eKISS: Sharing Experiences in Families Through a Picture Blog

Contemporary family life can be very stressful and many families are often busy and separated by time or distance. Physical separation makes it difficult to maintain an awareness of each other and the feeling of intimacy. But lack of such intimacy can result in insecure and troubled children. This paper outlines eKISS, a picture weblog for mediating intimacy between children and parents. eKISS supports asynchronous sharing of experiences from the children to their parents while being physically separated. Communication is based on pictures and text sent through mobile technology and shared on a weblog available to the family. A longitudinal field evaluation revealed that eKISS was able to support acts of intimacy by providing insight, new communication channel, and the possibility to easily share experiences. It also revealed that eKISS was most useful when the family was separated for longer periods of time.