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Abstract

Intercultural interactions encourage social inclusion and diversity, but they are often avoided due to prejudices. Intercultural Meaningful Social Interactions (IMSI) can overcome such prejudices; still, the literature lacks guidelines on how to promote them by Design. In this study, we propose eight design strategies to facilitate these interactions, which were originated by bridging four theories for prejudice reduction and exemplar IMSI experiences of 15 intercultural participants. This paper presents the strategies and discusses their use to inspire new design concepts for promoting IMSI.
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INTERNATIONAL DESIGN CONFERENCE DESIGN 2022
https://doi.org/10.1017/pds.2022.223
Design Strategies to Promote Intercultural Meaningful Social
Interactions
M. L. Ramírez Galleguillos , A. Eloiriachi, B. Serdar and A. Coşkun
Koç University, Turkey
mgalleguillos18@ku.edu.tr
Abstract
Intercultural interactions encourage social inclusion and diversity, but they are often avoided due to
prejudices. Intercultural Meaningful Social Interactions (IMSI) can overcome such prejudices; still, the
literature lacks guidelines on how to promote them by Design. In this study, we propose eight design
strategies to facilitate these interactions, which were originated by bridging four theories for prejudice
reduction and exemplar IMSI experiences of 15 intercultural participants. This paper presents the strategies
and discusses their use to inspire new design concepts for promoting IMSI.
Keywords: intercultural meaningful social interactions, design strategy, bridging concepts, design
research, human-centred design
1. Introduction
Intercultural social interactions refer to encounters held by people from different cultures. These
cultures frame the patterns of values, beliefs, and behaviors shared by any group of people (Neuliep,
2012). Culture has different levels of group categorizations (Laroche, 2012) (e.g., family culture,
generational culture, national culture). In this study, we refer to culture as pertaining to different
nationalities. Positive and meaningful intercultural interactions are needed to promote diversity and
social cohesion among different cultural groups (i.e., migrants and locals) besides contributing to
decreasing biases (Fonseca et al., 2021; Government, 2009; Pettigrew, 1998). Moreover, these kinds
of interactions are crucial to promote social inclusion under the current global migration context, as
lately there has been an increase in hate of speech, hate crimes, and nationalistic movements
(Associazione Carta di Roma, 2016; International Crisis Group, 2018; Ozduzen et al., 2020). Despite
these benefits, interactions between intercultural strangers are often avoided for various reasons, such
as language barriers, homophily, and biases and prejudices between them.
Design is an interdisciplinary field that integrates knowledge from other fields as psychology,
sociology, and computer sciences. Due to its quality of turning current situations into preferred ones
(Simon, 2019), design can be used to encourage/or discourage certain behaviors (Consolvo et al.,
2009; De Medeiros et al., 2018). Though previous work on design for behaviour change examined
how design can encourage healthy (Consolvo et al., 2014) and sustainable behaviors (Bhamra et al.,
2011), and create empathy (B. Gaver, T. Dunne, 1999; Mattelmäki and Battarbee, 2002), we have not
found studies exploring how to promote intercultural meaningful social interactions (IMSI). There
have been efforts to characterize these interactions (Ramírez Galleguillos et al. 2021), explore
elements that enable and disable them (Askins, 2016), and provide design speculations to promote
them (Ramírez Galleguillos et al., 2019).
Advancing on this previous work, and inspired by the notion of bridging concepts (Dalsgaard and
Dindler, 2014), we identified eight design strategies for promoting IMSI by connecting participants'
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situated knowledge (Haraway, 1988; Harrison et al., 2011) with existing psychology theories for
prejudice reduction. We first conducted a focus group with nine migrants and six locals living in
Istanbul to explore their previous experiences engaging in IMSI, understanding what made their
interactions meaningful. Then, we turned to social psychology, the body of work focusing on
developing theories for decreasing prejudices. We linked the insights derived from the focus group to
the theories for prejudice reduction, finding eight strategies to encourage IMSI: facilitating empathy,
syncing feelings, supporting understanding, boosting the self, nudging positive perspectives,
experiencing together, encouraging cross-learning, and identifying similarities. Finally, we conducted
a preliminary evaluation of these strategies through a design workshop, initially exploring the
strategies' potential to aid designers in creating new design ideas for promoting IMSI. In this paper, we
first present previous work on meaningful social interactions. Then, we introduce the bridging
concepts along with our methodology. After presenting prejudice reduction techniques from social
psychology literature and participants' insights into IMSI, and describing the proposed strategies, we
discuss initial insights from designers into the strategies' usefulness for inspiring new design ideas.
