This section first summarizes the key findings and research directions for the future, then discusses and further conceptualizes the aspect of enhancement, and finally reflects on the methodological validity of the literature review.
Enhancing collocated social interaction with technology is an emergent research topic that has gained increasing interest especially since the early 2010’s. Relevant contributions are both numerous and demonstrate a broad variety of design concepts, which confirms the timeliness of providing a proper outlook over the research landscape. The review outlines a breadth of interesting designs that embody various target areas, design objectives, and design approaches. In addition to the design objectives, approaches and focus areas, the review shows various theoretical concepts and viewpoints that are critical to understand in order to advance the theoretical foundations and outline new design directions for this topic.
6.1 Directions for future work
Many studies seem to be motivated by the exploration of new technology (e.g., Bluetooth, wearable displays) rather than by a well-defined social issue, theorized problem, or user need. This means that our bottom-up review could not identify detailed social problems but, rather, a broad array of design objectives and design approaches. Consequently, we call for better articulation of the aims of the design. For example, what can be considered as the success criterion of the design, and in what regard a design is intended to make a social situation more desirable?
Similarly, the theoretical foundations discussed in Section
2, such as the proximity levels by Hall (
1963), have been used to a limited degree to drive design work or evaluation studies. The various concepts and theories about interpersonal interaction are rarely utilized, even though we argue that many design explorations would benefit from more profound sociological and social-psychological analyses. More effort could be put into understanding the rules, practices, situational settings and other social factors that shape this hybrid space of social interactions and human-technology interactions. Design activities should also consider what is the existing ecology of technology used in the targeted context. Many of the analyzed designs do not explicate what kind of social interactions and human-technology interactions already take place in the targeted context.
Perhaps as a consequence of the rather limited theoretical basis, another common observation is that the design contributions are typically generic rather than specific. Many prototypes are intended for any user groups or contexts, or the focus areas are not explicated. While this is understandable from the viewpoint of design exploration and the development of technical enablers, we argue that future design endeavors would benefit from more deliberate choices of specific phenomena, social settings, target user groups, or type of interaction—particularly those that aim to actively enhance the quality of social interaction. We believe that future work should go beyond the classroom, corporate or event contexts that appeared in many of the papers.
Many of the reviewed papers state that the aim is to encourage social interaction but the actual objectives seem to be more modest and are often about inviting or supporting interaction. Considering Ludvigsen’s (
2005) levels of interaction, technology seems to be most utilized to alter the situation from ‘distributed focus’ to ‘shared attention’. The prototypes that encourage, incentivize or even trigger interactions—i.e., aim at ‘dialogue’ or ‘collective action’ (ibid.)—could be considered to most strongly manifest enhancement, similar to those that engage people in collective activity. However, in this corpus, such prototypes are in the minority. The majority of the prototypes focus on more lightweight roles, such as increasing awareness or enriching the means of interaction (approximately half of the papers). These two categories could be explained by a latent premise in ICT applications:
the more information, the better. This could also be seen to relate to the contact hypothesis (Allport
1954) when considering how social encounters can be facilitated by increasing mutual awareness.
As for more specific gaps identified in the corpus, one is that there are few solutions that aim to
sustain interaction that has already been initiated. While much of the research focuses on initiating encounters between strangers, future work could focus more on, e.g., maintaining family relationships or long-term friendships that can deteriorate over time. The system for facilitating parent-child communication by Chan et al. (
2017) is an interesting recent example of this type of work. Sustaining interaction could also mean alleviating social fears in encountering strangers or providing cues for the discussion dynamics and dominance during a dyadic conversation like in a recent paper by Muralidhar et al. (
2016). Another observation is the lack of research and design solutions addressing the introduced issue of phubbing, and, in general, technology disrupting ongoing interaction. While we have seen various campaigns that discourage or even prevent the use of personal devices in social situations, surprisingly little focus has been put on user interface designs for avoiding the disruption of interpersonal interaction and social gatherings, therefore minimizing the social effects of the inevitable disruptions.
We also see untapped potential in designing technologies for
crowds of people, a design space outlined by, e.g., Reeves et al. (
2010) and Roughton et al. (
2011). Different kinds of digital hosts or mascots, for example, could strengthen the sense of community in large events and encourage social encounters within temporary groups of collocated people. Recent interesting avenues that can broaden the design space of social enhancement include talking agents as social facilitators (Porcheron et al.
2017) or digital ‘confederates’ (Krafft et al.
2017). Overall, considering the extent of theories on social interaction, there seems to be an underexplored design space for other types of enhancement beyond what we summarize in Tables
2 and
3.
