Entertainment media at home - looking at the social aspects

In light of an increasing interest in home entertainment technologies, there is a need to discuss how these relate to social structures. By organizing this one day workshop we hope to encourage HCI research in this area and promote better design for home media technologies.

Workshop Goals

The home is increasingly being filled with entertainment technologies to allow for the watching of TV and movies, listening to music, and playing of games as well as novel technologies such as robotic pets and interactive furniture. As entertainment technologies continue to multiple, we need to consider how they are situated into existing households. The goal of this workshop is to discuss how the introduction of entertainment technologies into the home is changing the dynamics of family life, and the larger social effect. Issues of discussion during the workshop includes:

• Ethnographic and other studies of new and existing entertainment technologies, or studies of home life that are applicable to entertainment technology
• Reviews of sociology and anthropology research looking at technology use and adoption terms of gender, family roles, as well as regional or racial differences
• Discussions of social and cultural implications of new media, including the consequences of time shifting, profiling, and individually tailored media
• Discussions of how these issue vary across cultures to ensure the output of this workshop is applicable to domestic technology researchers across the world
• Work relating to design for a piece of home entertainment media if grounded in discussion of social and cultural issues

About the Organizers

Louise Barkhuus is currently a Research Fellow in the department of Computing Science at Glasgow University, researching ubiquitous computing, in particular games and other leisure technologies. She recently conducted a research project on visual home media, comparing the differences in usage patterns between regular TV/VCR use, PVRs, and watching TV via downloads to a computer. She is part of the UK wide Equator project. See more at Louise's website.

Jennifer Rode is a PhD candidate at University of California, Irvine, working with Paul Dourish to conduct ethnographic studies of domestic technologies. She previously worked as a usability engineer at TiVo evaluating its user interface and conducting ethnographic studies. Her previous research looks at gender differences in terms of what type of domestic appliances are programmed by men and women, parenting practices surrounding VCRs, and cross cultural discussions of homes and appliance use. See more at Jennifer's website.

Genevieve Bell is an anthropologist based out of Portland and serves as Intel's Director of Domestic Designs and Technologies Research. Bell obtained her Ph.D. in anthropology at Stanford, where she wrote a history of the first non-reservation boarding school in the United States at the end of the last century. She later taught anthropology, Native American studies and a range of other courses in the Anthropology Department at Stanford. She just concluded a two year ethnographic study looking at home PC use in countries throughout Asia.