2. Meaningful social interactions
Meaningful social interactions (MSI) can promote social diversity, increase the quality of life, and
influence the resilience of society (Fonseca et al., 2019). Such interactions can promote positive
attitudes and learn about other social groups perceived as different. However, these interactions are
often avoided in intercultural contexts because individuals prefer interactions with similar people
(Ingram and Morris, 2007; Karimi et al., 2018) or because of language differences and biases and
prejudices against other cultural groups.
Meaningful interactions between humans have been less explored in design literature, compared to the
work seeing meaningful interactions from the perspective of product attachment (Grosse-Hering et al.,
2013; Lukoff et al., 2018; Medeiros, 2014). Concerning meaningful interactions between humans, Litt
et al. (Litt et al., 2020) studied meaningful social interactions in the context of social media. The
authors explained that meaningful interactions are those with emotional, informational, or tangible
impact people believe enhance their lives, the lives of their interaction partners, or their relationships.
Fonseca et al. (Fonseca et al., 2021) explored children and teenagers' perceptions of meaningful social
interactions by studying if and when these interactions occur during gameplay, how they happen, and
with which impact. They indicated that designing for these interactions requires considering
participants' preferences, needs, and requirements to support interactions that are both desired and
meaningful to those interacting. Ramírez Galleguillos et al. investigated how MSI develops,
identifying that a memorable event needs to occur for the interaction to be meaningful (Ramírez
Galleguillos et al. 2021) and proposed igniting, sharing, and reflecting as a process to drive
meaningful interactions between intercultural strangers (Ramírez Galleguillos et al., 2019). Askins
and Pain (Askins and Pain, 2011) explored how elements of a participatory art project enabled and
disabled meaningful interaction between young people with African and British heritage.
The design field has also been concerned with promoting migrants' social inclusion. For instance,
ICTs have been developed for migrants keep in contact with their families (Gifford and Wilding,
2013), overcome language barriers (Abujarour et al., 2018), understand the regulations in the hosting
community (Harney, 2013), and increase their digital inclusion (Giglitto et al., 2019). There have been
efforts to explore storytelling for the empowerment of migrant women in Germany (Weibert et al.,
2017) and Finland (Bengs et al., 2018) and of Palestinian youth in the West Bank (Sawhney, 2009). It
can be observed that most of the works promoting contact between migrants and locals rely mostly
upon facilitating empathy between them (B. Gaver, T. Dunne, 1999; Batson et al., 1997; Kouprie and
Visser, 2009; Shu-huei Wang et al., 2018)
With all the above, though studies have explored MSI in the context of design, the literature lacks
strategies for encouraging strangers to interact meaningfully in everyday environments. Addressing
this gap, we aimed to propose such strategies to inspire designers when creating ideas that promote
IMSI.
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3. Methodology
3.1. Bridging concepts
Bridging concepts (Dalsgaard and Dindler, 2014) represent intermediary knowledge between design
theory and practice. They facilitate the exchange between these different ways of knowing, rather than
being constructed solely on one of them. This study presents design strategies to promote IMSI as
bridging concepts between theory (i.e., theories for prejudice reduction) and practice (i.e., participants'
experiences being part of IMSI). Bridging concepts are composed of three aspects: theoretical
grounding, articulations, and exemplars. In this study, the theoretical grounding is based on social
psychology theories for prejudice reduction as prejudices represent a critical challenge for intercultural
interactions, articulations are based on participants' perceptions of previous experiences that express
relevant qualities of the bridging concepts, exemplars are participants' stories of previous MSI, which
express relevant characteristics of these interactions. Hence, we grounded the articulations and
examples of the present study on participants' empirical and situated knowledge collected during a
focus group.
