Academic Awards 2024 booklet

89 Social Control Experience Design - A Cross-Domain Investigation on Media Media consumption is a pervasive aspect of modern life. It influences entertainment, relaxation, and the way we interact socially in private, shared spaces, particularly in the living room or car. However, traditional media devices often give control to a single, dominant user. This creates power imbalances and restricts active participation in decision making to verbal communication. Consequently, limiting collaboration, social interaction, and the creation of shared experiences. In my dissertation I explored the design of collaborative media systems to enhance togetherness and promote shared experiences in private, shared spaces. Focusing on user needs, I investigated how control of media functions can be shared among co-located users, specifically for collaborative movie selection and media-oriented in-car functionalities. Experimental evaluations in real-life settings showed that shared media control encourages active participation and discussion of individual preferences. This promotes the selection of media content that everyone is most satisfied with, leading to an enrichment of togetherness, social bonds, and shared experiences. This research presents four full-scale collaborative media systems and contributes essential design patterns and tools for creating collaborative media systems for other scenarios beyond the car and the living room. Overall, this thesis contributes to the research and consumer electronics field of designing interactive, collaborative, multi-user media systems for everyday, private, shared spaces. Figure 1: The designed and implemented TV App which allows to be controlled by multiple users at once. It demonstrates the main menu and shows on the right lower corner the connected remote controls. The focused TV menus by the individual remote-control holders are highlighted in white (channels), grey (tv guide), and green (movies). Figure 2: Installation of the collaborative music system that allows passengers in a car to create a playlist together. The three passengers have thus access to the music system through a dedicated in-car touchscreen.