Benefit-of-inconvenience-oriented handwriting chat system for enhancing quality of communications

Abstract

Postulating that handwriting should be positioned as an inconvenient communication tool, we investigate what kind of benefit may occur in its inconvenience in this paper. We are aiming to reconfirm the advantages of handwriting in communications from a viewpoint of a concept “Fubeneki” which denotes some sort of benefit such as an opportunity of discovery and joy under the inconvenience. For that purpose, we built a client-server based experiment system in which users can communicate with each other either by text-chat or handwriting chat, and conducted subject experiments to investigate difference in quality of communications with between text chat and handwriting chat. Results of the questionnaire about the difference between text- and handwriting chats which we asked the subjects to answer showed that more than 70% of them feel sense of reassurance and warmth in handwriting.