New communication technology has the potential to blend work and life rather than balance it. This study with the maker of the BlackBerry® presents seven new service applications that change our relationship with the world around us.
Information and communication technologies continue to change our lives, creating new freedoms and new dependencies. As they expand their capabilities, they start to impact in new ways. This project, in partnership with Research In Motion (RIM), maker of the BlackBerry® device, takes a people-centred look at how technology might enable our patterns of living and working to be more seamless, improving communication with those around us.
The BlackBerry ® is a ubiquitous business tool known for enabling work to happen outside the office and around the clock. This study looked at opportunities for technology to allow people to have better connection with their family, friends and life outside of work. A central hypothesis challenged the traditional view that we are all trying to create a work-life ‘balance’. For today’s city dwellers, this has become more of a work-life ‘blend’.
Work-life blend
In order to understand the drivers and tensions of this relationship, the project selected a number of users who exhibit different biases in ‘blending’ work and life. Four extreme work-life relationship types were identified: the Overlapper has work and life sharing the same space and the Separator keeps them apart; the Expander has work dominating life and the Reclaimer organises work around life. Seven participants were visited in their homes or at work, informally interviewed and given probe packs to allow them to capture a week-long snapshot of their lives.
The research was analysed and translated into design scenarios that depict possibilities five years in the future. The study identified two key user demands: first, to ‘experience the immediate’ and explore the unfamiliar safely; and second, to be able to ‘take their world with them’ wherever they went, allowing impersonal spaces to become familiar and giving them access to friends and family. These imperatives were used to generate seven new service applications.
Seven new services
Explorer logs all journeys and ‘greys’ out parts of the map you have not visited, encouraging you to discover new places. PeerSteer allows places on a virtual map to be bookmarked so friends can share personal knowledge of local areas and recommend shops or restaurants to each other. Traces allows pictures of those recommendations to be shared so you can see where your friends have been. Wildfire is a system that spreads information from person to person – mobile devices automatically communicate as people pass close by each other spreading messages around the city. BlackBox is a flight recorder for your life as well as a digital repository for personal media – it can reconfigure a hotel room to feel like your own living room. Footfall gives an ambient experience of another person’s movement even though they are at a remote location, allowing active participation in their daily routine. Quiet Time filters incoming communications, making it possible to create a quiet personal space away from constant digital interruption.
These concepts have been brought to life in three short films, showing how they can create a more seamless work-life blend for different users. Together they suggest new ways of building on the traditional stronghold that BlackBerry® technology has in the business arena, encouraging wider engagement with the consumer and lifestyle market.