3.1.1. Theoretical grounding: Analyzing relevant theories from social psychology
We analyzed a body of work from social psychology that focused on prejudice reduction theories from
both intergroup and interpersonal approaches. While intergroup theories aim to decrease prejudice
among different social, economic, and cultural groups, interpersonal strategies focus on individuals and
their own identities, thoughts, and cognitive processes, instead of the groups they identify with,
representing a more one-to-one approach. We integrated both approaches into the analysis since
although meaningful interactions have a relevant personal and subjective component related to feelings
and what is meaningful to everyone, prejudices are generally originated from a group perspective. We
identified four critical theories for prejudice reduction: intergroup contact theory, social identity, and
categorization theories, targeting emotions, and self-affirmation theory (see section 4.1.).
3.1.2. Practice: Focus group study
We conducted the focus group in collaboration with an NGO working to promote the social inclusion
of migrants living in Istanbul. We made an open call through the NGO's internal email and social
media. Participants were between 19 and 32 years old. Nine were migrants. Six were locals. All of
them lived in Istanbul at the moment of the workshop (Table 1).
Table 1. Participants' demographics.
We aimed to learn about their previous experiences engaging on IMSI and their perspective of this kind
of interaction. Therefore, a focus group dynamic provided a unique opportunity for participants to openly
Participant
Age
Time Spent in Turkey
Pronouns
1
28
6 years
He/him
2
23
Whole life
She/her
3
20
3 years
She/her
4
28
Whole life
He/him
5
28
4 years
He/him
6
24
Whole life
She/her
7
27
6 years
She/her
8
26
Whole life
She/her
9
32
3 years
She/her
10
23
5 years
She/her
11
19
6 years
She/her
12
19
5 years
She/her
13
20
8 years
He/him
14
27
Whole life
She/her
15
22
3 years
He/him
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share their experiences being part of IMSI and comment on each other's stories. Specifically, we asked
them (i) to think about previous experiences being part of IMSI and to share those stories with the group,
and (ii) to express what IMSI means to them. After sharing their stories, the participants organically
discussed their feelings and thoughts during and after the interactions. The session lasted four hours, and
it was audio-recorded. Authors made in situ annotations during the sessions. The transcripts and notes
were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2019, 2020). We focused on the
experiences participants had with IMSI and brainstormed the initial codes. With these, we identified the
following initial themes: stories, feelings, perceptions, and outcomes of interactions. Then, we
performed a round of open coding. Finally, we extracted four main themes, which framed different ways
of achieving an IMSI: feelings associated with the interaction, reflections of the interaction, activities
performed while interacting, and outcomes of the interaction.
3.1.3. Intermediary knowledge: Building strategies
After collecting knowledge from theory and practice, we revisited the focus group data to identify the
strategies. First, we coded the theories from social psychology according to their approach to prejudice
reduction: positive attitudes, re-shaping social category patterns, targeting emotions and fostering self-
affirmation. Then, we coded the experiences shared being part of an IMSI and associated outcomes as
exemplars embodying qualities of IMSI. Finally, we explored these qualities concerning the selected
prejudice reduction theories to make evident connections with this knowledge. Thus, by connecting
the three aspects of bridging concepts, we created the strategies to reflect that link between the
theories and practice.
4. Findings
This section presents the findings of focus group and the analysis of key prejudice reduction theories.
4.1. Theoretical grounding: theories for prejudice reduction
We have explored various ways to reduce prejudices from social psychology. Intergroup Contact Theory
(Allport, 1954; Pettigrew and Tropp, 2008; Pettigrew et al., 2011), one of the most comprehensive
strategies for reducing prejudice, states that positive contact can reduce biases. Bringing members of
different social groups into contact is thought to improve intergroup relations. However, not just any
contact is considered positive (Allport, 1954; Arias et al., 2000; Government, 2009; Pettigrew, 1998;
Pettigrew et al., 2011; Wessendorf, 2014), as some can be more damaging or validate biases (Pettigrew,
1998). Plus, optimal conditions need to be achieved for positive contact to happen, such as equal status,
shared goals, authority sanction, and the absence of competition.
Social identity theory (Grigoryan et al., 2020; Paluck and Green, 2009) posits that intergroup conflict
may arise because of social categorization processes. Categorization process (Turner et al., 1987)
explains that individuals present differences in their ability to cognitively access different levels of their
social and personal categorization. These differences are based on their previous experiences,
expectations, motivations, and goals when expressing such categorizations (i.e., what aspects of the self
are we trying to highlight at that moment). Besides, these categories are adapted to different kinds of fits.
The comparative fit refers to categorizing themselves in comparison to other groups. The normative fit
refers to categorizing themselves with what would be expected from members of those groups.
