After considering my cell phone use, I have noticed that I mostly use my phone for text messaging, as an alarm clock, and as a calendar to remind me of appointments. Although most of my calls are made in the evenings, I am always worried that I will forget to turn my phone to ‘vibrate’ or ‘silent’ mode when I am in class and that that day will be the day when I will get a call in the middle of class. In addition, I get text messages from friends and family at all times during the day, so if I forget to turn my ringer off in class, I will inevitably become that person whose phone went off during class.
Though I am usually very good about turning off my ringer, there are times when I forget to turn it back on and consequently miss phone calls after classes are over for the day. As Ackerman notes, humans are “highly flexible, nuanced and contextualized”, so “rigid and brittle” technological systems don’t fit well into our lives. Schedules are highly subject to fluctuation, and there are unexpected changes which happen daily. For example, someone may choose to not attend a class because they have a headache, or a spur-of-the-moment project meeting may occur during the time they have marked themself ‘free’. To solve this problem, I wish my phone was ‘smart’ enough to be able to input my daily schedule and adjust notification sounds automatically according to my schedule. Although this would be convenient, a socio-technical gap I notice right away is that the user is not going to want to input their schedule every day. Therefore, perhaps this schedule system could be augmented with a location-awareness device. This addition would probably help eliminate undocumented fluctuations, but some users may be worried about privacy. An additional socio-technological gap would be the ability of the location-awareness system to pinpoint your location. It would have to be highly accurate otherwise your phone may continue to be in ‘silent’ mode while you are in your dorm or apartment.
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Wow, great post! You bring up some really good arguments. Although it would be nice if a phone turned the volume down itself at particular parts of the day or adjusted ur schedule due to spur-of-the moment things, there are definitely some downsides to it.
ReplyDeleteLocation-awareness to me seems like the next step in really understanding design for people. This was partly my project for HCI last year, and it's starting to come into fruition with more phones including GPS.
ReplyDeleteYou address a great point with scheduling and this is why your solution with GPS is particularly interesting to me. We can usually define a location by why we're there. If it's something as simple as wanting my phone's volume on or on vibrate, there are some places where it's safe to assume one or the other. For example, I would always want my phone on vibrate at the movie theater and the library.
Sorry for the run-on post, but I've just never really thought of it in that sense, and to me, it'd be a solution that I would to have.