Social Control Interaction Framework: Design to Technically Support a Group of Users in Making Control Decisions Together

Entertainment is enjoyable and helps people to feel socially connected with others. However, the control of entertainment applications in group situations is often restricted to one person. This especially limits group decision-making where people sit in close proximity such as in the living room or inside a car. Restricting users in group decision-making can cause interpersonal conflicts and frustration. To overcome these aspects, my PhD research aims to articulate design principles to support social control. I specifically focus on distributing control across group members to support collaborative group decision-making and enhance social connectedness. To achieve this, I will design entertainment-oriented social control services for the car and the living room. Based on the exploration and designs for the car domain, I will transfer the gained knowledge to the living room, to verify and generalize my findings. This should support in drawing an overall conclusion for the design of general social control entertainment services. Thus, my dissertation contributes to the understanding of the design for future, entertainment-oriented, distributed control systems to best support group collaboration.