Interventions derived from this social identity and categorization perspective aim to change individuals'
categorization levels by four approaches: (i) individuals are encouraged to decategorize themselves, a
situation in which individual's identity(ies) is (are) emphasized over group's identity, (ii) recategorize
themselves, on which participants are encouraged to think of people from different groups as part of one
superordinate group, (iii) cross-categorize when people from opposing groups become aware that they
share membership in a third group and (iv) integrate, which aims to promote the acceptance of group
differences within a shared group identity (Paluck and Green, 2009).
Emotions can affect cognitions and stereotypes. Therefore, targetting emotions is proposed to
manipulate the expression of prejudices (Smith, 1993). An example is perspective-taking interventions
that encourage individuals to experience the feelings of being discriminated against by the opposing
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group [3, 4, 36] to feel what others feel. Experiments promoting empathy and feelings while learning
the experience of a discriminated group, for example, when watching a video portraying anti-black
discrimination, can increase the desire to interact with members of that group, which is explained by a
change in emotions towards black people (Esses and Dovidio, 2002).
Self-affirmation theory (Steele, 1988) predicts that people discriminate against others to affirm their
self-identity when they feel threatened. Hence, people can refrain from demeaning others when their
identity is affirmed, for example, when they receive positive feedback about themselves or their work
(Paluck and Green, 2009). This body of work suggests that selfprotection motivations drive
individuals to be biased in their judgments of conflictrelated information because they challenge their
previously held beliefs about their group's role in the conflict (Sherman et al., 2017).
4.2. Practice: Insights from focus group
Focus group study revealed various insights into IMSI. Overall, participants perceived IMSI as a more
profound kind of interaction that can promote a change, even if small, in individuals themselves or
their day. Analyzing participants' discussions during the session, we identified five characteristics that
make intercultural interactions meaningful and positive. First, these interactions involve a mutuality
component in what people feel, think, and show of themselves. For instance, participants defined
interactions as meaningful when they perceived mutual trust, safety, and tolerance. Therefore, some
IMSI are related to empathy, experiencing similar feelings, and understanding individuals' differences.
Second, these interactions allow participants to feel like they belong to the moment they live.
Participants perceived belonging as being part of something bigger and feeling accepted by others.
Further, they linked belonging to feels like security, openness, and compatibility. Hence, even though
participants might be from different cultures, they expressed that they felt they were part of the same
group at the time of the interaction through IMSI.
Third, participants explained that by being part of these interactions, they could learn and reshape
parts of themselves and, thus, of their identity. They described identity as an image about oneself that
comes from being part of a group of people who have something in common. They expressed that
their identity, belongings, and perceptions of others are somewhat contextual and change depending
on their life experiences. For example, participants said that meaningful interactions could allow them
to change their perspectives about people they would normally avoid. In fact, according to their
previous IMSI, these interactions allowed them to experience or learn something that leads to
perceiving others as good people or discovering aspects they have in common.
Fourth, participants felt more confident and safer when they were part of IMSI compared to
interactions that might make them feel judged or threatened. Furthermore, they explained that feeling
trust and vulnerability, when mutually felt, could make the interaction more meaningful.
Figure 1. Design strategies as bridging concepts notion of intermediary knowledge. Colors
express the link between theory and practice for each strategy.
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Finally, connectedness was related to the experiences participants shared. They noted that connectedness
often occurred due to shared interests, experiences, or thoughts while doing something relevant together.
Furthermore, they would have that experience connecting them for the rest of their life.
5. Intermediary knowledge: IMSI design strategies
By bridging the theories with the characteristics of IMSI, we synthesized eight design strategies to
facilitate IMSI. We present each strategy below:
1. Facilitating Empathy. With this strategy, design interventions can explore ways of enhancing
the gathering of insights about the life of people from a different social, economic or cultural
group by accessing each other's experiences and attached feelings, reflections, and goals as if
these were their own. An example of this strategy could be the various VR experiences (Yee
and Bailenson, 2006; Youn et al., 2016) that facilitate experiencing something through
someone else's eyes and then reflecting on it.
