Grounding Interpersonal Privacy in
Mediated Settings
A Design Study
User Centered Engineering Group Natalia Romero Herrera
Industrial Design Faculty Panos Markopoulos

Agenda
Problem & Approach
Privacy Grounding Model
Design Study
Conclusions
Future Work

Interpersonal Privacy Problem
Communicators in mediated settings lack of
lightweight and distinctive mechanisms to
signal and ground each others’ intentions to
interact

Context – Social Interactions
Image sources:
http://www.cc.gatech.edu
http://www.rvbasics.com
http://www.analytics20.com
http://web.media.mit.edu/

Problem – Too much/Too little
Desired States Undesired States
U E
Crowding
U E
Isolation U E
U E
U E
Obligation
U E
U E
Insufficient
U E
output

Approach – Social Theories
Privacy is a BORDER REGULATION process
(Altman, 1975)
Privacy is dynamic and dialectic process of
opening and closing borders for interaction
Privacy regulation is a GROUNDING process
(Clark, 1996)
Establishing a shared understanding of each
others representations for interaction

Privacy Grounding Model
Least collaborative effort
Explicitness/Ambiguity
Representing Establishing a shared
privacy borders understanding

Privacy Grounding Model – Mechanisms
Brief
Background
Distinctive
Simultaneous

Privacy Grounding Model – Application
Existing
representations
Collaborative
Signalling and
Privacy
grounding
Coordination
Privacy
intentions

Design Study – Grounding mechanisms
Community Bar (McEwan& Greenberg, 2005)
One-click and Drag-and-drop
Mechanisms to ground intentions for interaction using
alternative interaction techniques than typing a text,
as a reaction to other’s message in a chat
application

Design Study – Scenario

Design Study – Expectations
Lightweight
One-click
Drag-&-drop
Distinctive

Design Study – Description
12 participants (PhD students)
4 weeks:
Weeks 1 and 4 (control weeks)
Weeks 2 and 3 (grounding weeks)
Data logs, dairy logs (ESM), interviews.

Design Study – Observations
One-click
As an ‘Ok’ reaction to an open question/request
‘Take a look at this site http://this.site.com’
‘I come over in a second’
As a signal to indicate passive participation in
others’ conversation
‘In the meantime Mark, coffee is ready’
‘I agree with that John’
Drag-and-drop
No need for explicit signalling& grounding

Design Study – Analysis
Lightweight & Interactive
Passive participation
Lightweight interactivity
Distinctive &Ambiguity
No need of text messages
Implicit signalling and grounding

Conclusions
Communicators in mediated settings lack of
lightweight and distinctive mechanisms to
signal and ground each others’ intentions to
interact
Grounding mechanisms can support
lightweight and distinctive
collaborativepractices to help people
establishing a shared understanding of each
others’ representations of privacy borders in
an interactive way

Future Work
Mechanisms: digital and tangible – incidental
and intentional
Community: distributed – closely connected
Period: longitudinal study
Techniques: ESM

Acknowledgment
The work presented here has been supported by the European
Commission through the FP6 FET ASTRA STREP (IST-2004-29266).