Balaam, M.,
Fitzpatrick, G., Good, J., &Harris, E. (2011)
Enhancing
Interactional Synchrony with a ambient display
CHI 2011,
May7-12, Vancouver, BC, Canada
Paper
brings together 'research from social psychology with advances in HCI to
explore a new role for pervasive and ambient technologies' p 1
Pervasive
and ambient technologies could provide
support both for encoding and decoding in authentic environments
Most of
the technologies that have been developed to support social interaction
(face-to-face) are informational or
support the verbal aspects e.g. RFID badges, iBand, GroupWear with mixed
reactions from those involved.
Other
approaches use para linguistics information to provide a view of an interactional context.
Non
verbal communication ' Research suggests that it communicates information about
emotion, interpersonal relationships, and is an essential aspect of social
competence' p 2 (2,7,20,22,37)
Rapport
'Rapport
is one element of social interaction that is strongly encoded through nonverbal
communication, and additionally theorised as key to the development of
interpersonal relationships, and the success of an interaction. Rapport is
believed to be crucial to develop trust, to create closeness, and be included
in a group(22) as well as help
interactions feel smooth (36) .' P 2
Has three
components ( see ref 37 )
1. Mutual attentiveness
2. Positivity
3. Coordination ( sometimes
referred to as interactional synchrony) - postural and movement. Much of this
work done by Bernieri who foregrounds the importance of interactant proximity.
Also that physical aspects (physical artefacts) of the task are important.
Each of
which is encoded through non verbal communication with p7 ' with positivity
most important at the outset whilst
coordination becomes more important later.
'there
can be a disconnect between how rapport is encode and how observers decode
rapport from NV signals' p 2. That it is
' expressivity that drives social judgements' p 3
Ethics of
using persuasive ambient technology is discussed on p 8.
the
implication he is that more subtle NV communication can be missed and led to the research aim - to use ambient
technology to amplify (make more salient) the the more subtle NV that is
sometimes missed by the observer.
'There
are very few guidelines available' p 3 technologically speaking that is.
Scenario
Holiday
planning in duos . Map display surrounded by representation of water that could
be animated according to a wizard of Oz observer who took the role of the
ambient technology of the future.
Ripples
activated by
•
Simultaneous
movement
•
Tempo
similarity
•
Coordination
•
Posture
matching
•
Back
channel responses ( e.g. Head nodes, utterances showing agreement,/listening
such as 'uh ha'
•
Eye
contact
Explored
' the relationship between self reports of rapport, observer reports of
rapport, and the body language of the participants in the holiday planning.' P
3 did the task twice (for personal use, for an older pair), once with the
animation and once without. Untrained observers rated a video of the exchange ,
the video record was subject to a mosaic procedure that removed some of the
expressive codes ( the ones that are
attended too at the expense of more subtle NVs)
Rapport
scale by Bernieri (
ref 7)
based on theory of 37.
'The data
presented in the Results section indicates that our amplification of rapport
through an ambient display increased the amount of interactional synchrony, and
more specifically, the amount of coordination and posture similarity seen
within an interaction by untrained observers.
At the same time, interact ants themselves were seemingly unaware of
these increased behavioural manifestations of rapport, with no significant
differences in their self reports of rapport between conditions'
Barron
and mutual attention p 9 ' To aid this mutual attention, groups coordinated
themselves and their work through the use of physical artefacts in the
environment, conversational devices, and coordinated physical movement' Overlaps with Salt and Bernieri
Discussion
section contains more detailed account of HCI considerations
Refs
23, 34
spontaneous versus impression management
28
empathy
37, 5,
22, 7rapport
12, 18
Pervasive technology to support Group work
