What makes an object social?

    A social object is one that mediates interpersonal interactions among those who create, own, use, critique, and consume the object. Social objects aren't just for looking at or producing; they are transactional, facilitating exchanges among those who encounter them. A chair is not a social object because one person designed it and another one sat in it; there is no social interaction between these two individuals. But a chair may be a social object when two people argue over who should sit in it. A chair is a social object when it is acknowledged as "Eric's chair" and becomes the topic of conversation among Eric's colleagues. A chair is a social object when one person gives it as a gift to another. A chair is a social object when one person shares a photo of it and another asks where it was purchased. In other words, any object can be a social object in certain conditions, at certain times.

    There are few objects that are persistently social, that motivate interpersonal engagement among a diversity of strangers at different times. Artifacts of interpersonal communication, like letters, are intrinsically social, but technological advances have led to many communication technologies that are not necessarily two-way. Even within networks designed to optimize the sociality of objects, some objects are more social than others. There are some Facebook status updates and Flickr photos that generate lots of discussion, whereas others fall on seemingly deaf ears.  Whether in the real world or the virtual, there are at least five conditions that help render an object social.  Objects that are personal, active, provocative, communicative, and relational tend to be consistently social. Let’s look at each of these in detail.

    Social objects are often personal. Many of the most effective social objects are highly correlated with their owners or users as individuals and are not social objects when taken out of that personal context. For example, both tattoos and pets are objects that become social when they are with their owner. The owner has a set of stories that go with the object, and strangers have a set of socially-permissible questions to ask about the object. If I approach you in a museum and ask what captivates you about the sculpture in front of us, you might look at me strangely and tell me you were just spacing out. But if I ask what type of dog you have or why he does that funny thing, you will chatter on for minutes.

    Can people have personal connections to institutionally-held objects? Definitely, but it is most typical for highly engaged members, volunteers, or staff, who have vested interests, relationships, and ideas about the objects on display. Casual visitors are rarely as “close” to exhibits as they are to their pets. [except that, in my experience, casual visitors do get close when something they see, even for the first time, really sparks off something in them, resonates with their experience. The question then is, do they feel comfortable sharing that experience with strangers, and what can museums do to help create the right environment and means of sharing? - LG - ok, I see now this comes later!]

    Some social objects are active. Objects that are able to directly and physically interject into the space between strangers can motivate discussion. For example, if an ambulance passes by or a fountain splashes you in the breeze, your attention is drawn to it, and you feel complicit with the other people who are similarly imposed upon by the object. Similarly, in bars, darts or ping pong balls that leave their playing fields often generate new social connections among those looking for the ball and those whose personal space has been interrupted by it. In cultural institutions, active objects are often those that pop into motion intermittently. In some cases, like the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, the action is on a fixed schedule, and passersby naturally strike up conversations about when it will happen and what’s going on. Other times, the action is more spontaneous. For example, living objects, like the animals in zoos, frequently motivate conversation when they move or make sounds in surprising ways. Inanimate objects can also exhibit this behavior—think of the discussions among visitors that naturally arise as model trains move through environments or automata perform their dances.

    Relatedly, social objects are often provocative. An object need not physically insert itself into a social environment to become a topic of discussion if it is a spectacle on its own. Many of the objects in the Race exhibition fall into this category. One of the most discussed exhibits is a vitrine featuring stacks of money representing the average earnings of Americans of different races. Money is somewhat exciting on its own, but the real power in the exhibit comes in the shocking disparity among the piles. People are compelled to point out of surprise. The powerful physical metaphor of the stacks makes the information presented feel more spectacular without dumbing it down or over-dressing it.

    Of course, it’s not always easy to identify which objects will be provocative to whom. The It Is What It Is exhibition relied on a single object—a bombed-out car from the Iraq war—to encourage people to engage in interpersonal conversation. While in some venues (particularly non cultural-institutions, like parking lots), this object successfully drew people to dialogue, in museums its power was diminished. Visitors, especially to art museums, expect a certain amount of shock in their experience and may choose to internalize provocation instead of pursuing discussion around it.

    Some social objects are transmissive. While people don't consciously use or discuss the objects together, users have a social experience that passes through the objects. For example, comment boards and online discussion forum collects comments from individuals who are not co-located in place or time. Those comments are social objects in a growing dialogue that happens among individuals who may never meet. For example, Brian Singer’s 1000 Journals project sent one thousand journals out into the world to be filled and eventually returned back to him in San Francisco. Each person who picked up a partially-completed journal encountered a social object featuring the preserved voices of contributors who had come before. While a reader might not ever meet the others who had contributed to the journal, she likely entered into a mental dialogue with them through her own interaction with the storied object.

    The most consistently effective social objects are explicitly relational. They require several people to use them to work, and their design often implies an invitation for strangers to get involved. Phones are relational. Pieces of content that are posed as questions are relational as long as they beg an answer. Pool tables, seesaws, and game boards fall into this category, as do many interactive museum exhibits and participatory sculptures that invite people to work together to solve a problem or generate an effect. For example, every science center features exhibits that explicitly state on their labels, “this exhibit requires two people to use.” One is the player, one the tracker, or one on the left and the other on the right. These objects are reliably social because they demand interpersonal engagement to function. However, in many cases, instructional text is written in passive voice (“this exhibit requires two…”) as opposed to active instruction (“find a partner and…”) and the result is exhibits that mostly attract pre-existing social groups. Without an explicit entreaty to connect, lone visitors may be reticent to take the initiative to find a potential partner.

    Most social object experiences are fleeting and inconsistent. For social object experiences to work repeatedly for a wide diversity of users or visitors, day after day, you need more than just objects that exhibit one or more of the above conditions. Museums are particularly challenging social object platforms, especially those (like art museums) in which visitors often already feel a little uncomfortable or uncertain of how to behave. If you don't feel comfortable and in control of your environment, you are unlikely to talk with a stranger under any circumstances. In 2009, I did social object experiments in several museums and informal learning environments in which I challenged colleagues and students to create objects that get strangers talking with each other without staff intervention. At the Woodlawn Park Zoo in Seattle, a highly social place, it was fairly easy for graduate students to design objects, especially game-like objects, that visitors comfortably gravitated towards and used in connection with others. But at the Denver Art Museum, it was almost impossible for staff to design successful social objects. These were creative, energized professionals experimenting in an institution that has been lauded for its welcoming, friendly feel. But visitors expect art to be strange and potentially uncomfortable, and so everything that the staff created--signs that altered the meaning of elevator buttons, invitations into stories and games, even a box of chocolates--was viewed silently with suspicion and confusion by visitors. 

    It takes more than just an intriguing object to get visitors talking. To accentuate the socialness of an object, you need to design a platform for it that enhances its ability to be shared. Jyri Engestrom talks about the fact that there should be active verbs that define the things users can "do" relative to social objects--consume them, comment on them, add to them, etc.--and that all social objects need to situated in systems that allow you to share them. If I can't share my object experience with you, how can we discuss it?

    In museum situations when visitors are co-located, experiences are often shared naturally among proximate individuals. But there are many museum experiences that are not shareable, either because of prohibitions on actions like photographing artifacts, or because exhibits are designed for individual consumption. To make social objects shine, we need to design platforms that promote them explicitly as shareable, relational objects.

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