Social intelligence

Psychologist Nicholas Humphrey believes that it is social intelligence, rather than quantitative intelligence, that defines humans. Generally speaking, social intelligence means to get on with others. Here we are considering the term more from the perspective of how we generate experiences that resonate with attendees as well as, how we integrate intelligent social interaction into our content and staging. Our ability or not to create optimized interaction between all stakeholders in an event is crucial to ensuring the take-away, retained experience has an extended afterlife. Firstly, we need to ensure that the experiential elements are comprehensively covered in our content/curation design and fully reflect the event theme/concept. Then we need to create spatial design and active data exchange systems that enable participants to maximize the social experience.

The use of social platforms to create a greater interactive milieu has grown significantly over the past decade and has provided an arena for pre-, during and post-show social interaction on levels that are beneficial for all stakeholders. Introducing intelligent agents with varying functions through each stage of the design process as well as at the event itself, whether face-to-face or virtual, is beginning to make the tenets of social intelligence more meaningful, relevant and tangible.

In recent years, we have designed a number of events that have included augmented human – human interaction as well as human to robot and robot to robot. These have included everything from the Robot Group’s Giant Brain, University of Texas’ robot soccer, MIT’s Singing Fingers and installations from Georgia Institute of Technology’s Adaptive Digital Media Lab (ADAM Lab).