Interpersonal Communication- A Mindful Approach to Relationships, 2020a

Facilitate
• Facilitating ongoing social situations
• Enriching means of social
interaction
• Supporting sense of community
• Breaking ice in new encounters
• Shared digital workspace
• Open space for shared activity
• Topic suggestions
• Disclosing information about
others
Invite
• Increasing awareness
• Revealing common ground
• Avoiding cocooning in social silos
• Engaging people in collective
activity
• Open space for shared activity
• Matchmaking
• Self-expression
• Topic suggestions
• Open space for shared activity
Encourage
• Encouraging, incentivizing or
triggering people to interact
• Introducing constraints
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-019-09345-0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Table 12.2 Mapping the social design objectives and design approaches interpreted from the papers
to abstract enhancement categories (Roles of Technology)
In Table 12.2 you are introduced to four different ways that technology can help facilitate collocated
social interaction. You are also presented with the design objectives for each of these different ways to
encourage collocated social interaction along with specific design approaches that technology creators can
use to help foster collocated social interaction. Let’s look at each of these in turn.
First, “enabling interaction refers to the role of a technological artifact making it possible or allowing
for social interaction to take place.” 33 The goal of enabling is to set up situations where collocated social
interaction is possible. As such, there’s less information about specific design objectives and approaches
even though most of the research in the area of helping people interact has historically focused on
enabling.
Second, “facilitating interaction refers to making it easier to converse, collaborate or otherwise socially
interact, or to support desirable feelings, equality or suitable interaction dynamics while doing so.” 34 The
goal of facilitating collocated social interactions is to help ease tension and encourage people to interact
while minimizing possible negative experiences people may face. One of the ways to achieve facilitating is
to have an open space for a shared activity. For example, an online college or university may have coffee
shop nights or alumni events in various cities. The alumni events don’t necessarily have specific agendas,
Interpersonal Communication 424