Towards agents which are suggestive of "awareness of connectedness"
As Information Technology progresses, our daily lives are getting "connected" more and more. At the same time, however, problems are appearing. The center of these problems can be captured as the "Communication Overflow." To cope with such problems, we propose an approach that tries to provide a communication environment that assists users in managing their communication activities. The key notion of this approach is to enhance the "Awareness of Connectedness." Here, agents which are suggestive of awareness of connectedness play an important role. In this paper, we describe the key notion and introduce a brief road-map towards the environment for the awareness of connectedness. Two candidate tools for the environment are described. The first one is a visualization tool for communication media that provides feedback of users' communication activities. Its purpose is to enhance the awareness for communication. The second tool is a simple, intuitive interactive media that exchanges the statuses of users. It is an alternative network communication media that might be suitable for very light-weight, almost-acknowledge-only communication mode. Some results on an experiment of these two tools are also reported.
awareness of connectedness communication media suggestive agent information design socialware