Carnegie Mellon University: Situationally Appropriate Interaction

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Situationally Appropriate Interaction

Portrait

As personal computers and the Internet have become key components of professional life, tools for computer-mediated communication have become important complements to the written document, the telephone conversation, and the face-to-face meeting. Email and instant messaging, in particular, have come to play an important role in interpersonal communication. While such media are often more convenient and cost-effective than traditional communication media, they create interesting changes in how people communicate.

One such change is that these media tend to reduce the presentation of an individual to a username. The individual may select this username, or it may be determined by the technology. Regardless of how it is selected, the username carries less information about the individual than even the shortest face-to-face meeting. Although a written document is also not as rich as a face-to-face meeting, a letterhead does support the presentation of an identity. Because this presentation can have a significant impact on how the reader reacts to the content of the document, organizations spend significant resources creating letterhead and other presentations of an identity. Even this type of a basic personal presentation is often absent from communication conducted via email and instant messaging.

With current technology, including personal presentations in email is still cumbersome. This problem is compounded by the fact that many of the potential benefits are realized by the recipient, though the sender incurs the costs. This project presents the Portrait system, an automated approach to generating personal presentations for computer-mediated communication. The Portrait system works by searching the web for photos or logos that represent individuals and organizations. Using aesthetic templates, it then combines these images to create personal presentations. There are several potential applications of Portrait presentations, including email glance displays and group awareness displays.

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