References to books, projects and academic papers that inspire us

Literature

Mobile Times (People & Practices Research Lab, Intel)

Mobile Times is a research programme at the P&P Research Lab, encompassing various studies and publications.

Topic:
Which aspects of time use matter most to technology use?

Main thesis:
The issue of managing one’s own personal time zones—the set of social obligations, relationships, and activities that create the rhythms of one’s day—is increasingly complex and fragmented, though this occurs differently in different parts of the world.
Being busy was not the root cause of dissatisfaction with time use. Conflicts arose not when people have more to do, but increasingly diverse things to switch between, creating the need to ‘shift gears’ frequently.
We discovered a new aspect of time—‘plastic time’—that is cause to rethink our assumptions about busy lifestyles. There are many aspects of our day, such as computer usage, that fly under the radar, can be done not just in a rushed manner but at the right time, and be bent and stretched in such a way as to enable people to interleave the multiple activities going on in their lives, in both relaxed and high-pressure moments. This bending and stretch­ing we are calling “plastic time,” and is a key way that people engage with the constraints and opportunities of modern life. The experience of “plastic time” frames modern life—it is an experience that is highly interruptible, shrinking and expanding around immediate concerns, and interleaving through multiple activities.

Methodology:
Mix of qualitative and quantitative methods to understand how personal time zones affected technology use.
A multi-sited, multi-method research, wherein each field site and method provides an important piece of the puzzle, enabling social scientists to ask broad, fundamental questions.
By tracking 169 laptops and Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs), interviewing people, and working with national time use datasets, we have studied the long term social transformations that have created this way of life (in connection with the Intel Mobility Group’s Strategic Planning team).

Theoretical framework:

(Just found a summary of the research on the Intell website. Did not find a full publication yet. The more theoretical references will probably be listed there. Seems interesting enough to look for it.)

Format:

Academic papers

Links:
Intell page – http://techresearch.intel.com/articles/Exploratory/1754.htm

Relevance:
Seems very relevant to B&B project. Both because of methodology and descriptions of how people deal with complexities of everyday life.

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