Collocated interaction has received growing interest in both academic research and the design of information and communication technological applications. An emergent research topic within this area relates to technological enhancement of social interaction. Various envisioned systems aim beyond simply enabling interaction, to actively enhance-i.e., improve the quality or extent of-social interaction between collocated people. However, there is little understanding of the optimal design solutions and roles of technology considering this goal. This literature review outlines the landscape of design explorations in this emergent research topic. We contribute an in-depth study of 92 publications that present relevant solutions or prototypes, analyzing their focus areas, design objectives, and design and evaluation approaches. To contribute with a new theoretical perspective, we identify various roles of technology relevant for enhancement, representing three abstract categories: facilitating, inviting and encouraging. This review helps researchers to describe, analyze, and position relevant prior research and identify gaps in scientific knowledge.
Wearable computing and smart clothing have attracted a lot of attention in the last years. For a variety of applications, it can be seen as potential future direction of mobile user interfaces. In this paper, we concentrate on usability and applicability issues concerned with capacitive touch input on clothing. To be able to perform user studies, we built a generic platform for attaching, e.g., capacitive sensors of different types. On top of that, several prototypes of wearable accessories and clothing and implemented various application scenarios. We report on two studies we undertook with these implementations with a user group randomly sampled at a shopping mall. We provide a significant set of guidelines and lessons learned that emerged from our experiences and those studies. Thus, developers of similar projects have to put major efforts into minimizing the delay between button activation and feedback and to make location and identification of controls and their function as simple and quick as possible. Issues that have to be treated in all designs include the requirement of onehanded interaction and that, even for minimal functionality, to find a general solution with regard to layout and button-tofunction mapping is hardly possible. Additionally, in order to generate a satisfactory user experience good usability must be combined with aesthetical factors.
Serendipity refers to uncontrolled circumstances that lead to unexpected yet fortunate discoveries. The phenomenon has been studied extensively in relation to information retrieval. However, serendipity in the context of social encounters has been the subject of few empirical studies. In professional life, social serendipity might result in benefits such as fruitful collaboration, successful recruitment, discovery of novel information, and acquisition of crucial new perspectives from peers. Despite the potential significance of serendipity, particularly for knowledge work, there is a lack of empirical understanding of related subjective experiences and the role of technology within the process of encountering unsought findings. This qualitative study investigates knowledge workers’ detailed narratives of serendipitous social encounters and the related factors through an analysis of 37 responses to an international online survey. We provide a detailed account of the experiential characteristics and contextual qualities of the reported instances of social serendipity. Finally, we discuss the seemingly minor role of technology in social serendipity and research avenues to computationally enhance social serendipity.
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