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UCF EEL 6788 - The Familiar Stranger - Anxiety, Comfort, and Play in Public Places

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The Familiar Stranger: Anxiety, Comfort, and Play in Public Places Eric Paulos Intel Research 2150 Shattuck Avenue #1300 Berkeley, CA 94704 [email protected] Elizabeth Goodman Intel Research 2150 Shattuck Avenue #1300 Berkeley, CA 94704 ABSTRACT As humans we live and interact across a wildly diverse set of physical spaces. We each formulate our own personal meaning of place using a myriad of observable cues such as public-private, large-small, daytime-nighttime, loud-quiet, and crowded-empty. Not surprisingly, it is the people with which we share such spaces that dominate our perception of place. Sometimes these people are friends, family and colleagues. More often, and particularly in public urban spaces we inhabit, the individuals who affect us are ones that we repeatedly observe and yet do not directly interact with – our Familiar Strangers. This paper explores our often ignored yet real relationships with Familiar Strangers. We describe several experiments and studies that led to designs for both a personal, body-worn, wireless device and a mobile phone based application that extend the Familiar Stranger relationship while respecting the delicate, yet important, constraints of our feelings and affinities with strangers in pubic places. Author Keywords Strangers, urban computing, wireless, wearable, public place, digital scent, community, dérive, détournement ACM Classification Keywords H.5.3 Group and Organization Interfaces INTRODUCTION The Familiar Stranger is a social phenomenon first addressed by the psychologist Stanley Milgram in his 1972 essay on the subject [1]. Familiar Strangers are individuals that we regularly observe but do not interact with (see Figure 1). By definition a Familiar Stranger (1) must be observed, (2) repeatedly, and (3) without any interaction. The claim is that the relationship we have with these Familiar Strangers is indeed a real relationship in which both parties agree to mutually ignore each other, without any implications of hostility. A good example is a person that one sees on the subway every morning. If that person fails to appear, we notice. There are exceptions to the non-interaction rule with Familiar Strangers. The further away from our routine encounter with a Familiar Stranger, the more likely we are to establish direct contact because of a shared knowledge and place. Thus, we are likely to treat our subway Familiar Strangers in San Francisco as close friends if we encounter them in Rome. Similarly, extraordinary events such as an injury, earthquake, etc. will also provide the impetus to interact with our Familiar Strangers. There is a special class of Familiar Strangers called the “socio-metric stars.” These are individuals who stand out in a community or group and are readily recognized by an extremely high percentage of people. Familiar Strangers form a border zone between people we know and the completely unknown strangers we encounter once and never see again. While we are bound to the people we know by a circle of social reciprocity, no such bond exists between us and complete strangers. Familiar Strangers buffer the middle ground between these two relationships. Because we encounter them regularly in familiar settings, they establish our connection to individual places. It is also not uncommon for people to personalize their Familiar Strangers by giving them names and/or concocting fictitious stories and backgrounds of their personal lives [2]. The epiphany of the Familiar Stranger relationship is when an individual realizes that they are likely someone else’s Familiar Stranger, complete with names and stories. Figure 1: Familiar Strangers in a typical urban setting Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work forpersonal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies arenot made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copiesbear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise,or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires priorspecific permission and/or a fee. CHI 2004, April 24–29, 2004, Vienna, Austria. Copyright 2004 ACM 1-58113-702-8/04/0004...$5.00. CHI 2004 ׀ Paper 24-29 April ׀ Vienna, Austria Volume 6, Number 1 223TWO SCENARIOS Image a device that could display some measure of “familiarity” of people and places. How might such a device be used? We briefly outline two scenarios. Scenario 1: A woman who has recently graduated from college has moved to a new city and doesn’t feel at home. The display on her familiarity device reinforces her growing sense of integration within her new neighborhood, and reassures her that familiar people are nearby, even if she does not recognize their faces. When she explores unfamiliar neighborhoods in the larger city, she is occasionally surprised to discover how many people around her she has encountered before. Scenario 2: In the midst of a frustrating day, an urban professional decides that he doesn’t want to eat lunch in his usual spot. After years at the same job, the large city seems more like a small town. He sees the same people every day in the same places. He wants to escape. As he walks quickly away from his work, he occasionally checks his familiarity device to see if there are any Familiar Strangers nearby. When he finds a street that the device tells him is completely unfamiliar, he chooses a restaurant. He feels as if he’s exploring new territory and though he is still surrounded by other people, he feels much less crowded than he did 15 minutes ago. MOTIVATION Wireless, personal, digital technologies are rapidly transforming our relationship to people and place in public urban settings. Emerging mobile communication systems are fundamentally reshaping the spatial and temporal constraints of all aspects of human communications in both work and play. A myriad of new interactions and potential interactions between individuals are dramatically increasing the capacity and efficiency of information flow within urban settings. Mobile phones are simply the first wave of an imminent invasion of portable, personal digital communication tools. These future devices will lead to a transformation of individuals’ perceptions of self and the world and consequently the way they collectively construct that world. Mobile communication devices will have a profound effect on our cities as they are


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UCF EEL 6788 - The Familiar Stranger - Anxiety, Comfort, and Play in Public Places

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