While the questions of how and why information technology could take a meaningful position in social interaction are extensively reviewed in this paper, the question of which of the approaches
best enhance interpersonal interaction remains unanswered. From the perspective of evaluation, a key finding is that few papers have assessed the proposed solutions’ impact on interpersonal interaction, relationships, or other aspects pertaining to social interaction. The lack of depth in evaluation (e.g., teasing out the behavioral impact of technology) is a common phenomenon in engineering-driven HCI research (Väänänen-Vainio-Mattila et al.
2015). Understanding which design approaches actually work, and in which kind of social settings, requires research focus in the future. We speculate that this partly results from the need to develop scalable measures, as well as the challenges in organizing realistic study settings. This calls for methodological contributions specific to this topic. Analogously to what NASA-TLX (Hart and Staveland
1988) or SUS (Brooke
1996) are for the concept of usability, enhancing social interaction would benefit from similar well-established evaluation instruments. The understanding of
enhancement and
collocated social interaction should be operationalized into guidelines that help consider its various aspects as well as measures that help assess the goodness of the developed solutions. Moreover, considering that the various contextual factors in the evaluation are critical for the success of any social catalyst design (Heinemann and Mitchell
2014), we need a deeper qualitative understanding of different social settings and their unique characteristics.
All in all, the reviewed papers indicate that there is room for new technology that supports—rather than disrupts—people in collocated situations. A techno-critical viewpoint could argue that preventing the use of technology in, for example, public spaces and social events would solve some issues related to ignorance and isolation due to technology use. However, the morality of regulating the use of personal devices is questionable, and the issues possibly solved with regulation are not the only problems pertaining to collocated social interaction. Similarly, as CMC has fundamentally augmented social experiences between remote users, we believe there can be socially acceptable
technological solutions to truly enhance collocated interactions. This creates an interesting application area for technologies related to autonomy and proactivity (Tennenhouse
2000), persuasiveness (Fogg
2002), and socially aware computing (Lukowicz et al.
2012). There is space for the development of technical enablers and novel services for proactively inviting and encouraging new encounters, as well as for the redesign of existing systems and interfaces to better cater for the dynamics of collocated social interaction.
6.2 The many roles of enhancement technology
The following further conceptualizes ‘enhancement’ in this research context. By revisiting the identified categories of social design objectives and design approaches, we abstracted them into different forms of enhancement; i.e., roles or positions for technology. The abstraction was aimed to provide a bigger picture of how enhancement can be embodied in the context of collocated social interaction. It provides a hierarchy and a vocabulary to help consider the roles of technology on different levels of abstraction. We hope this representation serves as a step towards a more fine-grained vocabulary about the enhancement of collocated social interaction and helps researchers and designers to determine specific design objectives and approaches for the different roles.
The resulting conceptualization stems from a meta-analysis of the categories in Sections
5.1 and
5.2, and the identification of common themes across them. We started by unpacking the approximate continuum identified across the design objectives (summarized in Table
2). Next, we analyzed how the categories about design approaches relate to the different design objectives and the three categories identified thus far. After collaboratively iterating the categories, we concluded that technology can take four main roles in collocated social interaction:
enabling,
facilitating,
inviting and
encouraging (Table
4). Of these, we consider the three latter ones to manifest the concept of enhancement and to differentiate the work outlined in this review from more conventional CSCW research. As the framework is based on an extensive literature review, it refines and extends the previously mentioned framework by Benford et al. (
2000) and concretizes the topic with various prototypes presented in past work.
Table 4Mapping the social design objectives and design approaches interpreted from the papers to abstract enhancement categories (Roles of Technology).
Enable (previous work beyond which the reviewed literature explores) |
Facilitate | • Facilitating ongoing social situations | • Shared digital workspace |
• Enriching means of social interaction | • Open space for shared activity |
• Supporting sense of community | • Topic suggestions |
• Breaking ice in new encounters | • Disclosing information about others |
Invite | • Increasing awareness | • Open space for shared activity |
• Revealing common ground | • Matchmaking |
• Avoiding cocooning in social silos | • Self-expression |
| • Topic suggestions |
Encourage | • Engaging people in collective activity | • Open space for shared activity |
• Encouraging, incentivizing or triggering people to interact | • Introducing constraints |
Enabling interaction refers to the role of a technological artifact making it possible or allowing for social interaction to take place, which represents an extensive body of prior CSCW and HCI systems. The design solutions provide platforms and opportunities for social interaction (either as the primary or a secondary activity). The users involved have the power to decide whether to use the opportunities or not; the designs do not particularly invite or encourage the users to behave in a more social way, or they do not actively facilitate interaction. Consequently, the resulting social interactions would largely depend on the current social setting; for example, the social norms in place, the actors’ relations to each other, and whether or not there is interaction already. Although this review has intentionally disregarded much of such work, this category is nevertheless highly important to consider when designing for collocated social interaction. In some situations, active forms of enhancement might not be possible nor desirable. For example, the social setting or characteristics of involved participants might be hard to foresee, and thus a solution that takes a stronger role in interpersonal interaction might be unacceptable.
