Smartphones, vending machines, cameras on selfie sticks: Interactive technologies are everywhere, and we often interact with them in social situations. When someone else starts a phone call on a train we may feel disturbed, for example if we try to read something. But it can also give us an enjoyable, "forbidden" glimpse into their private life. It can facilitate social interactions: Maybe they mention that they are tourists and worried to miss the right stop, so we can offer help. Or maybe other passengers also feel disturbed, and we can get a sense of togetherness while sending annoyed looks to the intruder. The point is, even a seemingly identical interaction with technology can lead to all sorts of experiences in social situations and change the interaction dynamics for everyone involved. I am interested in this impact of social situations on how we experience technologies.

I study how different people, with their goals, activities, and interpersonal relations, shape each other's experiences of technology. Unlike previous research that mainly focused on the user and the form of interaction (e.g., mid-air gestures, touch displays, voice interfaces), I take a broader look at different people's co-located activities and how they fit together. Obviously, phone calling and reading do not go along well. But phone calling and "listening in" do (in a way). How can we describe and explain such (in-)compatibilities between activities systematically, and how can we use this productively to create positive social experiences? In addition, how can we define which combinations of activities we consider positive, if we look at diverse groups of individuals who all experience an interaction differently?

There is still a lot of groundwork to do until we reach a solid understanding of these dynamics. In a first sketch, I have referred to social practice theory to describe how different materials, skills, and motivations of different co-located people and their activities can relate to each other. These relations can have positive or negative effects on everyone involved. For example, a phone caller cannot easily have an additional conversation with someone sitting next to him, by design. During a date, that is a problem. But the caller can also use this incompatibility on purpose, as a tactic to self-defend against salespeople on a shopping street.

We used this practice-based perspective in two experimental studies to compare people's experiences of different forms of interaction with an interactive hearing aid. Such studies are often set in anonymous, public settings like a bus or a supermarket. We chose a different social situation: Face-to-face conversations. In the first study, we found that a more expressive form that is normally considered "unacceptable" was experienced more positively than a supposedly "safe", subtle alternative. We can explain this effect if we consider the form of interaction not as an isolated, standalone characteristic of an interaction, but as a carrier of situated meaning. In face-to-face situations, "subtle" can signal that someone is trying to hide something or is not really honest. In contrast, expressive gestures do not hide anything and clearly communicate that something is going on. The second study critically reflects on widely used concepts of "hiding" and "showing". They have been formative for current design but used inconsistently. We show that existing guidelines to design for witnesses not only fail to create the intended experiences, but unnecessarily reduce the design space to only a couple of categories. As an alternative, we show that we get much more flexibility when looking at the actual form of an interaction in more detail, with its situated meaning.

My current research revises some further concepts in the field of socially situated experiences of technology and takes new methodological approaches that better capture the complexity of interpersonal dynamics than traditional experiments.

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