PuppetChat: Fostering Intimate Communication through Bidirectional Actions and Micronarratives
Emma Jiren Wang, Siying Hu, Zhicong Lu

TL;DR
PuppetChat is a dyadic messaging prototype that enhances intimate communication by enabling embodied interactions, responsive actions, and personalized micronarratives, leading to increased social presence and self-disclosure.
Contribution
It introduces a novel messaging system that incorporates reciprocity-aware recommendations and micronarratives to deepen expressive and continuous communication.
Findings
Enhanced social presence and intimacy
Supported more expressive self-disclosure
Sustained continuity and shared memories
Abstract
As a primary channel for sustaining modern intimate relationships, instant messaging facilitates frequent connection across distances. However, today's tools often dilute care; they favor single tap reactions and vague emojis that do not support two way action responses, do not preserve the feeling that the exchange keeps going without breaking, and are weakly tied to who we are and what we share. To address this challenge, we present PuppetChat, a dyadic messaging prototype that restores this expressive depth through embodied interaction. PuppetChat uses a reciprocity aware recommender to encourage responsive actions and generates personalized micronarratives from user stories to ground interactions in personal history. Our 10-day field study with 11 dyads of close partners or friends revealed that this approach enhanced social presence, supported more expressive self disclosure, and…
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Taxonomy
TopicsDigital Mental Health Interventions · Mental Health via Writing · Innovative Human-Technology Interaction
