Barriers for Bridging Interpersonal Gaps

Abstract

Positive face-to-face social encounters between strangers can strengthen the sense of community in modern urban environments. However, it is not always easy to initiate friendly encounters due to various inhibiting social norms. We present three inspirational design patterns for reducing inhibitions to interact with unfamiliar others. These abstractions are based on a broad design space review of concepts, encompassing examples across a range of scales, fields, media and forms. Each inspirational pattern is formulated as a response to a different challenge to initiating social interaction but all share an underlying similarity in offering varieties of barriers and filters that paradoxically also separate people. The patterns are "Closer Through Not Seeing"; "Closer Through Not Touching"; and "Minimize Encounter Duration". We believe these patterns can support designers, in understanding, articulating, and generating approaches to creating embodied interventions and systems that enable unacquainted people to interact.

Collocated Sharing of Presentations of Self in Public Settings

“…Supporting collocated social interactions requires to respect the socio-spatial context, as shown in research on connecting strangers [37]. As Heinemann & Mitchell [17] argue, in order to engage with others, people need a mutual benefit, a need for belonging.…”

“…However, research on collocated social interactions demonstrated that people use systems differently depending on the social context of the place [6,17,28,37]. Dourish and Bell [8] argue that embedding ubiquitous technology does not make the technology disappear but rather contributes to the complexities that compose , we defined personal context as a persons' intrinsic motivations, moods, and preferences of individuals' self-expression and social engagements.…”