Terminology and Evaluation: Two Challenges for Awareness Systems Research

Technology offers many ways to help us stay aware of a wide variety of things we are interested in. Based on my research experience I believe that there are two challenges for awareness systems research that we should address in the CHI 2005 workshop: terminology and evaluation.  Clarifying the wide variety of terms related to awareness systems will help the research community communicate more easily about their work and provide a framework for this rich design space.  By exploring the best practices for evaluating awareness systems, we can work together to identify successful methods of evaluation and determine ways to compare systems that attempt to provide similar types of awareness.