This research investigates the meaning of ‘human-computer relationship ’ and presents techniques for constructing, maintaining, and evaluating such relationships, based on research in social psychology, sociolinguistics, communication and other social sciences. Contexts in which relationships are particularly important are described, together with specific benefits (like trust) and task outcomes (like improved learning) known to be associated with relationship quality. We especially consider the problem of designing for longterm interaction, and define relational agents as computational artifacts designed to establish and maintain long-term social-emotional relationships with their users. We construct the first such agent, and evaluate it in a controlled experiment with 101 users who were asked to interact daily with an exercise adoption system for a month. Compared to an equivalent task-oriented agent without any deliberate social-emotional or relationshipbuilding skills, the relational agent was respected more, liked more, and trusted more, even after four weeks of interaction. Additionally, users expressed a significantly greater desire to continue working with the relational agent after the termination of the study. We conclude by discussing future directions for this research together with ethical and other ramifications of this work for HCI designers.

What kinds of social relationships can people have with computers? Are there activities that computers can engage in that actively draw people into relationships with them? What are the potential benefits to the people who participate in these human-computer relationships? To address these questions this work introduces a theory of Relational Agents, which are computational artifacts designed to build and maintain long-term, social-emotional relationships with their users. These can be purely software humanoid animated agents--as developed in this work--but they can also be non-humanoid or embodied in various physical forms, from robots, to pets, to jewelry, clothing, hand-helds, and other interactive devices. Central to the notion of relationship is that it is a persistent construct, spanning multiple interactions; thus, Relational Agents are explicitly designed to remember past history and manage future expectations in their interactions with users. Finally, relationships are fundamentally social and emotional, and detailed knowledge of human social psychology--with a particular emphasis on the role of affect--must be incorporated into these agents if they are to effectively leverage the mechanisms of human social cognition in order to build relationships in the most natural manner possible. People build

This paper argues that because the home is so familiar, it is necessary to make it strange, or defamiliarize it, in order to open the design space for it. Critical approaches to technology design are of both practical and social importance in the home. Home appliances are loaded with cultural associations such as the gendered division of domestic labor that are easy to overlook. Further, homes are not the same everywhere – even in one country. Peoples ’ aspirations and desires differ greatly across and between cultures. The target of western domestic technology design is often not the user, but the consumer. Web refrigerators that create shopping lists, garbage cans that let advertisers know what is thrown away, cabinets that monitor their contents and order more when supplies are low are central to current images of the wireless, digital home of the future. Drawing from our research in the United States, the United Kingdom and Asia, we provide three different narratives of defamiliarization. A historical reading of American kitchens provides a lens with which to scrutinize new technologies of domesticity, an ethnographic account of an extended social unit in England problematizes taken-for-granted domestic technologies, and a comparative ethnography of the role of information and communication technologies in the daily lives of urban Asia's middle classes reveals the ways in which new technologies can be ‘captured ’ and domesticated in unexpected ways. In the final section of the paper, we build on these moments of defamiliarization to suggest a broad set of challenges and strategies for design in the

Fantasy play and storytelling serve an important role in young children's development. While computers are increasingly present in the world of young children, there is a lack of computational systems that support children's voice in everyday storytelling, particularly in the context of fantasy play. This paper introduces StoryMat, a system that supports children's own voice in their own storytelling play. StoryMat offers a child-driven play space by recording and recalling children's narrating voices, and the movements they make with their toys on the mat. Empirical research with children showed that StoryMat fostered developmentally advanced forms of storytelling and provided a space where children engaged in fantasy storytelling collaboratively with or without a playmate. The paper addresses the importance of supporting children's fantasy play and suggests a new way for technology to play an integral part in that activity. Keywords: Storytelling, young children, interactive narrati...

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On the Internet, virtual communities structured around consumer interests have been growing rapidly. To be effective in this new environment, managers must consider the strategic implications of the existence of different types of both virtual community and community participation. Contrasted with database-driven relationship marketing, marketers seeking success with consumers in virtual communities should consider that that they: (1) are more active and discerning; (2) are less accessible to one-one-one processes, and (3) provide a wealth of valuable cultural information. Strategies for effectively targeting more desirable types of virtual communities and types of community members include: interaction-based segmentation, fragmentation-based segmentation, co-opting communities, paying-for-attention, and building networks by giving products away.

