Paper Reading #9: Jogging Over a Distance Between Europe and Australia

References:
Jogging Over a Distance Between Europe and Australia by Florian Mueller, Frank Vetere, Martin Gibbs, Darren Edge, Stefan Agamanolis, Jennifer Sheridan. 

Published UIST '10 Proceedings of the 23rd annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology

Authors:
Florian Mueller is a researcher at Stanford University.
Frank Vetere is a senior lecturer at the Univeristy of Melbourne.
Martin Gibbs is also a lecturer at the Universtiy of Melbourne.
Darren Edge is a researcher in the field of CHI for Microsoft, obtaining his degree from Cambridge.
Stefan Agamanolis is the director of a research institute at  Akron Children's Hospital.
Jennifer Sheridan is a senior consultant and director of user experiences at BigDog Interactive.

Summary:
Hypothesis:
Adding a social aspect and the ability to communicate over distances to jogging could make it more enjoyable.

Methods:
The subjects jogged from 25 to 45 minutes while communicating with a friend. They were then interviewed and asked various open ended questions to describe their experience

Results:
Ultimately this was deemed a success. Participants noted that they were more motivated to attempt to get better results when they knew they were competing with the person on the other end of the line. The positional audio and heartrate monitor greatly helped it feel like an experience where you were actually running with a friend.

Contents:
This paper attempted to explore the social aspects of running. The writers saw that physically running with another person is a great way to motivate onesself and they attempted to replicate that over distances. Overall they explored the different ways that running can create bonds between people. The paper was focusing mainly on making running more enjoyable, not making it easier or more effective.

Discussion:
As someone who has just, in the last few months, started running consistantly i can say that i really dont personally believe that this would help at all. I have never felt the urge to run along with someone, nor have a i ever felt that when i did run with another person that it was any more enjoyable. While this is a neat concept i dont believe it has any practical application. It seemed to me to be a kind of "do it because we can" type of thing rather than an attempt to develop something that was actually useful.