1 Connecting Families through Technology

communities has expanded in scope to move away from a solely-workplace focus to investigations of the ways in which family members appropriate and make use of technology as a part of domestic life. Our research premise is ‘the home is not the office’; in order to understand how to design technology to fit within and extend the routines of family members, one must carefully consider the intricate nuances of domestic life, including family and friend relationships and the everyday routines people employ. Within this space, our research broadly focuses on the study and design of ubiquitous and mobile technologies for family members. This has included the study of communication and awareness needs for families [1,7], family calendars [8-10], family photo sharing [11,13], and video communication systems for families [2-4,6,13]. W