Social Displays on Mobile Devices: Increasing Collocated People's Awareness of the User's Activities

Activities that have traditionally been performed with tangible artifacts, e.g. reading the newspaper and browsing printed photos, have increasingly moved to mobile devices. This has made it harder for the surrounding people to become aware of the activities a person is performing with the device. As a result, the possibilities for serendipitous social interactions between the user and the collocated people have diminished. We introduce social displays, additional displays on mobile devices providing social cues about the activities of device user’s activities for surrounding people. We conducted five focus groups with in total 23 participants, each discussing four scenarios and co-designing the presentation of cues on the display. The results suggest that the display has potential to break the private bubble of mobile device activities, as well as to provide tickets-to-talk to enhance social interaction, especially between acquaintances. We discuss social opportunities and challenges as well as possible design directions for social displays.