People presence or room activity supporting peripheral awareness over distance

Peripheral awareness is a powerful human resource that has only recently been addressed in media space design. The challenge is to figure out what would be important to convey remotely and to strike a balance between too much and too little. Symbolic representation of remote activity is a powerful way to go, but as it turns out also easy to do wrong. This paper presents some early findings on problems and promises of using symbolism: it reports from informal studies of people using the AROMA prototype in regular office and home settings, and it conveys some lessons on designing appropriate and effective symbolic representations.