Dyadica: Designing Wearable Technology for Consistent and Consentful Communication at Social Dances

Abstract

Social dances are community gatherings centered around dancing with one another. However, current etiquette and social norms fall short of ensuring consistent communication and struggle to support the growing community culture of Affirmative Consent in social dance communities. To address these issues, we investigate the current use of technology in these spaces alongside dancers' communication tendencies. We introduce Dyadica: a socio-technical system for real-time, preference-based partner matching. This dual-interface system allows users to submit their preferences via a smartphone application prior to a social dance. During the social dance, users receive partner suggestions and their preferences via a smartwatch. Dyadica was evaluated at a real Swing social dance with a mix of 7 Dyadica users and approximately 25 non-users. This study showed Dyadica was effective in providing suitable partners for users while not disrupting users' experience at the social dance. Additionally, Dyadica showed promise in helping users learn about each others' preferences and facilitating social interaction. Based on these findings, we present guidelines for the development of wearable social technology for social dances.