Mood Squeezer: lightening up the workplace through playful and lightweight interactions

Gallacher, Sarah, O'Connor, Jenny, Bird, Jon, Rogers, Yvonne, Capra, Licia, Harrison, Daniel and Marshall, Paul (2015) Mood Squeezer: lightening up the workplace through playful and lightweight interactions. In: Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing - CSCW '15. ACM, New York, pp. 891-902. ISBN 9781450337663, 9781450337670, 9781450329224

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Abstract

Many companies would like to redesign their workspaces to make them more pleasant and even fun places to work in. An assumption is it will result in social and economic benefits. However, it can be difficult to achieve because of cost, level of disruption and regulations. We present an alternative approach that provides an injection of playfulness into "drab" office buildings. A lightweight technology intervention was designed-Mood Squeezer-that asks people to reflect on their mood by squeezing a colored ball from a box set. The squeezes are mirrored back as an aggregate colorful visualization on a public floor display. An in-The-wild study showed how this intervention was successful at getting people to squeeze their mood, leading to a diversity of conversations throughout the building. We discuss how this lightweight approach to office augmentation can provide new opportunities for opening up a "closed" workplace.

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