SocialStools: A Playful, Socio-Spatial Interface for Fostering Togetherness Across Strangers

Abstract

Leveraging the human propensity for embodied interaction, SocialStools is a socio-spatial interface that facilitates playful social interactions across strangers in a physical space, fostering togetherness. Three stools on caster wheels generate sound and image around them in response to sitting on them, and moving and rotating relative to each other. In this paper, we identify the challenges of stranger interactions, introduce our cyber-physical system, and describe and demonstrate three interaction situations: sitting, moving closer and away from each other, and rotating to face or turn away from each other. By translating these interactions into visual and auditory effects, we explore the possibilities of merging the socio-physical world with a digital system to create unique social affordances for interpersonal interactions that foster togetherness. Our demonstration transforms three strangers into a trio of sound-and-image makers interacting through creative, embodied play.