When Geography Matters - Location Awareness and Community Care

This paper presents some of the early design work of the 'Care in the Digital Community' research project-begun under the EPSRC IRC Network project EQUATOR. We outline some initial findings and designs from this interdisciplinary research project focusing on developing enabling technologies to assist care in the community for user groups with different support needs. While location-awareness may be regarded as an important, if not crucial, component for future mobile devices, and there are interesting arguments about what location-aware services can achieve, our impression is that much of the research has been technology led with technological 'solutions' being proffered for what may well be imaginary 'problems'. In the process the various 'real world' challenges faced when trying to meet the requirements of a real application domain-where geography really does matter-are avoided or invented and many of the 'real world, real time' issues-such as political factors, ethics, development and evaluation remain unexplored. Our early studies suggest that designing for care settings must not only take account of the usability of applications, but also how such technologies and their uses are integrated into a range of social contexts. Moving away from technology led applications and attempting to have a useful input into the development process requires an understanding of how technologies and their uses are integrated into a range of social contexts. As with other studies of domestic environments as sites for the