Hello.
From Istanbul.
I'm Uğur.
I'm doing my Ph.D. at Koç University, Arçelik Research Center for Creative Industries.
And in this paper, we emphasize that there is another way to enrich social interaction
while mitigating the effects of excessive smartphone use on social life.
Smartphones ease our lives in many different aspects.
However, excessive use of these devices has disadvantages, including joint pain, sleep
disturbances, and depression.
Smartphones also affect social interactions since people become less engaged with the
immediate social movement due to smartphone use.
Several studies show that people perceive the quality of their relationships as lower
than people around them use their smartphones.
Likewise, people feel more connected to each other and read each other's emotions better
without smartphones.
In order to avoid excessive use of smartphones, there are plenty of solutions available in
the market, but most of them follow a restrictive approach.
In the field of HCI, it's also possible to encounter research on limiting strategies
regarding excessive smartphone use.
However, studies show that restricting the use of these devices is ineffective, and backlashes.
Under these circumstance,
as suggested in several studies, the digital well-being interventions should move beyond
a focus on restricting and showing screen-time approach.
That's why we wanted to aim at enriching the co-located interactions without limiting the
use.
And in our previous research, we explored the ways of enriching users and co-located
interactions.
By following this bottom-up strategy and found for design approaches, supporters, compliers,
enlighteners, and preservers.
Preservers reduced the triggers that cause people to use their phones.
Compliers provides users with smooth isolation from social interaction when they do not want
to interact.
Supporters improve the quality of conversations and help users avoid unexpected lulls and
enlighteners raise awareness about the quality of social interaction.
While designing WHISPER, we were inspired by the enlighteners and the supporters because
they are directly related to enriching the conversations and highlighted as the most
promising approach to intervene in social interactions.
Whisper is an interactive audio narrative box that consists of three parts.
The magnetic main body with a Bluetooth speaker and holder to contain tokens and genre imprinted
magnetic story tokens.
It aims to provide feedback regarding qualitative social interaction and to improve the quality
of this interaction.
It follows lulls in the conversation to decide when to intervene.
When there is a long lull or when individuals start using their smartphones instead of interacting
with each other.
It starts an audio story to create a moment of curiosity, to take their attention from
their smartphones and to open up a new conversation.
- Whisper plays a story. -
The box comes with tokens that allow users to change
the genre of the stories.
These are sci-fi, crime, fantasy, drama, comedy, and tragedy.
Tokens are place on the center point of the ripple pattern on top of Whisper's Surface.
The wavy surface was designed to create a resemblance with sound waves, and its high
fidelity prototype was created with 3D printers, which created a more finalized look as well
as nature and cozy qualities while blending into a cafe environment.
This is particularly important to create a realistic experience for the participants
while not being too distractive.
Our aim in this study was to explore how users perceive Whisper as a product that subtly
measures people's social interaction quality and intervenes in their interactions and how
it would influence their social interactions.
A total of ten sessions were conducted with the university students, and the sample consisted
of 12 females and nine males, nine of the sessions were dyads and one was a triad.
Overall, the participants indicated that the concept is a valuable tool to enhance the
quality of their social interactions.
After Whisper's every intervention, we observed an increase in participants' interactions.
We also identified several issues that conflict with these positive reactions.
These include whether silence can be used for measuring the quality of social interactions,
whether Whisper is more effective in small or crowded groups, and whether Whisper's ambiguity
affects positively or negatively.
Since our goal with this study is not to validate our concept, but to examine behavior and reactions
to interactive technologies designed to boost social interaction, we believe that these
conflicting insights will be beneficial for designing such solutions.
To illustrate this usefulness, we discuss the implications for our findings for both
design, research, and practice.
On the side of design implications, we concluded that design interventions aim to enhance co-located
social interactions, should be respectful, adaptable, targeted, and have a balanced ambiguity.
Artifacts that are designed to influence the behavior might become very persistent since
they do not get tired, so they might disturb the user when it becomes too persistent.
Although we designed Whisper as subtle as possible and based on users' everyday practices,
some participants stated that they were uncomfortable with the Whisper constant nudges during the
lull moments.
This implies that even a concept that subtly influenced user behavior can backfire and
create an unintended effect.
