SOCIABOWL
MIT Media Lab | 2018
Collaborators: Joanne Leong, Yuehan Wang
Instructor: Hiroshi Ishii
Selected for CHI 2019
Published at ACM Digital Library
Duration: 1 month
Tools Used: CAD, Adobe Suite, Arduino
︎ Problem: Conversations can sometimes be imbalanced when some participants have more dominant characters and others tend to wait for their turn passively.
︎ Solution: A dynamic centerpiece that aims to mediate group discussions.

Problem
Conversations can sometimes be imbalanced when some participants have more dominant characters and others tend to wait for their turn passively.
How might we assist conversations to give voices to those unheard?
Ideation
We thought about up to 15 different design solutions, some of which were more artistic while others were wearables. We found that both did not provide a group feedback loop. That is when the idea of a “centerpiece” seemed the most promising to pursue.
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Solution
SociaBowl aims to mediate group discussions that are sometimes imbalanced and polarized. A centerpiece actuated by touch can move to reward a thoughtful speaker when the bowl is filled with candy or can act as a threat to those who chat for too long if filled with liquid .
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Input and output ideation![]()
Touch, Swipe Up and Swipe Down
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Water, Pens, Hourglass and Candy as the SociaBowl
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Input and output ideation

Touch, Swipe Up and Swipe Down

Water, Pens, Hourglass and Candy as the SociaBowl

Solution

Fabrication process

Results

The project was selected for the Conference on Human Factors in Computing System (CHI 2019), and was published on the Arduino Blog and the ACM Digital Library.