Paper (Talk)

Technology provoking disparate individuals to collaborate or share experiences in the public space faces a difficult barrier, namely the ordinary social order of urban places. We employed the notion of the breaching experiment to explore how this barrier might be overcome. We analyse responses to a set of city center social interventions to reveal four themes: “offering collaboration”, “requesting collaboration”, “allowing for collaboration” and “making collaboration contextually relevant”. Each of these breaching experiments in different ways helps reveal the ordinary social organization of life in public spaces. Arising from this, we argue for the importance of qualities such as availability, facilitation, perspicuous settings, and perspicuous participants to encourage and support co-located strangers to collaborate and share experiences.