Ubiquitous computing encapsulates the idea for technology to be interwoven into the fabric of everyday life. As computing blends into everyday physical artifacts, powerful opportunities open up for social connection. Prior connected media objects span a broad spectrum of design combinations. Such diversity suggests that people have varying needs and preferences for staying connected to one another. However, since these designs have largely been studied in isolation, we do not have a holistic understanding around how people would configure and behave within a ubiquitous social ecosystem of physically-grounded artifacts. In this paper, we create a technology probe called Social Wormholes, that lets people configure their own home ecosystem of connected artifacts. Through a field study with 24 participants, we report on patterns of behaviors that emerged naturally in the context of their daily lives and shine a light on how ubiquitous computing could be leveraged for social computing.

翻译：普适计算体现了将技术融入日常生活方方面面的理念。随着计算设备融入日常物理器物，强大的社交连接机遇应运而生。已有的连接媒体对象涵盖了广泛的设计组合。这种多样性表明，人们对保持彼此连接有着不同的需求和偏好。然而，由于这些设计大多是在孤立环境中被研究的，我们尚无法全面理解人们将如何在由物理化器物构成的普适社交生态系统中配置自身行为并与之互动。本文中，我们构建了一种名为“社交虫洞”的技术探针，允许用户配置自己的家庭连接器物生态系统。通过一项包含24名参与者的实地研究，我们报告了在其日常生活中自然浮现的行为模式，并揭示了如何利用普适计算推动社交计算的发展。