Awareness Systems: Design and Research Issues

This paper summarizes an invited lecture for the SID 2007 conference, with the same title; it discusses awareness systems for supporting informal social relationships, focusing on some of they key concerns for designers and researchers. The discussion is general, but examples from research done on this topic at the Eindhoven University of Technology are discussed. The paper argues in favor of automated capture of awareness information and suggests that social intelligence is relevant a) as a design and evaluation criterion for such systems and b) as a mechanism for supporting users in managing the information sharing behavior of awareness systems