In collaboration between strangers, group formation and familiarization often take a lot of time. To facilitate this, icebreaking activities are commonly utilized, aiming at a positive and relaxing social atmosphere. To explore how interactive technology could serve as a tool in such social activity, we developed Who's Next, a multiplayer quiz-based mobile game intended to break the ice in a group of strangers. The design utilizes the information asymmetry between people, aiming to encourage joint activity between them. We conducted six evaluation sessions where four to six participants in each played the game together and were interviewed. Who's Next was found to be a promising support for icebreaking. It was considered to offer a comfortable way of sharing information about oneself and getting to know newly-met strangers. We conclude that interactive technology could successfully support the facilitator role in encouraging interaction and creating a relaxed atmosphere between strangers.

Many activities that have traditionally been performed with different dedicated physical artifacts are now done with personal mobile devices. Consequently, the privacy of mobile interfaces has hampered social observability and chances for serendipitous interactions. For example, reading an electronic newspaper with a mobile device does not allow the surrounding people to be similarly aware of the reader's activity as traditional newspapers. Social displays are additional displays on mobile devices providing the surrounding people with light-weight cues about the activities of the device user. We implemented a prototype that reveals the user's current active application and presents its name on an e-ink display on the backside of a mobile device. We conducted a ten-day field trial with 13 participants using the prototype. The results show that the prototype was able to increase awareness of users' mobile activities and occasionally triggered interactions with others, without significantly violating the sense of privacy.

This paper presents the design and concept evaluation of Next2You, a proximity-based social mobile application that uses gamification, progressive disclosure and light-weight interactions to encourage interaction between people who are regularly within a close proximity of each other. The application aims to break the current norm of matching and introducing people based on similar interests or commonalities. We conducted focus groups to evaluate the application concept. We report findings of the user study contributing to the understanding of the potential and challenges of gamified proximity-based social applications.

Encouraging social interaction between collocated strangers has become an increasingly popular topic in Computer Supported Collaborative Work research and interaction design. The research aims to foster more social interaction between collocated people to, e.g., produce positive new encounters and increase social awareness. To address these social goals, we developed Next2You, a proximity-based social mobile application. Its design builds on the principles of gamification, progressive disclosure and light-weight interactions. This paper summarizes the novelties in the design and implementation of Next2You.