1986: Bob Stults published a report to Xerox PARC proposing Media Space, in which people live and work using remote video- and computer-mediated tools. Research at PARC and Rank Xerox EuroPARC follows, foreshadowing modern videoconferencing and also exploring support for ‘peripheral awareness’.  https://bit.ly/3fCpJel ; https://bit.ly/2V6b9CA

1990: Roy Ascott published ‘Is There Love in the Telematic Embrace?’. Inspired by the cyberneticists, Ascott's artistic practice and teaching had since the late 1960s focused on geographically separated interactions amongst people over telecommunication networks - so-called telematic art. However, in this influential article, he went further suggesting that "The technology of computerized media and telematic systems is no longer to be viewed simply as a set of rather complicated tools extending the range of painting and sculpture, performed music, or published literature. It can now be seen to support a whole new field of creative endeavour that is as radically unlike each of those established artistic genres as they are unlike each other. A new vehicle of consciousness, of creativity and expression, has entered our repertoire of being.

1992: artist Paul Sermon’s installation Telematic Dreaming created a video link between two beds via a 2MB ISDN telephone line. Live video of a participants on separated beds are projected on one another, giving the effect of lying next to a virtual partner.

1995: working from the Computer Related Design (CRD) research studio at the Royal College of Art (RCA) – then headed by Gillian Crampton Smith – Tony Dunne and Fiona Raby developed a series of proposals called Fields and Thresholds for tele-proxemics experiences embedded in the environment.

1996: CRD MA student Rob Strong developed three prototypes for remote emotional communication –Feather, Scent, and Shaker (Strong and Gaver, 1996). To our knowledge, these are the first devices to explicitly support emotional awareness. 

1997: MIT Media Lab student Scott Brave, with his adviser Hiroshi Ishii, developed InTouch, a pair of connected rollers for exchanging simple gestures (Brave and Dahley, 1997). https://vimeo.com/44537894.

1999: Heather Martin, a RCA/CRD graduate, designed the Kiss Communicator while working with IDEO. Blowing on one device caused a pattern of coloured lights to appear on its partner. https://stanford.io/378wyAB

2002: Crispin Jones, a RCA/CRD graduate, in collaboration with Graham Pullin and colleagues at IDEO developed the Social Mobiles series - a set of five playful mobile telephone designs, including one to exchange knocks designed by Alexander Grünsteidl. Pullin would latterly become a tutor at the University of Dundee.

2002: The Ambient Orb is launched commercially by Ambient Devices, a spin out company from Hiroshi Ishii’s lab at MIT by David Rose. Indicating online information (stock market performance, weather, etc.), Ambient Orb was not a person-person awareness device, but it offered a related approach and aesthetics.  Ambient Devices still trades today.

2003: Founded by Rafi Haladjian and Olivier Mevel, the French company Violet launched the DAL lamp. Offering similar functionality to the Ambient Orb, the DAL lamp also allowed the exchange of emotional messages amongst friends and family. The lamp retailed at €800 and sold in small numbers. By 2005 Violet had initial commercial success with the launch of the Nabaztag, the Internet connected rabbit.

2004:  Founding members of the Interaction Research Studio Bill Gaver, Andy Boucher, Sarah Pennington and Brendan Walker had been working on the Equator project since 2000. Amongst the proposals and highly-finished research products developed by the project was Lamp Share, a network connected lamp.

2004: Following Heather Martin’s appointment at the Interaction Design Institute at Ivrea –founded by Gillian Crampton Smith after she left CRD – she supervised a four-week class called ‘Strangely Familiar: Repurposing Everyday Devices’ which generated two notable student projects: Tok Tok and Tug Tug - both collaborations between Haiyan Zhang and Aram Armstrong. The following year (in 2005) Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino, then an Ivrea student, first proposed the Good Night Lamp in response to a brief on single household living.

2005: Jofish Kaye and his colleagues reported the ‘one-bit communicator’ at CHI, software that turns a single bit red on a remote computer desktop when activated locally before slowly fading away.  A study over several weeks of its use by couples in long-distance relationships shows that even this minimal interaction helps support emotional connections. 

2006: Jack Schultz, an MA student in Dunne and Raby’s new Design Interactions programme at the RCA, presented Availabot, developed with his friend Matt Webb, at his final year degree show. Availabot was a “presence-aware, peripheral-vision USB toy” that worked with Instant Messenger to physically show availability. Schulze & Webb founded a studio of the same name and attempted, ultimately unsuccessfully, to commercialise the product (the studio eventually became BERG).

2009: Mike Vanis and colleagues, then students at the University of Dundee tutored by Graham Pullin, designed a set of connected awareness devices for Social Sewing in response to a brief from Microsoft Research. Designed for Vanis’ grandmother, a miniature sewing machine mimics the activity of her remote friends as they sew.

2010: Joanna Montgomery developed Pillow Talk while a student at the University of Dundee, for a couple to share the intimate sounds of sleep. Latterly it was commercialised through Montgomery’s company Little Riot and is available today. 

2012: Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino launched the Good Night Lamp as a Kickstarter and was subsequentially commercially available. It received positive critical attention and is part of the permanent collection at the London Design Museum.

2015: David Chatting and colleagues, at Newcastle University and the Royal College of Art, developed a series of connected machines for families separated by their work through the Family Rituals 2.0 project, including a wine machine coupled with a remote bottle opener.

2017: Isaac Blankensmith and the Google Creative Lab published Paper Signals, designs for papercraft mechanical indicators of data from the Internet – like weather and stocks – much like Ambient Devices, but in DIY form.