As the Internet has changed communication, commerce, and the distribution of information, so too it is changing psychological research. Psychologists can observe new or rare phenomena online and can do research on traditional psychological topics more efficiently, enabling them to expand the scale and scope of their research. Yet these opportunities entail risk both to research quality and to human subjects. Internet research is inherently no more risky than traditional observational, survey, or experimental methods. Yet the risks and safeguards against them will differ from those characterizing traditional research and will themselves change over time. This article describes some benefits and challenges of conducting psychological research via the Internet and offers recommendations to both researchers and institutional review boards for dealing with them. The Internet and the widespread diffusion of personal computing have the potential for unparalleled impact on the conduct of psychological research, changing the way psychologists collaborate, collect data, and disseminate their results. In this article, we focus on the way the Internet is changing the process of empirical research, identifying both opportunities and challenges. The Internet presents empirical researchers with tremendous opportunities. It lowers many of the costs of collecting data on human behavior, allowing researchers, for example, to run online experiments involving thousands of subjects with minimal intervention on the part of experimenters (Nosek, Banaji, & Greenwald, 2002b). Internet chat rooms and bulletin boards provide a rich sample of human behavior that can be mined for studies of communication (Galegher, Sproull, & Kiesler, 1998), prejudice (Glaser, Dixit, &

In this article I argue that the organizational involvement of large scale information technology packages, such as those known as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), has important implications that go far beyond the acknowledged effects of keeping the organizational operations accountable and integrated across functions and production sites. My claim is that ERP packages are predicated upon an understanding of human agency as a procedural affair and of organizations as an extended series of functional or cross-functional transactions. Accordingly, the massive introduction of ERP packages to organizations is bound to have serious implications that precisely recount the procedural forms by which such packages instrument organizational operations and fashion organizational roles. The conception of human agency and organizational operations in procedural terms may seem reasonable yet it recounts a very specific and, in a sense, limited understanding of humans and organizations. The distinctive status of framing human agency and organizations in procedural terms becomes evident in its juxtaposition with other forms of human action like improvisation, exploration or playing. These latter forms of human involvement stand out against the serial fragmentation underlying procedural action. They imply acting upon the world on loose premises that trade off a variety of forms of knowledge and courses of action in attempts to explore and discover alternative ways of coping with reality. Key Words: Human agency, behaviour, information infrastructures, integration, organizational action, procedural action, procedural knowledge, standardization

Surveys administered over the Internet have been plagued by low response rates and at times have provoked respondent rebellions against researchers who stand accused of broadcasting noxious unwanted e-mail or “spam. ” This article examines the issue from the perspective of social science research on privacy in an effort to understand the unique privacy context of Internet-based survey research. Online surveyors commit multiple violations of physical, informational, and psychological privacy that can be more intense than those found in conventional survey methods. Internet surveys also invade the interactional privacy of online communities, a form of privacy invasion seldom encountered with traditional survey methods. The article concludes with recommendations for improving response rates to online surveys using accepted privacy protection practices already found on the Internet as well as emerging Internet technologies.

We describe a five-month pilot project conducted in the dialysis unit at Boston's Children's Hospital. Pediatric patients with renal disease used the Zora graphical multiuser environment while facing hemodialysis. Zora is an identity construction environment specifically designed to help young people explore issues of identity, while engaging in a participatory virtual community. This paper presents the experience and evaluates the feasibility and safety of using Zora in a hospital setting. It describes how Zora facilitated explorations of identity and mutual patient support and interaction. Finally it also presents design recommendations for future interventions of this kind. More generally, this paper explores the potential of technology specifically designed with therapeutic purposes to help patients cope with their illness. Keywords Multi-user virtual environment, pediatric patients, dialysis, therapy, identity, storytelling, virtual communities.