Privacy and Community Connectedness: Designing Intelligent Environments for our Cities

Abstract

This paper investigates the casual interactions that support and nourish a community and seeks to provide a solution to the increasing detachment of modern society as community spaces become less and less engaging. We suggest the use of a ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) infrastructure to promote and support community connectedness via the hosting of virtual community environments and by providing local information and interaction possibilities. This infrastructure addresses our need as society to communicate more effectively and create loose bonds with familiar strangers within our community. We explore this idea with a use scenario and user study of users interacting with the services in a developed intelligent environment.