Facilitating interaction refers to making it easier to converse, collaborate or otherwise socially interact, or to support desirable feelings, equality or suitable interaction dynamics while doing so. This role aims to relieve tension and minimize other negative experiences, maximize interaction related aspects and feelings that are considered desirable, and generally help make the best out of a social situation. In this corpus, facilitation primarily refers to supporting ongoing interaction, but some papers also aim to ease the initiation of a new encounter (or icebreaking therein) in situations where people are expected to interact. However, as with
enabling, the intention or need to interact has been defined by the involved users or, e.g., a community manager or a teacher of a class, rather than by technology. Considering the latter, Kreitmayer et al. (
2013) discuss this role in terms of ‘orchestrating collaborative activities’. Here, the design approaches of
providing information about others or
topic suggestions could help nurture or enrich an ongoing encounter. Interestingly, none of the identified design approaches address only this category. For example,
open space for shared activity can be useful in this role but also in all the other roles; it seems to be a generic approach to employ in any role.
Inviting interaction is about the role of informing people of the available proximal social possibilities, which can motivate to spontaneously engage in new encounters. It is about signaling one’s interests and availability with the help of a digital medium in situations where the social opportunities (or social affordances) can seem non-existent, vague, or too excessive, or when people are not intentionally searching for company. Given that the current use of devices may lead to isolating oneself, this is also about avoiding the risk of isolation in social situations. Technologies playing this role provide external motivators, i.e., reasons, for initiating new interactions and being socially open-minded. However, the users may freely decide whether to act based on the provided information and social signals or not. From a systemic perspective, inviting interaction can be about situations where collocated or nearby people have no particular intention to interact but there is an external interest to foster this (e.g., in educational settings, public spaces, or used by an organizer of an event). Several design approaches (disclosing information about others, matchmaking, self-expression) particularly address this form of enhancement, which means that the largest portion of prototypes in our corpus manifest this role. Having said that, while primarily providing additional information to a user, the designs should carefully consider in which situations to do that and how much information to provide. An excessive amount of information can not only lead to information overload, but also strengthen social isolation due to the user having to interact with a device.
Encouraging interaction is about incentivizing or persuading people to start interacting or maintaining ongoing interaction. This means not only providing opportunities, but also utilizing computational features that nudge and stimulate people to take action (for example, to grab the given social affordances or to get involved in collaborative activity partly mediated by technology). For example, technology could make a subtle intervention when one does not dare to say something to someone else, or it could encourage two strangers to collaborate on something they seem to have a common interest in. Here, the approach of introducing constraints (e.g., with asymmetry) provides an interesting and contradictory design space to explore new forms and paradigms of computational solutions. From all the categories about design approaches, this is perhaps the only one that provides a means for advancing beyond the conventional information-centered approaches. Looking at the numbers, this form of enhancement seems to be the least common in our corpus.
Contrasting with the framework by Benford et al. (
2000), our conceptualization introduces new roles of
facilitating and
inviting. Particularly,
inviting interaction is prevalent in the corpus, considering the breadth of both the design objectives and approaches. At the same time, the corpus includes very few examples of
enforcing interaction, the third of Benford’s categories (for example, creating a situation that coerces people into interaction). Therefore, enforcing was not included as one of our enhancement categories. This suggests that the fear is that enforcement may produce negative consequences for social interaction as reflected in the designs reported so far. This gap between what has been envisioned and what has been actually designed calls for new design endeavors as well as developing more relevant frameworks. Furthermore, as our roles emerged bottom-up from the corpus, we acknowledge that there might also be other relevant categories of enhancement that future technology development could consider. Other possible roles beyond encouragement, as well as other manifestations of each role, remain as future research questions and avenues for design exploration.
Overall, the goal of social enhancement is challenging to conceptualize because it expects technology to take stronger agency in social situations. Although technology is already taking increasingly strong positions in dictating what people do and, for example, what digital content they consume, influencing collocated social interaction is still an uncharted territory. Social interaction between humans is generally considered as a spectrum of delicate activities and behavior that is defined by the situation, the involved individuals and their interests, and numerous other factors. In this context, giving agency to blatantly non-intelligent and insensitive technology can seem unacceptable or undesirable for many, very understandably. While this review has charted recent ventures towards more socially active technologies, the optimal ways for technology to participate or intervene in interpersonal interaction remain open questions.