Moving Phones, Active Peers: Exploring the Effect of Animated Phones as Facilitators in In-Person Group Discussion
This addresses engagement issues in co-located group interactions for users like students or professionals, but it is incremental as it builds on existing facilitation methods with a novel device-based approach.
The study tackled the problem of low engagement in in-person group discussions by using animated smartphones as facilitators, resulting in re-engagement of inactive members and improvements in group dynamics, task performance, and relationships, as demonstrated in a study with 56 participants.
In today's in-person group discussions, smartphones are integrated as intelligent workstations; yet given their co-presence in such face-to-face interactions, whether and how they may enhance people's behavioral engagement with others remains underexplored. This work investigates how animating personal smartphones to move expressively, without compromising regular functions, can transform them into active embodied facilitators for co-located group interaction. In the four-stranger small-group discussion setting, guided by Tuckman's group-development theory, we conducted a design workshop (n=12) to identify problematic group-work circumstances and design expressive, attention-efficient animated phone facilitations. Subsequently, we developed AnimaStand, a movement-enabled phone stand that animates phones to deliver group facilitation cues according to conversation dynamics. In a between-subjects Wizard-of-Oz study (n=56) with four-stranger group discussions, where everyone's phone was on an AnimaStand, the facilitations re-engaged inactive members, enhancing group dynamics, task operation performance, and relationships. We finally discuss prospects for more adaptive and generalizable animated device personal facilitation.