Amber

Amber used voice recordings to store activities in personal devices. The user could “paint” these activities on the shared interface, “the canvas”. The canvas had a vague representation of time, that covered one complete day. Other users responded on the activities using voice recordings. By stacking the audio recordings a dialogue on today’s activities was created.

Amber proved to be the most promising of the three. It preserved a sense of freedom and respected the ambiguity that surrounds planning in a family environment. The central piece showed a quick overview of the family’s available time and planned activities. Users were invited to discuss about these planned activities to tweak the proposal and make the best out of their shared time.

The concept underwent several iterations, becoming more structured and usable for planning longer periods of time. However, when more functionality was added and the concept became more concrete it showed that it had some significant issues. The posting of voice messages mediated a slow discussion about possible activities. Instead of bringing people together to plan activities, it created distance between the users. Efforts in making the lay-out more structured resulted in the concept losing the flexibility and vagueness. Amber appeared to be a dead end.

The lessons learned from Amber is that the interactions had to be quick and easy to perform. The concept should motivate to spend time together instead of mediating isolation from each other. And most importantly, planning with your family should be simple. As uncovered when further developing Amber, flexibility and vagueness got lost when a lot of functionality and structure is implemented. A family should not be ran like a company. It needed ways to move freely. Fig.6: Amber