Using Digital but Physical Surrogates to Mediate Awareness, Communication and Privacy in Media Spaces . Abstract Digital but physical surrogates are tangible representations of remote people, typically members of small intimate teams, positioned within an office and under digital control.
Surrogates selectively collect and present awareness information about the people they represent.
By responding appropriately to these physical actions of people, surrogates can control the communication capabilities of a media space in a natural way. Surrogates also balance awareness and privacy by limiting and abstracting how activities are portrayed, and by offering different levels of salience to its users. The combination of all these attributes means that surrogates can make it easy for intimate collaborators to smoothly move from awareness of each other to casual interaction while mitigating privacy and distraction concerns. Exploring different surrogate designs and how they work together can be straight-forward if a good infrastructure is in place. Because surrogate design, implementation and use is still a new discipline, we also present several issues and next steps.