2. Syncing feelings. With this strategy, design interventions can explore ways for people to
feel the exact same thing at the very same moment. It is different from empathy in that with
empathy, people put themselves in the position of the other, while, by syncing feelings,
people feel the same from their own perspective. For instance, when hearing a song that
wakes similar senses at the same time. To make a case, we could think of a system that
encourages intercultural groups to visit a museum together, matching them according to
their favorite painting, so they receive a unique route according to the items that provoke
their similar feelings.
3. Supporting understanding. With this strategy, design interventions explore ways to create
awareness and tolerance of each other's actions, cultures, and beliefs to understand and accept
the other as another human being. This strategy is different from empathy in that individuals
do not switch points of view. Instead, intercultural people create dialogues about their
thoughts and ways of understanding the world, ensuring respect and safety. As an example,
we would create mobile spaces in town squares to facilitate peaceful dialogues between
residents.
4. Boosting confidence. With this strategy, design interventions can look for ways of increasing
individuals' self-appreciation and self-compassion, so they do not feel threatened by others
and their perceived differences. Examples of this could be receiving good feedback about
themselves, their performance or even nudging diversity advocacy. To make a case, we could
think of an intercultural community or neighborhood clapping app on which neighbors are
encouraged to give positive comments about others, their businesses, their gardens, or other
contributions people could make to their community.
5. Nudging positive perspectives. This strategy involves designing interventions that extend a
positive mindset and attitudes towards those perceived as different. Hence, it includes
interventions that highlight positive aspects about the others. Examples can be social media or
radio shows that portrait cooperative qualities and values regarded as positive within the local
culture about migrants (Paluck, 2009).
6. Experiencing together. With this strategy, design interventions can explore different ways to
nudge intercultural people to perform activities together, therefore, having that experience in
common for the future. Examples could be systems that offer discovering the city together or
urban games that allow people to be out of their comfort zone while doing something together.
7. Encouraging Cross-learning. With this strategy, design interventions can ideate ways to
support people learning something new about their culture and beliefs, hence producing a
cultural exchange. To make a case, we could think of a free food sharing app (Ganglbauer et
al., 2014) that facilitates people sharing their traditional foods and having meals together.
8. Identifying similarities. With this strategy, design interventions can explore ways to show
people that they are connected through obvious or unexpected similarities. Thus, people can
find common ground between themselves and their group identities. An example of the latter
could be an add-on of Spotify, which would suggest meeting with intercultural people who
share a similar music taste.
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6. Using the strategies
Next, we present the initial outcomes of the preliminary evaluation of the strategies by designers.
6.1. Preliminary evaluation of the strategies
To initially test the usefulness of these strategies to inspire designers to create solutions for promoting
IMSI, we gave these strategies to eight designers with a design challenge asking them to think about
how two characters from different cultures could meaningfully meet in a public place of their selection.
Each designer was assigned with one of the strategies, and received the same challenge, the same
characters, and a different strategy. This way, we could initially observe whether the designers reached
divergent ideas related to their assigned strategy or not. The activity was individual, conducted in Miro,
an online collaboration tool. To communicate the strategies to the designers, we created a set of cards
(Figure 2) and provided the same description of the strategy as in 4.3 as text in the Miro board. Finally,
we asked the designers about their cognitive process to understand and use the strategies, their decision
process, and how they integrated the strategy we gave them into their idea.
Figure 2. Example of cards used to conduct a preliminary evaluation of the strategies.
6.2. The strategies potential to inspire new ideas
To evaluate whether the strategies could be helpful to inspire ideas, we assessed the designers' comments
and ideas they generated in the workshop. Overall, we observed that the strategies helped boost
divergent design solutions between apps, interactive installations, services, games, and speculative
artifacts. Further, the eight final ideas touch upon a broad array of design concepts from space design,
public services, artifacts, public interventions, apps, and online services, hence corroborating the
divergence of ideations the strategies provide to identify how design could contribute to creating IMSI.
Notwithstanding the diversity of the design solutions, we observed that the strategies allowed designers
to converge around the initial challenge of promoting IMSI. The strategies narrowed down their
possibilities and provided an appropriate frame to ideate around these interactions. The preliminary
insights gathered were positive, providing them with a better frame to focus on while ideating. D2
explained that "It was very helpful to have a strategy. Otherwise, I would have spent a long time
deciding how I could go about creating MSI and perhaps would have felt lost. So, I was glad to have a
starting point." -D5 added that "I think they [strategy] limited me very effectively, it was easier to
develop an idea (…) I also based my idea solely thinking on a shared experience which enabled me to
find ideas faster without getting lost."
