Social weight: designing to minimise the social consequences arising from technology use by the mobile professional

Abstract

This paper defines the concept of social weight as a design consideration and presents the e-SUIT, a social weight research platform incorporated covertly within a traditional business suit. The e-SUIT allows its user to strike a balance between a given technology's derived benefit and its social consequence. As the e-SUIT is designed for research within a business context, it is built upon commercially available enterprise software. This work is a first step towards subjecting the empirical social interactive phenomena of wearable technology to quantitative design analysis. Proof of concept testing shows access to commercially available enterprise applications with a distinct, user selectable, strata of social weight.