Opportunistic Collective Experiences: Identifying Shared Situations and Structuring Shared Activities at Distance

Despite many available social technologies for connecting at a distance, we don’t always find opportunities to actively engage with friends and loved ones, even though this kind of interaction is associated with reduced loneliness and increased social closeness. To meet our need for active engagement and to fit desired interactions into our busy lives, our work explores the design of Opportunistic Collective Experiences (OCEs), or social experiences powered by computer programs that proactively surface opportune moments as they arise for engaging in shared experiences and interdependent activities across distributed contexts. These programs identify the opportune situations as they arise in people’s physical contexts and structure links between seemingly independent situations in order to support active engagement in shared experiences and interdependent activities. To prototype these social experiences, we built Cerebro, which consists of a mobile app for users to interact when opportunities and situations align, a programming API for social experience designers to implement OCEs, and an execution engine for coordinating interactions. Through a 20 day deployment study tested with groups of geographically-distributed college alumni (N=28), we found that OCEs lower the barriers for interacting at a distance; enable more personal, shared experiences; and increase feelings of being a part of a group. We contribute to CSCW (1) a novel interaction that supports at-distance, actively engaging social interactions through shared experiences and activities without the need for initiating or preplanning; and (2) the design of systems to implement and execute these kinds of interactions.