6.3. Touching on interculturality, beyond empathy
The theories for prejudice reduction are broader than just about intercultural contact. In that sense,
personas seemed to help build ideas around more grounded information about the characters involved in
the interactions. With the preliminary evaluation, we understood how relevant feelings, character traits,
and previous experiences of the fictional characters were for creating appropriate solutions. For example,
D1 stated that "persona was especially helpful in imagining a story and take the perspective of users in
order to perceive what will/won't work". Further, by complementing the strategies with these fictional
characters, designers were able to create more contextually relevant ideas. For example, D4 explained
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that "cards and personas helped me to find a common interaction ground for my ideation phase. They
helped me to ideate freely, widening my perspective on what can happen between two strangers. They
were designed in such detail that, I was able to create empathy between myself and them".
Consequently, it seems that, for the ideas to include even a broader array of cultures, these could reflect
characters' different intercultural experiences and cultural diversity aspects (Pride, 2015) such as
migration status, languages, values, among others.
Additionally, one designer who was using the facilitating empathy card mentioned she needed a more
detailed explanation of the persona, and a clarification of the subtle differences between strategies, as
she thought empathy was required for all strategies. We think that this is because empathy has been a
broadly used concept in design and overused idea concerning social inclusion interventions. Still,
only because someone can understand the other does not mean they are being empathetic towards that
person, as there are differences between empathy , triggering emotions (Smith, 1993) (e.g., self-
compassion, kindness), motivating positive attitudes (Allport, 1954; Pettigrew and Tropp, 2008;
Pettigrew et al., 2011), between other theories. This confusion highlights the need to appripiatly
integrating theories from other fields into design. Actually through this study we transferred
knowledge from theory and practice into actionable strategies, making visible that IMSI can be
promoted in seven other ways, besides through empathy. Therefore, by identifying relevant theories
and linking them to participant's experiences, we are proposes seven other strategies that could expand
the ways of achieving meaningfulness.
6.4. Recommendations from designers to improve the cards
It should be noted that we initially created the cards only to communicate the strategies to designers,
and other materials to observe how the strategies could contribute to inspiring new design ideas. Thus,
our aim is not to create a finished design tool that can be immediately utilized in design practice.
However, we identified two main areas to improve the design strategies' cards based on designers'
suggestions. First, designers suggested to have different colors and sizes of fonts to visually
distinguish between strategies.Second, it was suggested that we expand these tools' applicability by
improving the design of the Miro board in which it was used. Furthermore, through this study, we
have understood the relevance of creating tools specific to design activities. It seems that creating
tools that guide designers becomes even more critical in relation to topics and goals that seem to be far
from design such as sociology and psychology. By bridging existing knowledge from social
psychology with the empirical knowledge derived from participants, we were able to identify
strategies that could benefit designers by guiding them to create solutions. These strategies need to be
appropriately communicated to designers to guide them effectively. Hence, in the scope of future
work, we aim to iterate the design of the cards to communicate the strategies better and explore other
tools which could be integrated into the ideation process (i.e., personas, boards).
7. Conclusion
Intercultural Meaningful Social Interactions (IMSI) are required to promote social cohesion and
diversity in society. These interactions are relevant to promoting the social inclusion of migrants in
their hosting society. However, there are no directions to encourage them within everyday life. This
study was concerned with creating strategies to inspire designers while ideating for promoting IMSI.
We were inspired by the notion of bridging concepts, linking empirical knowledge from a focus group
with migrants and locals living in Istanbul, and social psychology literature on prejudice reduction.
We proposed eight design strategies to promote IMSI. We made a preliminary evaluation of these
strategies in their potential to inspire ideas that diverge in the kind of design interventions while still
converging to the type of interaction they promote. There are different aspects limiting this work, one
is the number of participants, their composition and specific social culture they are part of, hence they
might not represent every migrant experience. However, our study does not look for generalizability
as much as collecting situated knowledge (Haraway, 1988) and insights to inspire designers.
Therefore, this work could be complemented by being performed in other multicultural contexts as
well. Still, through the strategies devised, we put forward ways in which IMSI can be promoted
through design based on both literary work and participants’ situated knowledge, by generating
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practical tools for designer's inspiration in creating solutions promoting IMSI and eventually
promoting social inclusion. We will continue to develop and iterate tools that can inspire design
solutions for facilitating IMSI in future work.
