The Playful Potential of Digital Commensality: Learning from Spontaneous Playful Remote Dining Practices

Abstract

With one-person households being increasingly common and Covid-19 lockdown policies forcing people to stay home, remote dining has become common practice for many, who take it as an opportunity to connect with others in times of loneliness. Sharing meals online, also known as digital commensality, is a rich form of interaction, where people leverage technology to achieve a sense of connectedness and belonging while eating. In this paper, we look at digital commensality and we explore its inherent playful potential with the aim to inspire the design of engaging technologies that can support, enhance and augment this form of interaction. For this, we used a situated play design approach to document and analyze the behavior of 36 people (including pairs of friends and strangers) sharing meals online. Our analysis surfaced a set of play potentials of remote dining -- i.e., playful things people already do and enjoy spontaneously while sharing meals online. We present those play potentials as inspirational material: they can motivate and enrich the design of future digital commensality technologies by responding to people's desire for playful and social interaction with, through, and around food.

The role of technology use in food practices during the COVID-19 pandemic

“…Regarding the current state, however, our study provides an opportunity to complement existing quantitative studies about the impact of the pandemic on food practices (e.g., Ceccaldi et al, 2020 ; Janssen et al, 2021 ; Nuijten, 2020 ; Schlegl et al, 2020 ), with qualitative narratives and explanations, thereby providing more insight into the effects of the pandemic on food practices. We think it is important to analyze recent HFI research conducted during the pandemic to explore whether there are certain academic foci (e.g., Researching digital commensality (e.g., Alhasan et al, 2022 ; Ceccaldi et al, 2020 ; Ye et al, 2021 )). After all, it was evident from our study that despite various efforts to try out new practices of digital commensality (e.g., virtual co-cooking and virtual co-drinking ), they often failed to establish themselves, especially when the organizational effort and the demand on technical equipment/set-ups seems to be substantially higher (e.g., co-cooking vs. co-drinking ).…”

“…Since some families were unhappy with such an increase, they introduced rules prohibiting the use of technical devices during meals. Considering the recent rise and adoption of web conferencing systems ( Hacker et al, 2020 ), it is also likely that more forms of digital commensality occurred during the pandemic ( Alhasan et al, 2022 ).…”

“…Instead, they argued that, due to the easier preparation, virtual coffee sessions and tea times were preferably integrated into everyday life as regular practices. Alhasan et al (2022) observed different situations of digital commensality. They identified different playful interactions resulting in insights that can be used in the future to make digital commensality more fun.…”