Hi, everybody.
My name is Eran Toch.
I'm a faculty member and co-director of the IWiT
lab at Tel Aviv University.
And this is a collaboration with Hadas Chassidim, also
from the IWiT lab, and Tali Hatuka,
the head of the lab for contemporary urban design, also
at Tel Aviv University.
I'm going to talk about the spatial and social context
of mobile disturbance.
Imagine that you're standing in a bus station like these guys.
And your phone is suddenly ringing.
In some situation, you might be concerned
that your call is disturbing to other people around you.
And in another situation, you might not.
What makes a difference?
So previous studies have shown that it's
related to the number of people around, the type of the place,
and type of activity carried out in the place.
What we're trying to do in this study
is to look at two other factors.
The first one is social norms.
So social norms distinguish between the way
different cultures perceive how things
are disturbing to others.
And you can imagine, for example,
that in one restaurant, if your phone rings,
that's going to cause a huge disturbance.
And in another type of restaurant,
it's going to be fine.
And it doesn't really depend on the number of people around.
It depends mainly on the norms.
So we're going to look at especially whether the place is
considered private or public, as this is a very
important norm in our society.
The other theory that we're going to test
is the idea of portable private personal territory.
That's the idea that our phone actually
causes us to change our perception of the way
the space around us is utilized and the type of things
that we can actually do.
So to answer those kinds of questions,
we developed Smart-Spaces.
It's an experience sampling Android application
to allow us to create different questionnaires that
are answered by participants according
to the place they stay in.
We ask about activity carried out
in the place, the number of people
around, whether a phone call will be perceived as disturbing
to people around the participants,
and the perceived privacy, the extent to which the smartphone
provides privacy from other people around the participant.
We also ask about whether the place is
considered private or public.
And we've collected different types
of data about the location, the activities
carried out on the phone, and other evidence.
We've used this technology in the study
with 50 participants that carried our application
for three weeks.
They have surveyed a total of 1,912 different locations,
answering all those questions around them.
The study was carried out mainly in Tel Aviv University,
surrounding neighborhoods, and wherever the students went
to hang out or work or do whatever
they had gone out to do.
So just to give you an example, about a third
of the survey locations were considered private.
These are those-- sorry-- were considered public.
These are those kind of purple locations here.
And about 2/3 were considered private.
Our main tool of analysis was ordinal mixed model,
in which we tested the effect of the different variables
on the amount of perceived disturbance.
So a couple of results--
the number of people around is a significant factor,
like in previous studies, but also whether the place is
considered public or private.
And that works independently of the number of people around.
So if the place was considered public,
then the phone is perceived--
then the phone call would be about 20% more disturbing
to the participants.
And that works in conjunction with the type
of activity carried in the place, even though most of them
are highly correlated.
The perception of privacy is also very impactful.
Again, if the place is--
if the phone provides the user with privacy,
then a phone call would be about 20% less disturbing.
And that works with the type of activities carried out
on the phone.
So for example, texting lowers the amount of disturbance.
So a quick summary-- first of all, norms matter.
And also the perception of what we do on our phone
and what we actually are running on our phone, what we actually
do on our phone.
In the future, we're going to look at norms-aware computing,
where we can build computing experiences and mobile devices
that take into account the norms around us.
And we're going to look at how norms change.
So for example, the COVID-19 pandemic
really changes the way we perceive the space around us
and people around us.
And that might have an impact on things like phone disturbance.
So thank you very much.
I was Eran Toch from Tel Aviv University.
This is my Twitter handle.
And I'm waiting for your questions.