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... Besides, this study suggested elements that characterize different configurations of IMSI: group size, duration, mobility level, kind of communication, and proximity. Additionally, [59] proposed eight design strategies to promote IMSI. The strategies are: Facilitating Empathy, Syncing feelings, Supporting understanding, Boosting confidence, Nudging positive perspectives, Experiencing together, Encouraging Cross-learning, and Identifying similarities. ...
... The cards introduced the concepts of meaningful social interactions and their relevant aspects to make participants understand and internalize these concepts. We created the cards according to previous work, which defined the impact of IMSI [28,58,67], the strategies to promote them [3,59], and the elements of interactions [24,60]. ...
... We presented participants with three sets of cards, the first relating to the kinds of impact IMSI produced [28,58,67], the second presenting design strategies to promote IMSI [3,59], and the final set showing the various elements of IMSI [24,60][60]. The cards helped create a shared understanding of core IMSI concepts. ...
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Positive meaningful interactions are encounters that promote positive attitudes and learning about others, which are needed to develop healthy social fabrics and cultural diversity. However, individuals tend to interact more with people like themselves often avoiding encounters with others that seem to be different, for example, with intercultural strangers. Though previous HCI work has been concerned with exploring meaningful experiences with products and technologies as a way of promoting product attachment, the field lacks studies exploring how design could facilitate intercultural MSI. Designing interventions to support intercultural MSI requires i) understanding what characteristics make these interactions meaningful and ii) how these characteristics can be addressed through design. In this study, we contribute to the literature by producing knowledge on these aspects. Based on an analysis of 56 real-life stories about intercultural MSI and an idea generation session with designers, we characterize intercultural MSI with four dimensions (outcomes, feelings, context, and elements) and we identify four design considerations to be taken into account when designing interventions to support intercultural MSI. Hence, our contribution is to formulate this knowledge while highlighting how the characteristics and perceptions of intercultural MSI can be applied to design new technologies that promote this kind of interaction.
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Research on intergroup bias usually focuses on a single dimension of social categorization. In real life, however, people are aware of others' multiple group memberships and use this information to form attitudes about them. The present research tests the predictive power of identification, perceived conflict, and perceived symbolic threat in explaining the strength of intergroup bias on various dimensions of social categorization in multiple categorization settings. We conduct a factorial survey experiment, manipulating 9 dimensions of social categorization in diverse samples from 4 countries (n = 12,810 observations, 1,281 participants representing 103 social groups). The dimensions studied are age, gender, ethnicity, religion, place of residence, education, occupation, income, and 1 country-specific dimension. This approach allows exploring the generalizability of established determinants of bias across dimensions of categorization, contexts, and target groups. Identification and symbolic threat showed good generalizability across countries and categorization dimensions, but their effects varied as a function of participant and target groups' status. Identification predicted stronger bias mainly when the participant belonged to a higher status and the target belonged to a lower status group. Symbolic threat predicted stronger bias mainly when the target was a minority group member. Conflict predicted bias only in few cases, and not only the strength but also the direction of the effects varied across countries, dimensions, and target and participant groups. These findings help to clarify the limits of generalizability of established determinants of intergroup bias and highlight the need for new explanations of social-cognitive processes among minority group members. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).
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This article argues that digital publics unleash and bolster everyday racism, creating an unregulated space where anonymity and ubiquity enable the dissemination of racist message. By creating broader visibility and wider reach of racist texts and facilitating more participation for racists, social media platforms such as Twitter normalize gendered and place-based racialization of refugees. Recently, hostility and hate became the norm in derogating the refugee identity on social media platforms. To investigate the complexity of digital racism, this article presents a unique case study on Twitter, capturing the widespread user reactions in the aftermath of the mass resettlement of Syrians in Turkey. It examines varying racialization of Syrians on the Turkish Twittersphere, using sentiment and qualitative content analyses of hashtags and mentions on Syrians, when they hit Twitter trends for Turkey for a year, first, for mundane events and, second, during the Turkish state's occupation in Northern Syria.