In order to prevent the disturbance from occurring, the artifacts should know how and when to
give up.
As we mentioned before, we designed this work in a way that does not reveal the meaning,
reason, and timing of the interventions.
This was preferred to ensure that users were affected by Whisper's presence as little as
possible during their social interactions.
However, the implicitness of the concept, including its design and intervention logic,
was one of the points participants contradicted themselves.
Some of the participants could not understand Whisper, because of its ambiguity.
There is also a surprise effect since Whisper is an unusual product that offers completely
different interactions.
From this point of view, we can assume that Whisper may disappear or be ignored once the
surprise effect wears off.
This should provide a balanced ambiguity in terms of its interventions and presence to
prevent this.
Hence, users can be more involved in the next stage of the concept.
In addition to that, the users gave feedback as they agreed that Whisper enhances their
social interaction.
But the topics that Whisper offers vary across people.
Therefore, they expect more topic-specific or personalized content, especially for longer,
deep, ongoing conversations.
All of these show that it's essential to design adaptive systems that can instantly react
to users' emotions, thoughts, and needs, and is shaped for a specific social interaction.
Unfortunately, the development of customized products raises many privacy problems, along
with advantages.
Providing a meaningful, personalized experience to the user and keeping this experience consistent
often requires collecting more user data.
Although users admit that their personal devices, for example, their smartphones collect many
data, as we have seen in our interviews, they do not prefer to use of this data by third-party
technologies, like Whisper. Lastly, Whisper aims to arouse users' curiosity by playing
a prerecorded narrative as if they were hearing real conversations between other people in
a cafe environment.
Although we designed Whisper to trigger conversation subtly using this feature, some of the participants
who understood the purpose perceived it as a warning about their conversation quality
and felt bad about their relationships.
To solve this issue the nudges can be more subtle and target individuals rather than
the group.
In addition to this, Whisper might offer users, different parts of the story and expect them
to share their stories to enrich their social interaction.
In this research, our aim was not to measure the quality of social interaction.
However, we track the quality of social interaction between users by looking at the amount of
the conversation Previous work, use, self- or observer reports.
Using this kind of measurement might be problematic because of subjectivity, credibility, and
self-deception.
Later, to create a more objective measurement method, the devices equipped with sensors
start to be used to measure the quality of social interaction by looking, distance, gaze,
body position, and sound levels.
Although these studies are valuable in measuring the quality of social interactions objectively,
rather than being something that can be quantified and measured with scales, the quality of social
interactions is considered as high or low, according to the pleasure taken from the moment
or the satisfaction felt after the interaction.
Participants described the silent moments as sometimes more valuable than those with
conversations.
So, investigating how the quality of social interactions as a phenomenon with such subjective
elements could be observed, measured, and made sense of, is worth exploring in the scope
of future research.
Lastly, in any research where there is persuasion and technology, there are ethical concerns.
Because these interventions might cause frustration and have both intended and unintended results.
Regardless of the increase or decrease in the social interaction that Whisper causes,
it can create a disturbance.
This means that features of Whisper, such as concealment of the aim and intervening
without permission, exceed two of the main elements to consider when designing persuasive
technologies.
In support of this, as we have seen in our interviews, these processes, which are beyond
the control of the users, may cause the systems to have adverse effects on users or loses
effect.
Literature has pointed out a project that unintended output is a measure of debate in
ethics, and the creators of this persuasive technology should pay attention to this issue.
Also, designers of this technology are the ones who should assume this responsibility,
and such a reasonable forecast necessitates extensive user testing and creators' comprehensive
forward-thinking.
In this paper, we presented, Whisper, an artifact designed to enhance people's co-located social
interactions in public places without restricting smartphone use, and a user study assessing
users' reactions to it and its potential influence on social interactions.
So we synthesize for design implications for guide designers, the technologies aimed at
enhancing social interactions should be respectful to users' desires to have control over their
interactions, adaptable to diverse users' needs and preferences, targeted towards individuals
rather than the group, and provide a balanced ambiguity to create surprise and curiosity
without confusion.
Furthermore, we provide two broad implications for HCI research.
Quantifying a subjective notion from users' lives and the responsibility aspect of the
persuasive technologies to intervene in the social interaction.