MAIN RESEARCH INTEREST

 
< I am interested in exploring how Phenomenology as a theoretical approach can be used to better understand
the role of mediation that new technologies are been designed to provide. In particular, I am considering a set
of techhnologies that could be called ‘proximity-based social technologies’. The term has not been used to far,
but it creates a category for a series of research projects that have been carried out by R&D labs and universities
over the past few years. This set of ubiquitous ICTs includes personal, mobile and networked devices that allow
users to communicate, share resources and be aware of each other’s presence only when in physical proximity.
The boundaries of the ‘physical proximity’ are set by the technology used to connect the devices, and can vary
from a few to hundreds of metres, so the term becomes useful primarily to differentiate these technologies from
those that allow users to communicate over any distance. I suggest that this category of interactive systems,
which will be commercially available soon, is of particular relevance to social computing, because it will affect
existing social interactions. While the only means of interaction among people in co-presence has been so far
face-to-face verbal and non-verbal communication, proximity-based social technologies will introduce a virtual
space of mediated interactions. For the design of these technologies researchers need to understand how
existing or non-existing social interactions among co-located people could be supported and mediated by new
ubiquitous technologies.