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Digital serious games have shown to be effective in promoting citizen engagement and social interaction. The reasons for their success are, however, unknown. This paper proposes design recommendations to support designers of serious games for meaningful social interaction, based on player preferences, needs and desires, based on literature study and a case study for which a location-based game framework was designed, developed and evaluated. The case study with and for children/teenagers in Rotterdam focussed on the design of challenges by the children/teenagers for meaningful interaction with their environment, and the strengthening of their engagement with their own neighbourhood. The paper focuses specifically on: 1) if and when meaningful social interaction occurred during game play, how it occurred, and with which impact, and 2) the design choices/features that contributed to (the experience of) meaningful social interaction. On the basis of these results and the literature this paper proposes design recommendations to support designers of serious games for meaningful social interaction, taking not only the current players’ needs and desires into account but also those of future players.
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As we increasingly integrate technology into our lives, we need a better framework for understanding social interactions across the communication landscape. Utilizing survey data in which more than 4,600 people across the United States, India, and Japan described a recent social interaction, this article qualitatively and quantitatively explores what makes an interaction meaningful. A qualitative analysis of respondents’ own words finds that meaningful interactions are those with emotional, informational, or tangible impact that people believe enhance their lives, the lives of their interaction partners, or their personal relationships. A quantitative analysis predicting respondents’ ratings of recent interactions finds the attributes most likely to facilitate meaningfulness include strong ties (e.g., friends and family), community ties (e.g., neighbors), shared activities, and synchronicity; meaningful social interactions are also more likely to be planned in advance and memorialized with photos or videos. These attributes are consistent across cultures. Although popular rhetoric often juxtaposes people’s online lives against their offline lives, this research finds in-person interactions can be just as meaningful as technology-mediated interactions. We conclude with a new framework for thinking about social interactions more holistically.
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Design for social integration aims to provide support to foster societies that are inclusive and tolerant with a diverse array of people, regardless of whether they are locals or migrants. So far, in order to support migrants on their integration to a new society, a diverse range of tools have been developed which have been more focused on providing technical knowledge about migration (e.g., learning a language, legal orientation). However, developing positive interactions between locals and migrants is also a potential strategy for facilitating migrants' integration into a new society, as it helps to overcome prejudices and social exclusion which has been in rise recently. Since this strategy is underexplored, we conducted a study with the local and international community at a university in Istanbul to understand interactions between these communities and identify ways of encouraging positive interactions between culturally different groups. In this paper, we present four themes, three design tactics along with three design speculations derived from this study.
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As the rates of lifestyle diseases such as obesity, diabetes, and heart disease continue to rise, the development of effective tools that can help people adopt and sustain healthier habits is becoming ever more important. Mobile computing holds great promise for providing effective support for helping people manage their health in everyday life. Yet, for this promise to be realized, mobile wellness systems need to be well designed, not only in terms of how they implement specific behavior-change techniques but also, among other factors, in terms of how much burden they put on the user, how well they integrate into the user’s daily life, and how they address the user’s privacy concerns. Designing for all of these constraints is difficult, and it is often not clear what tradeoffs particular design decisions have on how a wellness application is experienced and used. Designing for Healthy Lifestyles: Design Considerations for Mobile Technologies to Encourage Consumer Health and Wellness assesses different design approaches to common features of mobile wellness applications, and discusses the tradeoffs that are inherent in those approaches. It also outlines the key challenges that human-computer interaction researchers and designers will need to address to move the state of the art for mobile wellness technologies forward.
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Herbert Simon's classic work on artificial intelligence in the expanded and updated third edition from 1996, with a new introduction by John E. Laird. Herbert Simon's classic and influential The Sciences of the Artificial declares definitively that there can be a science not only of natural phenomena but also of what is artificial. Exploring the commonalities of artificial systems, including economic systems, the business firm, artificial intelligence, complex engineering projects, and social plans, Simon argues that designed systems are a valid field of study, and he proposes a science of design. For this third edition, originally published in 1996, Simon added new material that takes into account advances in cognitive psychology and the science of design while confirming and extending the book's basic thesis: that a physical symbol system has the necessary and sufficient means for intelligent action. Simon won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1978 for his research into the decision-making process within economic organizations and the Turing Award (considered by some the computer science equivalent to the Nobel) with Allen Newell in 1975 for contributions to artificial intelligence, the psychology of human cognition, and list processing. The Sciences of the Artificial distills the essence of Simon's thought accessibly and coherently. This reissue of the third edition makes a pioneering work available to a new audience.