Silent Knock app for iPhone and iPad

•What is Silent Knock?
Silent Knock is an application supporting people to connect over long-distance with lightweight interaction. Add people you want to connect with to your quiet neighbourhood and exchange knocks with your neighbours to show that youre thinking of each other.

•What is the key feature?
Silent Knock has been designed to remove as much of the external elements that may stimulate users communication patterns (e.g. motivation, time and ways to connect). It tries to support a way to share one’s thinking of others without expecting other’s reaction. To achieve this, Silent Knock does not allow real-time interaction (i.e. text, voice and video), as well as any type of push notification.

•What is the value of Silent Knock?
Silent Knock is not just a tool to support people’s connection in a distance setting. This forms part of a research study to better understand the role of technology in maintaining long-distance relationships in Open Lab, Newcastle University. When using the system, we hope that you will agree to take part in a number of brief surveys that can help us know more about your relationships and how we can better support them through new technologies. If you agree to take part in our research, we will ask you to complete a number of simple surveys while using the application. Any information gathered will be completely anonymous and never used for commercial purposes. It will form part of the below named researcher’s PhD research and the data may be published in academic journals and conferences. If you have any questions, or wish to withdraw during the study, please contact Euijin Hwang (e.hwang2@ncl.ac.uk).

•What is Open Lab?
Open Lab is a human-computer interaction, social and ubiquitous computing research group in the School of Computing at Newcastle University. Established in 2008, the group has a core team of around eighty researchers. Our work focuses on the experience-centred design of digital technology and applied challenges in ubiquitous computing. Many members of the group originate from disciplines outside computer science, including psychology, electronic engineering, sociology, clinical sciences, education, design and fine art.