UC San Diego

When traditional social media are brought off the desktop into the mobile milieu, the resulting interactions may become cumbersome. Yet, the mobile milieu demands even lighter-weight interactions than those on the desktop. We posit that mobile tools can support expressive, lightweight communication by leveraging users' existing tools and practices, streamlining essential interactions, and exploiting the affordances of visual media. To evaluate our ideas, we explore the design space of tools for supporting lightweight social communication using visual media and mobile phones. We present four projects representing points in this space, covering it in the dimensions of proximity (proximate or remote) and interaction focus (input or output). In our analysis, we consider why and how people communicate using these tools, the social consequences of using them, and the implications for design. In the remote-output part of the design space, the Emotipix project aims to reduce demands on attention by embedding an ambient display of friends' photos in the background of the mobile workflow. In the remote-input part of the space, the UbiSketch project aims to enrich communication by supporting ubiquitous sketching, enabling users to easily publish paper-based information to social media channels in real time. In the proximate- output part of the space, the projector phone project explores the use of personal, mobile projection to transcend the limitations of phones' small screens, enabling the use of arbitrary elements of the physical world as (potentially large) display surfaces. In the proximate-input part of the space, the ShadowPuppets project looks at employing hand shadows as input to support collocated interaction with projector phones. We implemented functional prototype systems and conducted user studies, with quantitative and qualitative measures, which validated our techniques. Our design devices were largely successful in supporting expressive, lightweight mobile communication, and some surprising results point to areas for future work