  Ubiquitous computing encapsulates the idea for technology to be interwoven
into the fabric of everyday life. As computing blends into everyday physical
artifacts, powerful opportunities open up for social connection. Prior
connected media objects span a broad spectrum of design combinations. Such
diversity suggests that people have varying needs and preferences for staying
connected to one another. However, since these designs have largely been
studied in isolation, we do not have a holistic understanding around how people
would configure and behave within a ubiquitous social ecosystem of
physically-grounded artifacts. In this paper, we create a technology probe
called Social Wormholes, that lets people configure their own home ecosystem of
connected artifacts. Through a field study with 24 participants, we report on
patterns of behaviors that emerged naturally in the context of their daily
lives and shine a light on how ubiquitous computing could be leveraged for
social computing.
