A socially aware persuasive system for supporting conversations at the museum café.

In this paper we propose a new type of system explicitly aimed at influencing immediate behavior in an informal, non goal-oriented co-located small group. The state of the group dynamics is automatically assessed in order for the system to continuously plan and deploy minimalist strategies using evocative means to influence behavior, rather than explicit recommendations. A key aspect of our approach is that the main "interaction channel" is left for direct human-to-human interaction, while no large conscious elaboration effort nor actions are meant by the user toward the interface. We present here the concept and a working implementation of a prototype system targeted to a museum scenario. The system has the form of a table in the museum café, and is aimed at inducing a group of friends to talk about the content of their visit to the museum.