@mail

Abstract

People in now days live between tow realms- virtual and real world. Although these two realms are result of same human culture they have very different characteristics from each other. This paper especially focuses on communication culture of now days. Email is one of the major paradigm shifts of communication culture. Email technology not just brought fast communication speed. For people in now days email has become more like a habitat than an application. Today email is a medium of communication and at the same time a medium for document archiving, document delivering, task managing, scheduling or etc. Naturally email became rich source of information describing person’s life comprehending traces of events and emotion. Design work presented in this paper, @mail, had tried to suggest new approach to email to express writer’s emotion and make a life log with that data. This paper had overviewed various approaches to show writer’s emotion in virtual test data and way of dealing with life log. Cases are categorized and analyzed to find out weakness and limitations of former approaches. The final design @mail is based on the insights found out from case studies. @mail is emotional asynchronous communication system with life logging using email as a medium. Unique point of @mail is that it used communication medium as a life log which specially developed to include emotional information inside it. @mail is composed of software system and hardware system. Custom email software had developed for @mail and special hardware for printing life log of @mail is made using electronic typewriter. Two sets of field trial-one for software, one for hardware- had done to evaluate @mail. User’s feedbacks were gathered by questionnaire and interview.