Social Media on the Road

Oskar Juhlin is the Studio Director of the Mobility Studio at the Interactive Institute, Stockholm, Sweden. He is assistant director and senior researcher at the newly started Mobile Life VinnExcellence Center at Stockholm University. He is Associative Professor ("Docent") in applied information technology at the IT-university in Goteborg. He holds a Ph.D. in sociology of technology at Tema, Department of Technology and Social Change, Linkoping University. He has also a Master of Science in Civil Engineering at Lulea Technical University. He has been a research fellow at the Section for Science and Technology Studies at Goteborg University, and researched at the Viktoria Institute in the Mobile Informatics programme. His current approach is design research oriented, which combine studies of mobile practices (so called ethnographic fieldwork) and design sessions to generate new mobile applications. The thematic research approach, which has been pursued during the last five years, is called the Interactive Road. It points to, on the one hand, the importance of social interaction in road use for coordination as well as for community life, and on the other hand, new technical possibilities with emerging mobile media to provide better tools and increased experiences in mobile situations. The results have been influential on the area of interaction design, computer-human interaction, support for collaboration, physical computing, games research, and mobile applications. The research agenda has been established and pursued by Oskar Juhlin and the Mobility studio at the Interactive Institute in Stockholm since 2001. Oskar has also been responsible for supervising Ph D students, securing funding and so on.

• An Empirical Program of Road Use.- Social Life in Traffic.- Juxtaposing Traffic Research and Social Computing.- Investigating and Designing for Social Interaction.- Vitality and Social Interaction on the Roads.- Traffic as Situated Interaction.- Interactional Adaptation for Achieving Safe Mobile Phone Handling in Traffic.- Driving and Articulating the Road Context with the PlaceMemo Application.- Road Talk: A Public Roadside Location-Dependent Audio Message System.- Sense and Social Interaction.- The Automobile Flâneur—Joint Music Listening in Traffic Encounters.- Motorcycling and Social Interaction—Design for the Enjoyment of Traffic Encounters.- Legibility and Public Road Signs.- The Road as a Stage in Journey Games.- A Game for the Backseat Experience.- Locative Interactive Storytelling Along Vast Road Networks.- Multiplayer Gaming in Traffic Encounters.- Post Script: A New Balancing Act for Research on Traffic and Mobile Technology.

From the reviews: "This interesting presentation addresses human-computer mobile interactivity and the design of new applications and services. ... Though the book is a brief 200 pages, it will stimulate readers to imagine the possibilities of vehicle-based computing. The chapter references and index provide additional details of this seldom-discussed topic." (Brad Reid, ACM Computing Reviews, May, 2011)