WantEat: interacting with “social” networks of intelligent things and people in the world of enogastronomy

In this paper we introduce the idea of socially intelligent things and the concept of Mixed social networks of people and things. By social intelligence we mean the ability of things to interact with users and other things, hence managing their “social” networks created during this interaction process. We present WantEat, an application we designed in the field of enogostranomy as a framework that supports social intelligence. In our framework, users can interact with intelligent things, exchange information with them, be introduced to their “friends” in the social networks, as well as navigate these networks. Our innovative interaction paradigm and a novel interface design support ludic interaction and enhance the user experience. The first prototype has been implemented and tested with users in a trial “on the field”.