Pradthana Jarusriboonchai

CueSense: A Wearable Proximity-Aware Display Enhancing Encounters

Wearable technology has been envisioned, amongst other things, to enhance face-to-face social interaction. For example, the visibility of wearable devices to other people (e.g. a wearable display) could augment the wearers appearance by displaying public and socially relevant information about them. Such information could increase nearby peoples awareness of the wearer, thus serve as tickets-to-talk and, ideally, enhance their first encounters. We present the design of CueSense, a wearable displays that shows textual content from the wearers social media profiles, determined by the level of proximity to another user and match-making between their contents. We report the findings from a preliminary user study with 18 participants, followed by discussion as well as ideas for future research and further refinement of the concept.

Personal or social?: designing mobile interactions for co-located interaction

Personal mobile devices such as mobile phones, tablets, fitness wristbands, and smart watches are becoming ubiquitous and widely involved in our daily activities. However, these devices are designed and considered by the users as personal -- not as shared or collaborative. As a response to this, the workshop aims to explore the design of new application ideas for mobile devices that explicitly encourage users to engage in face-to-face interaction. The research question is firstly how to design for face-to-face interactions. Secondly, it is how we can utilize various possibilities e.g. combining mobile devices (e.g. phones + tablets); extending commercial mobile-devices with hardware peripherals; utilizing social networks, geo-location services or proximity-based connections; or utilizing software to turn the personal devices into tools of face-to-face interactions.

Design and Evaluation of a Multi-Player Mobile Game for Icebreaking Activity

In collaboration between strangers, group formation and familiarization often take a lot of time. To facilitate this, icebreaking activities are commonly utilized, aiming at a positive and relaxing social atmosphere. To explore how interactive technology could serve as a tool in such social activity, we developed Whos Next, a multiplayer quiz-based mobile game intended to break the ice in a group of strangers. The design utilizes the information asymmetry between people, aiming to encourage joint activity between them. We conducted six evaluation sessions where four to six participants in each played the game together and were interviewed. Whos Next was found to be a promising support for icebreaking. It was considered to offer a comfortable way of sharing information about oneself and getting to know newly-met strangers. We conclude that interactive technology could successfully support the facilitator role in encouraging interaction and creating a relaxed atmosphere between strangers.

Social Displays on Mobile Devices: Increasing Collocated People's Awareness of the User's Activities

Activities that have traditionally been performed with tangible artifacts, e.g. reading the newspaper and browsing printed photos, have increasingly moved to mobile devices. This has made it harder for the surrounding people to become aware of the activities a person is performing with the device. As a result, the possibilities for serendipitous social interactions between the user and the collocated people have diminished. We introduce social displays, additional displays on mobile devices providing social cues about the activities of device users activities for surrounding people. We conducted five focus groups with in total 23 participants, each discussing four scenarios and co-designing the presentation of cues on the display. The results suggest that the display has potential to break the private bubble of mobile device activities, as well as to provide tickets-to-talk to enhance social interaction, especially between acquaintances. We discuss social opportunities and challenges as well as possible design directions for social displays.

Opportunities and challenges of mobile applications as "tickets-to-talk": a scenario-based user study

This paper presents a scenario-based user study of mobile application concepts that would encourage interaction between people within close proximity. The scenarios demonstrate three themes of digital tickets-to-talk: informing who and what are around, augmenting self-expression, and online interaction encouraging physical interaction. Our interview study explored the opportunities and challenges of such applications in developing into further face-to-face interactions between strangers. Tickets that are related to activities that convey a solid intention that would lead to practical collaboration, such as playing sports or studying together, have the best potential to advance to meaningful face-to-face interaction. Augmenting self-expression and online interaction encouraging physical interaction were found to have potential to create curiosity but seen less credible by our 42 interview participants to motivate face-to-face interaction between strangers. We conclude by discussing the potential of each theme of ticket-to-talk based on our findings as well as related literature.

Roles, scenarios and challenges of social devices

Face-to-face social interaction can often be diminished by issues like shyness to initiate interaction, not having a good reason to interact or not fully engaging in the current social situation. To tackle such challenges, we are working on designing applications which address the vision of Social Devices (SD): proactive mobile devices that aim to facilitate and increase social interactions. We present their possible roles in social situations, two scenarios demonstrating light-weight SD, and various challenges related to concretizing the vision into successful and acceptable applications.

Understanding collocated social interaction between Pokémon GO players

Pokémon GO, a location-based mobile game with millions of users, offers an opportunity to study how mobile technology can encourage collocated social interaction between people. Despite being predominantly a single-player game, Pokémon GO has been discussed to induce a variety of social interactions between the players. We conducted a qualitative online survey to gain insight on collocated interactions and encounters that take place around the game, and to understand how they relate to the game design. Our analysis shows that the game design promotes encounters between players, the idle time during the game allows various forms of social interaction to take place, and further, the players gain various benefits from exchanging information with each other. Based on the findings, we present design implications for the design of mobile applications or games aiming to encourage collocated social interaction.

Next2You: a proximity-based social application aiming to encourage interaction between nearby people

This paper presents the design and concept evaluation of Next2You, a proximity-based social mobile application that uses gamification, progressive disclosure and light-weight interactions to encourage interaction between people who are regularly within a close proximity of each other. The application aims to break the current norm of matching and introducing people based on similar interests or commonalities. We conducted focus groups to evaluate the application concept. We report findings of the user study contributing to the understanding of the potential and challenges of gamified proximity-based social applications.

Let's take photos together: exploring asymmetrical interaction abilities on mobile camera phones

Mobile phones have become common tools for photography. Despite the fact that photos are social artifacts, mobile phones afford the act of photo taking only as an individual activity. Photo taking that involves more than one photographer has been envisioned to create positive outcomes and experiences. We implemented this vision with mobile camera phones, exploring how this would influence photo taking practices and experiences. We conducted a user study where altogether 22 participants (11 pairs) were using a novel mobile photography method based on asymmetrical interaction abilities, comparing that with two traditional methods. We present the collaborative practices emerged in different photography methods and report user experience findings particularly with regard to enforced collaboration in mobile photo taking. The results highlight benefits and positive experiences in collaborative photo taking. We discuss lessons learned and point out design implications that come into play when designing for mobile collocated collaboration.

Using Mobile Technology to Bring Families Together: The Design of a Family History Concept to Motivate Face-to-Face Communication

Increased use of digital technology, such as social media or individual entertainment systems, may lead to less face-to-face communication between family members. This paper presents a two-phase design research study on a novel use of technology that could help reconnect co-located family members. The authors present the design qualities for a domestic technology that can increase the level of social interaction within a family. These design qualities provide a guideline for the second phase, in which a novel system concept, FAMEX, is designed to support discussion about family experiences. FAMEX is based on the concept of family history, and involves the creation, finding, and discussion of family memories, which are represented as virtual notes around the home. The design emphasizes ludic values in the form of playful stimulants to face-to-face discussion. Mobile devices, together with augmented reality and embodied interaction, are utilized within the home context: this combination has the potential to raise curiosity and interest, and therefore, encourage ongoing use of the system. In an iterative user study, with prototypes of various fidelities, the participants rejected the features of formal game play, but gave positive feedback to the main features of FAMEX.