Seating to stimulate conversation

We can sit in all sorts of angles to each other, from nose-to-noise to ear-to-ear.  Fiorillo and associates determined that “Experiments in which participants were asked to talk to each other while sitting at the same distance (1 m) were conducted in four seating arrangements . . . where the angle between the forward directions of two seats were positioned at 0° (side by side), 22.5°, 90° and 120° (almost opposite each other), respectively. . . . Experiment results indicate that the 120° configuration  scored the best in the overall comfort and the quality of conversation, but only slightly better than the 90° configuration.. . . Seating side by side is not optimal to have a comfortable conversation with your seatmate.”  Research was conducted in the context of a future car with seating options not generally available today outside of limousines; findings are relevant wherever we might find ourselves talking to others.

Iolanda Fiorillo, Silvana Piro, Shabila Anjani, Maxim Smulders, Yu Song, Alessandro Naddeo and Peter Vink.  2019. “Future Vehicles:  The Effect of Seat Configuration on Posture and Quality of Conversation.”  Ergonomics, vol. 62, no. 11, pp. 1400-1414, https://doi.org/10.1080/00140139.2019.1651904