Understanding Considerate Systems - UCS (pronounced: You See Us)

Interactions between people occur in a social realm. On the other hand, “things”, including devices for communication and computation, are generally socially deficient. Imagine socially aware systems moving from an interruption model of communication to an introduction model. To create considerate systems, there is a need to model social context, social behavior, and communication goals. This paper describes early systems that work to understand and eliminate the socially disruptive qualities of the ubiquitous systems people increasingly use and rely on in all aspects of their personal, educational, social and business lives. We show performance improving systems: an instant message arrives after you have finished typing a sentence, not while you are forming it; a car waits for you to complete a difficult maneuver before giving you distracting feedback. This work relies on dynamic task, user, system, and communication models. The goal is to stimulate more work to understand and create considerate systems. Such systems will improve people’s experience and performance. Social responsiveness can become the norm for the technology that pervades our lives.