Barriers for Bridging Interpersonal Gaps: Three Inspirational Design Patterns for Increasing Collocated Social Interaction

Positive face-to-face social encounters between strangers
can strengthen the sense of community in modern urban
environments. However, it is not always easy to initiate
friendly encounters due to various inhibiting social norms.
We present three inspirational design patterns for reducing
inhibitions to interact with unfamiliar others. These
abstractions are based on a broad design space review of
concepts, encompassing examples across a range of scales,
fields, media and forms. Each inspirational pattern is
formulated as a response to a different challenge to
initiating social interaction but all share an underlying
similarity in offering varieties of barriers and filters that
paradoxically also separate people. The patterns are “Closer
Through Not Seeing”; “Closer Through Not Touching”;
and “Minimize Encounter Duration”. We believe these
patterns can support designers, in understanding,
articulating, and generating approaches to creating
embodied interventions and systems that enable
unacquainted people to interact.