Social-Spiritual Face: Designing Social Reading Support for Spiritual Well-being

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Techno-spiritual practices refer to the use of digital technologies to support various spiritual activities, such as scripture reading. While prior human-computer interaction studies largely focus on understanding techno-spiritual practices in both personal and ministry environments, there is a lack of design research that explores novel design opportunities, based on longitudinal field deployment. As an important techno-spiritual practice, this work focuses on scripture reading and investigates the design space of "social scripture reading," as it is often organized into small groups for successful behavior maintenance. We designed and evaluated BibleCell, a social scripture reading tool that supports personalized reading plans, scripture reading, and social sharing. After the third year of deployment, we performed a two-month user study in Korean Protestant churches to deepen our understanding of techno-spiritual practices in social contexts via in-depth interviews (n = 27). We report the major themes of social techno-spiritual practices, such as social motivators, social interaction patterns, and leadership roles. We discuss our findings using a novel design concept of social-spiritual awareness that considers both the social and spiritual aspects of interactions in social computing systems.