Social response to knowing location of group members

This paper presents a study of how people socially respond to location-based information. They used a wizard-of-oz approach to simulate location awareness. Three test cases reviewed 1) no tech, 2) only location awareness, and 3) both mobile phone and location awareness. They discovered that location awareness without further contextual information can produce stress in participants because it doesn't explain why movement behavior is occurring. This is a very interesting study in that it occurs in-situ and looks at behavioral effects of technology introduction. It's also very nice to see researchers focusing on social use and using non-functional systems to explore technology usage instead of the usual tech-focused approaches. There's also some interesting things to probe further in this, regarding why mobile phones offer different contextual information and how other devices could take over some of these functions more efficiently.

Dearman, D., Hawkey, K., & Inkpen, K. M. (2005). Effect of location-awareness on rendezvous behaviour. In CHI '05 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems (pp. 1929-1932). Portland, OR, USA: ACM Press.
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