The inherent challenges and opportunities of mobile services design have recently led designers to embrace the theory of presence, as evidenced by recent white papers. However, our research finds that presence is a much richer theoretical construct than these studies suggest. Building on this viewpoint and drawing on prior communication research, we more fully explore the application of three types of presence—physical presence, social presence, and self-presence—to mobile services design and to the corresponding opportunities for value creation. We present a series of design challenges for mobility and identify opportunities for overcoming these challenges by incorporating presence. The implications of designing with presence are (1) a greater awareness of and response to the users' needs and behaviors; (2) strategies for design that leverage this awareness; and (3) methods for integrating unique features of mobile devices based on user-driven and environment-driven factors rather than technology-driven factors. Our research suggests the development of middle-range theories of presence for specific application domains such as mobility that combine theoretical aspects of presence theory with the real-world design factors of mobile services. Numerous real-world examples illustrate both the complete nature of presence and its application to mobile services.

Despite the intense interest in the phenomena of presence, there have been limited attempts to explain the fundamental reason why human beings can feel presence when they use media and/or simulation technologies. This is mainly because previous studies on presence have focused on “what” questions—what are the causes and effects of presence?—rather than the “why” question. The current paper tries to solve this problem by providing an elaborated—and probably controversial—account of the fundamental presence-enabling mechanism. More specifically, it explains the modularity of human minds, and proposes that human beings can feel presence due to the automatic application of two types of causal reasoning modules—folk-physics modules for knowing about physical causation, and folk-psychology modules for knowing about social causation—when they respond to mediated and/or simulated objects. Finally, it explains the media-equation phenomena (in which media or computer users feel physical or social presence) according to the modularity argument.