Moving Phones, Active Peers: Exploring the Effect of Animated Phones as Facilitators in In-Person Group Discussion

TL;DR

This study explores how animated smartphones can serve as active facilitators in face-to-face group discussions, improving engagement and group dynamics by integrating expressive movement without disrupting normal phone functions.

Contribution

Introduces AnimaStand, a movement-enabled phone stand that uses expressive animations to facilitate group interaction, demonstrating its effectiveness in enhancing engagement and group performance.

Findings

Animated phone facilitations re-engaged inactive members

Enhanced group dynamics and task performance

Improved relationships within groups

Abstract

In today's in-person group discussions, smartphones are integrated as intelligent workstations; yet given their co-presence in such face-to-face interactions, whether and how they may enhance people's behavioral engagement with others remains underexplored. This work investigates how animating personal smartphones to move expressively, without compromising regular functions, can transform them into active embodied facilitators for co-located group interaction. In the four-stranger small-group discussion setting, guided by Tuckman's group-development theory, we conducted a design workshop (n=12) to identify problematic group-work circumstances and design expressive, attention-efficient animated phone facilitations. Subsequently, we developed AnimaStand, a movement-enabled phone stand that animates phones to deliver group facilitation cues according to conversation dynamics. In a between-subjects Wizard-of-Oz study (n=56) with four-stranger group discussions, where everyone's phone was on an AnimaStand, the facilitations re-engaged inactive members, enhancing group dynamics, task operation performance, and relationships. We finally discuss prospects for more adaptive and generalizable animated device personal facilitation.