| Popis: |
Smartphones and tablets have entered nearly all parts of the daily life and became a constant medial presence in people’s everyday activities. These devices support their owners in specific situations, and in work and leisure contexts, and therefore make it increasingly difficult to separate work and private life. Detecting these activities for research purposes, and more specifically for making sense of practices around the use of mobile technology which blur the boundaries between work and life, has become a topic of some interest as issues around ‘work-life balance’ emerge, and as research into understanding the various constellations of people and activities that surround work and leisure develops. Although the field of HCI provides different approaches for capturing people’s activities in situ, we will show that these fall short when considering people’s situations, their privacy as well as the longterm motivation of a used for participating in this kind of research. These approaches also hamper researchers that are interested in people’s daily activities and their dynamic adjustment of a study to meet emerging research questions. In this paper, we examine how to design an observation environment that manages these issues while capturing data about and performing research into people’s lives, from an individual user’s as well as a researcher’s perspective. We developed a research framework called ‘PartS,’ based on existing literature and a comprehensive empirical study (interviews, an online questionnaire and workshops), and summarize the design implications for its implementation as a mobile application and a web-based analysis environment. The framework is able to capture in situ information about the individual as well as his/her (work/personal) context, and offers collaborative discussions about the collected information. Finally, we outline the findings of the evaluation using PartS and the implications thereof. |
