Saving Face: Playful Design for Social Engagement, in Public Smart City Spaces

Can social engagement and reflection be designed through social touch in today’s smart city’s public spaces? This paper explores ludic, playful design for shared engagement and reflection in public spaces through social touch. In two Artistic Social Labs (ASL), internationally presented in public spaces, a radically unfamiliar sensory synthesis is acquired, for which perception of ‘who sees and who is being seen, who touches and who is being touched’ is disrupted. Participants playfully ‘touch themselves and feel being touched, to connect with others on a screen’. On the basis of the findings in the ASLs, guidelines are proposed for orchestrating social engagement and reflection, through social touch as play.System Engineerin