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Recent scientific advances allow the use of technology to expand the number of forms of energy that can be perceived by humans. Smart sensors can detect hazards that human sensors are unable to perceive, for example radiation. This fusing of technology to human's forms of perception enables exciting new ways of perceiving the world around us. In this paper we describe the design of SpiderSense, a wearable device that projects the wearer's near environment on the skin and allows for directional awareness of objects around him. The millions of sensory receptors that cover the skin presents opportunities for conveying alerts and messages. We discuss the challenges and considerations of designing similar wearable devices.

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This study examines preservation of voicemail artifacts. Applying an exploratory approach through grounded theory, participants ( N = 52) from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk provided common reasons for retaining voicemail artifacts. Results highlighted why participants retained or deleted general and specific voicemails. Five categories,  past-focused, important, future-focused, sentimental, and neglectful, represented retaining reasons. The oldest and most important artifacts represented sentimental messages. Three categories, past-focused, technological affordance, and unremarkable or undesirable calls, represented reasons for deletion. Voicemails are paralleled to mass and interpersonal communication and implications make connections between information retention, temporality, and interpersonal memorialization. Findings indicate that asynchronous communication exchanges and relics, such as voicemails, offer linkages to and reverberations of old and emerging technologies.

Human-robot collaborations that operate in shared spaces are anticipated to become increasingly common in coming years. Decades of social psychological research have revealed that human observers positively influence people's performance in dominant and negatively in nondominant tasks. While studies indicate moderate support for social facilitation/inhibition effects with robot observers, this evidence is hotly debated. Addressing known methodological criticism, this study investigates how a copresent robot-observer affects Stroop task performance and whether perceptions of that robot's mental capacities have explanatory value. Results reveal limitations in transferring social facilitation/inhibition theory to robots. Since participants reported high task attention levels across conditions, emerging flow states may have helped them circumvent social facilitation/inhibition mechanisms. It may thus be recommended for future research to consider flow dynamics when investigating social performance effects.