Nicolas Nova, SMS as Location-Based Awareness Tool: field study proposal

\cite{Nova03}

This poposal explains why location-aware devices, like mobile phones, providing spatial information, may contribute to the contruction of the mental model of one’s partner. The information mobiles can provide, does not only include where the partner is but also who is co-located nearby and which objects are closely related in that position. the questions this field study aims to provide are the following:
1. how people build a representation of the location of their partner within a group.
2. In this information about space meaningful for gorup members?
The proposal reports on the study of Grinter and Eldridge (see \cite{Grinter03}), about particularities of SMS communication; Ito and Okabe (see \cite{Ito03}), about technological situations involving texts. Common patterns emerging during SMS usage are:
1. mobile text chat: to fil ‘communication void’
2. ambient virtual co-presence: maintaining ongoing background presence of the others
3. augmented flesh meet: texting creates a technology enhanced physically co-located gathering
The empirical methodology of this study aim to ask a gorup of users to build a table of their SMS exchange during the week, aiming to analise them afterwards.

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I lead a research project at CRAFT called ìGroup Mobî. The project investigates how new technologies, particularly mobiles technologies, learning relationships and forms of game theories can support individuals in forming social networks as they express their personality and develop relationships by solving puzzles. Specifically, my goal is to better understand how people starts forming a sense of belongings, develop a sense of trust, initiate a collaboration with peers in an informal context, and how technology can support them.

In developing this project, I have become increasingly interested in how human relations develop through a psychodynamic framework. What are the hidden processes, which brings a person to become the leader of a small group and how people convey their role in the group following conformists paths of aggregations.

Teenager groups are pervasively enabled to new forms of communication, which evolves rapidly into new forms of human interaction, which, in one hand, are brand new and require intensive studies and, on the other hand, may reveal new features of human groups. In addition, new technologies, particularly mobiles, offer a way to track and record human communication for deeper analysis. My goal is to understand how these new forms of conversation into new media can be used to represent social network activity. These acquired data can be used to represent social network maps. These representations, then, can be offered back to the single participants into the network giving them a feedback of their role and personality.

I am currently engaged in collaborative projects with some local cultural centres in Lausanne and Torino to investigate these issues. My hope is to strengthen my contribution and personal knowledge through the PhD programme.

I need a deeper understanding of several issues to develop these research projects further. I would like to understand better: how a sense of group is formed in general; how people develop trust and eager to collaborate; how people emerge as leader or outsider; how people consent to conformism; how their perception and decision can be influenced after knowing what is their role (using the feedback provided by the social map).
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