Crossmedia Systems Constructed around Human Activities: A Field Study and Implications for Design

Many interactive systems today span across a range of interoperable IT artifacts, forming crossmedia systems. They aim at providing pervasive and synergistic support for human activities. This paper reports a three-month-long qualitative field study exploring the use of a crossmedia fitness system to support physical training. The main concern is how the system – through the configuration of its components – supports the primary activity. Users’ primary motivation, elaborateness of their activities, internalization or externalization of their actions and their perceived threshold toward using distinct IT artifacts determined the utilization of the system and each of its components. Compositional aspects of the system, such as its hierarchical structure, distribution of functionality and functional modularity influenced its ability to support different ways of training. The article contributes by shedding light on aspects that influence the synergistic use of IT artifacts and by proposing implications for designing crossmedia systems.