ABSTRACT
With one-person households being increasingly common and Covid-19 lockdown policies forcing people to stay home, remote dining has become common practice for many, who take it as an opportunity to connect with others in times of loneliness. Sharing meals online, also known as digital commensality, is a rich form of interaction, where people leverage technology to achieve a sense of connectedness and belonging while eating. In this paper, we look at digital commensality and we explore its inherent playful potential with the aim to inspire the design of engaging technologies that can support, enhance and augment this form of interaction. For this, we used a situated play design approach to document and analyze the behavior of 36 people (including pairs of friends and strangers) sharing meals online. Our analysis surfaced a set of play potentials of remote dining - i.e., playful things people already do and enjoy spontaneously while sharing meals online. We present those play potentials as inspirational material: they can motivate and enrich the design of future digital commensality technologies by responding to people's desire for playful and social interaction with, through, and around food. © 2022 ACM.
ABSTRACT
Eating together is one of the most treasured human activities. Its benefits range from improving the taste of food to mitigating the feelings of loneliness. In 2020, many countries have adopted lock-down and social distancing policies, forcing people to stay home,often alone and away from families and friends. Although technology can help connecting those that are physically distant, it is not clear whether eating together, at the same moment via video-call,is effective in creating the sense of connectedness that comes with sharing a meal with a friend or a family member in person. In this work, we report the results of an online survey on remote eating practices during Covid-19 lock-down, exploring the psychological motivations behind remote eating and behind deciding not to. Moreover, we sketch how future technologies could help creating digital commensality experiences. © 2020 ACM.