Beneath Walls and Naked Souls: Factors influencing Intercultural Meaningful Social Interactions in Public Places of Istanbul María Laura Ramírez Galleguillos Koç University Arçelik Research Center for Creative Industries, Koç University, Istanbul, Turkey mgalleguillos18@ku.edu.tr Aya Eloiriachi Sociology Department, College of Social Sciences and Humanities, Koç University, Istanbul, Turkey aloiriachi19@ku.edu.tr Aykut Coşkun Koç University Arçelik Research Center for Creative Industries, Koç University, Istanbul, Turkey aykutcoskun@ku.edu.tr ABSTRACT Individuals often avoid intercultural interactions due to biases and stereotyped perceptions about others. However, these encounters are needed to promote social inclusion and diversity. Previous PD studies have supported migrants’ social inclusion through devel- oping their social capital and empowerment. Very few studies ex- plored the facilitation of intercultural interactions within everyday contexts, like public places; further, most studies provide western perspectives. Addressing this gap, we conducted a focus group study with migrants and locals living in Istanbul, a city connecting eastern and western cultures, to explore how they perceive intercul- tural meaningful social interactions (IMSI). We asked participants to share poems about meaningful interactions, opening a dialogue about their intercultural life experiences. This technique allowed us to identify abstract qualities of IMSI and factors that infuence them. We contribute to PD work on social inclusion by presenting in-between perspectives of IMSI and discussing opportunities for facilitating IMSI in a super-diverse city. CCS CONCEPTS · B7; Human-centered computing → Interaction design; Inter- action design process and methods; Participatory design. KEYWORDS Meaningful Social Interactions, Intercultural Interactions, Public Places, Social Inclusion, Participatory Design ACM Reference Format: María Laura Ramírez Galleguillos, Aya Eloiriachi, and Aykut Coşkun. 2022. Beneath Walls and Naked Souls: Factors infuencing Intercultural Meaning- ful Social Interactions in Public Places of Istanbul. In Participatory Design Conference 2022: Volume 1 (PDC 2022 Vol. 1), August 19śSeptember 01, 2022, Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 12 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3536169.3537793 Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for proft or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the frst page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specifc permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org. PDC 2022 Vol. 1, August 19śSeptember 01, 2022, Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom © 2022 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM. ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-9388-1/22/08. . . $15.00 https://doi.org/10.1145/3536169.3537793 1 INTRODUCTION Meaningful social interactions support the integration of diferent communities as part of the same social system [18, 89] and foster collaboration and diversity among these communities [40, 59, 70, 79]. Meaningful interactions are encounters that shift negative perspectives, stereotypes, and biases about others [2, 6, 17, 73, 74, 91, 93] However, to achieve these outcomes, it is required that these interactions be positive, deep, and sustained in time [34]. Still, individuals tend to interact and create networks with people like themselves [53, 98], avoiding interactions with people perceived as diferent. Thus, interactions between intercultural strangers (i.e., people from diferent cultures who are not acquainted with each other. For example, immigrants and locals who have not previously met) might be avoided due to language diferences, biases, and prejudices against other social or cultural groups [5]. Furthermore, an interaction does not directly translate into a positive interaction; it can even be detrimental for intergroup contact if it is negative or validates biases [77]. Promoting Intercultural Meaningful Social Interactions (IMSI) under the current global migration situation is critical for social integration. Despite this signifcance, previous work on meaningful interactions has not directly considered intercultural difculties, such as language barriers and intercultural conficts. Besides, most of the studies have been conducted in western cities, with a high focus in the UK, which do not necessarily represent other ways of understanding and experiencing diversity and interculturality. Thus, in order to facilitate IMSI, more work exploring factors infuencing these interactions in other-than-western contexts is needed. Participatory Design (PD) is concerned with power issues [37, 54] and contributes to pluralism in society and design. Previously, PD projects have tried to facilitate migrants’ social inclusion [80]; for example, by promoting their economic empowerment [22, 58, 62] and social capital [96], helping develop essential skills to be part of society [39], and enabling their participation in the design of the public space [83]. However, we have not found any study exploring how to facilitate meaningful social interactions between immigrants and locals within everyday contexts, such as in public places. Addressing these gaps, we explored what makes an interaction meaningful from participants’ perspectives in Istanbul, a super- diverse city in between east and west, to unpack design opportuni- ties for facilitating IMSI in public places. Public places are framed as the context of these interactions because they represent a crit- ical encounter space between diferent social groups [75, 76]. We 194