Eating alone, together: new forms of commensality

Catherine Grevet, Anthony Tang, and Elizabeth Mynatt. (2012). Eating alone, together: new forms of commensality. In GROUP ’12: Proceedings of the 17th ACM international conference on Supporting group work, ACM, 103–106. Acceptance: 25.5% - 24/94.

Abstract

Eating with others, or commensality, is an enjoyable activity that serves many important social functions; however, many individuals eat meals alone due to life circumstances, meaning that they miss out on these social benefits. We developed and deployed a simple technology probe providing social awareness around mealtimes to explore how social systems might help alleviate the loneliness of solitary dining. Our findings suggest that these systems can convey a sense of connectedness around a meal; further, our analysis revealed three themes relevant to systems of this type: that contextually-located peripheral awareness engenders connectedness; that such tools can foster a feeling of shared social presence, and that they can be a catalyst for other forms of communication around the meal. These findings suggest that “remote commensality” is not only possible, but that it may take on forms entirely different to that which we are accustomed.

Materials

PDF File (http://hcitang.org/papers/2012-group2012-eating-alone-together.pdf)
DOI (http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2389176.2389192)

Keywords

HCI, Social computing, Awareness, Contextual information, Design, Food, Mealtime

BibTeX

@inproceedings{grevet2012eating,
  acceptance = {25.5{\%} - 24/94},
  address = {New York, NY, USA},
  author = {Grevet, Catherine and Tang, Anthony and Mynatt, Elizabeth},
  booktitle = {GROUP '12: Proceedings of the 17th ACM international conference on
      Supporting group work},
  date-modified = {2014-01-11 20:45:46 +0000},
  doi = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2389176.2389192},
  isbn = {978-1-4503-1486-2},
  keywords = {HCI, Social computing, Awareness, Contextual information, Design, Food,
      Mealtime},
  location = {Sanibel Island, Florida, USA},
  pages = {103--106},
  pdfurl = {http://hcitang.org/papers/2012-group2012-eating-alone-together.pdf},
  publisher = {ACM},
  title = {Eating alone, together: new forms of commensality},
  type = {conference},
  year = {2012},
  bdsk-url-1 = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2389176.2389192}
}