2004 ; Tolmie, et al., 2002 ; Alex Taylor and Laurel
Swan, 2005) but are still rare. In line of these attempts,
we have been undertaking observations and analysis of the
in-situ and local organisation of activities in different
home settings in the context of a France Telecom Project on
Ambiant Intelligence for the home. To do so we have developed
a video-based infrastructure that captures the minutiae of
everyday life of the observed home. In this paper, we will
describe this infrastructure (the rationale behind its development,
its components, and how it operates) and the procedure of
observation. We will also show some instances of recorded
activities to show what we can learn from video observation
and analysis of everyday life in homes.
References
Crabtree, A. and Rodden, T. (2004), “Domestic routines
and design for the home”, Computer Supported Cooperative
Work: The Journal of Collaborative Computing, Dordrecht, Kluwer,
Academic Publishers
Taylor, A and Swan, L. (2005). Artful Systems in the home.
Proceedings of the 2005 CHI Conference on Human Factors in
Computing Systems, 2-7 Apr. Oregon, US. ACM Press
Tolmie, P., Pycock, J., Diggins, T., Maclean, A. and Karsenty,
A. (2002) Unremarkable computing. Proceedings of the 2002
CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp.
399-406, Minneapolis: ACM Press
Weiser, M. (1991) The Computer for the Twenty-First Century,
Scientific American, pp. 94-10
Weiser, M. (1994). The world is not a desktop. Interactions;
pp. 7-8
Weiser, M. (1993). Some Computer Science Issues in Ubiquitous
Computing. Communications of the ACM, 36(7), 75-84 |
