SOTATE: Visualizing Personal Social Battery Levels and Recharging States in Open-Plan Offices
Nari Kim, Jin-young Moon, and Young-Woo Park
Managing social batteries is crucial in highly interactive environments such as open-plan offices. To support both the internal self-management of one’s own social battery and the external coordination of interactions with others, we designed Sotate, a device that visualizes social batteries. Sotate uses a gauge-style LED display to represent a user’s social battery level and physical placement to indicate when the user is engaged in recharging activities. Our three-week field study with four groups revealed that participants used social battery representations not only to reflect their internal states, but also to intentionally express non-literal states to manage external communication. We also found that explicitly marking the beginning and end of recharging made recharging activities more deliberate and reflective, and that colleagues relied on simple, immediately interpretable cues rather than precise numerical values when coordinating interactions. These results highlight design considerations for systems that support the management of internal states associated with social interaction.