An Explorative Study on Requirements for Ambient Displays Presenting Mood Awareness

Abstract

In face-to-face meetings important information about other team members’ mood can be grasped from facial expressions. In distributed teams this information is missing. Media Spaces connect users in different rooms over distance via audio and video links. While studies on awareness have shown that mutual information—including the mood—improves social interaction, concerns with respect to users’ privacy in the connected rooms are increasing. In this paper we report on a study exploring the design space of ambient displays as means of capturing and presenting mood awareness while preserving present users’ privacy. Our survey (N=19) revealed interesting requirements for the design of ambient displays and shows that the actual mood has a strong influence on the willingness to share one’s mood.