Roles, scenarios and challenges of social devices

Face-to-face social interaction can often be diminished by issues like shyness to initiate interaction, not having a good reason to interact or not fully engaging in the current social situation. To tackle such challenges, we are working on designing applications which address the vision of Social Devices (SD): proactive mobile devices that aim to facilitate and increase social interactions. We present their possible roles in social situations, two scenarios demonstrating light-weight SD, and various challenges related to concretizing the vision into successful and acceptable applications.