A Table on the Beach: Probing Odd Invitations by Scaling Conspicuity

Paper i proceeding, 2026

Everyday public life is filled with fleeting opportunities for social connection, yet designing for such spontaneous encounters can be an elusive challenge. Building on Odd Invitations, defamiliarised objects that invite exploratory engagement without explicit instruction, we investigate how such invitations can mobilise social traction within a given socio-cultural setting. Following a research-through-design approach, we deployed six lo-fi invitations involving a defamiliarising table at beaches in Sydney, progressively scaling their conspicuity to probe how strangers transition from spectator to participant. Analysing these encounters through Participation Gestalt, we show how, for Odd Invitations encountered by chance in everyday public space, participation depends not only on what happens during engagement, but also on how an invitation first becomes noticeable and signals social permission to engage. We contribute an incremental probing approach for designing Odd Invitations and show how Participation Gestalt can be extended for Odd Invitations by proposing conspicuity as a pre-participation quality and reframing the socio-cultural setting as temporally dynamic.