In recent decades families have become more geographically distributed, making it challenging for family members to maintain a feeling of intimacy. Distributed families face many challenges trying to maintain a sense of intimacy: Different time zones, limited conversation topics, and limited knowledge of the other’s availability and mindset, to name a few. Distributed family members tend to share information, practical issues (when and where to meet next time), as well as special occasions (e.g. birthday events or job promotion) and less emotional information. The result is a more fragmented relationship, which gradually leads to less intimacy. Modern communication technologies (phone, cell phone, email, instant messaging) improve communication, but in most cases, do not achieve the same level of intimacy and connectedness as in face-to-face communication.
CASY: Contextual Asynchronous System is a new communication technology integrating audio/video messaging, asynchronous communication, and context-based delivery. CASY is designed to enhance connectedness between children and their distributed family members such as grandparents, cousins, uncles and aunts.
CASY enables family members to send ‘good morning’ and ‘good night’ asynchronous video snippets into a shared family database. The recipient views the snippet in-context of going to sleep or waking up.
This project is currently retired.
Project Resources
Publications
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CASY - Awareness System for Children in Distributed Families
Orit Zuckerman and Pattie Maes (2005).
In the Proceedings of the 2005 International Conference on Interaction design for children, IDC 2005, June 8-10, 2005, Boulder, Colorado, USA.