Susanna Paasovaara

Outlining the design space of playful interactions between nearby strangers

Designing interactive technology with an aim to encourage social interaction between nearby strangers is challenging. While there are various social norms, cultural practices and privacy concerns that hinder interaction with strangers, ignoring the other people can be even more detrimental in the long term (e.g., leading to a low sense of community and missed opportunities). In order to better understand this paradoxical design space, we arranged co-design workshops aiming to create ideas of future services where interactive technology playfully encourages interaction between nearby strangers. By analyzing the resulting ideas, we identify various aspects and elements that conceptualize and theorize this so far fuzzy design space. We explicate concepts like Hotter, Hotter, Changing Others Avatar and Dancing, and analyze the 60 resulting concepts to identify elements and viewpoints important in this design space. The conceptualization can help ideating future services, identifying relevant research questions, as well as evaluating design solutions with respect to relevant quality attributes.

Proximity-Based Automatic Exchange of Data in Mobile Gaming: Studying the Experiences of StreetPass Users

Despite the ubiquity of short-range connectivity technologies and their use for pragmatic purposes, the opportunities they provide for playful interaction are not well understood. StreetPass feature on Nintendo 3DS handheld gaming devices is a rare world-wide example of exchanging playful content (e.g. avatars, messages, items) automatically between close-by users over proximity-based technologies. To learn from the user experiences of this pioneer group we conducted an online questionnaire, gathering over 100 responses from active Nintendo 3DS users. The findings indicate that proximity-based automatic exchanges have remarkably enriched the gaming experience with 3DS, increased sense of community, and triggered serendipitous interactions between players. We argue that similar features could bring value also to other application areas and mobile systems; and describe what should be taken into account in their design.

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.

Collaborative Video Challenges: A Playful Concept of Proximity-Based Social Interaction

Mobile proximity-based networking technologies like Wi-Fi Direct enable applications that allow interaction between co-located users and device-to-device transfer of large amounts of data. To explore new ways of utilizing such enablers, we designed a concept that allows users to create collaborative video challenges, and further spread them device-to-device via Wi-Fi direct. The concept offers means for proximity-based playful social interaction, mediated by collaboratively created stories consisting of several clips. We present a preliminary user study to gather early feedback on the concept and to identify main hindrances. Our analysis shows promising results: the concept is considered as fun and playful, and there is high interest to follow how the challenges proceed. We discuss various opportunities and challenges as well as present ideas for further research.

Playfulness and progression in technology-enhanced social experiences between nearby strangers.

Encouraging social experiences and interactions between nearby strangers has received both research and commercial interest over the past years. This paper focuses on two design qualities that have previously been found successful in this area: playfulness and progression. Employing the research through design approach, we explore these as design principles in so-called people-nearby applications. To evaluate how playfulness and progression contribute to encouragement of social interaction, we carried out a field trial with Next2You, a playful mobile application that automatically detects nearby users and exchanges user-generated profile information. The results imply that the application features demonstrating playfulness and progression did contribute to encouragement of interaction between nearby strangers; however not as expected. The results provide a basis for reconsidering appropriate design decisions and methodological choices with respect to design and evaluation of people-nearby applications that aim to encourage interaction between strangers.

Next2You: a social application for nearby strangers

Encouraging social interaction between collocated strangers has become an increasingly popular topic in Computer Supported Collaborative Work research and interaction design. The research aims to foster more social interaction between collocated people to, e.g., produce positive new encounters and increase social awareness. To address these social goals, we developed Next2You, a proximity-based social mobile application. Its design builds on the principles of gamification, progressive disclosure and light-weight interactions. This paper summarizes the novelties in the design and implementation of Next2You.

User Experience of Mobile Proximity-Based Applications for Playful Social Interaction

Mobile proximity-based connectivity technology like Wi-Fi Direct allows detecting nearby devices and establishing a direct data transfer between them. The opportunities provided by that are still underutilized. My doctoral research looks into proximity-based playful social interactions as a way to enhance interactivity between collocated people, both friends and strangers. I do qualitative user research on new research prototypes as well as on existing commercial systems like Nintendos StreetPass.