Zoogy-ME: an approach to user-centered design for proximity-based social technologies

In a World where the main role of Information and Communication Technologies still seems to be the one of connecting people over distance, a process of remediation is slowly showing how new ICTs also have the opportunity to improve the connection between individuals and their immediate surroundings. This paper presents an attempt to understand how this emerging set of technologies, later addressed as "proximity-based technologies", could be researched by translating the characteristics of the context where they will be used into design solutions for new applications. This project Zoogy-ME, a real time communication tool aimed to support the creation of face-to-face interactions among students on campus, is the result of a short-term ethnographic project conducted at the London School of Economics.