UC Irvine

While public physical space use has dramatically changed over the last 50 years, most recently exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic, participation in these spaces, remains a vital facet of people’s lives. In order to create public spaces that are suitable to these altered patterns of social interactions, it is critical to understand how physical spaces and in-person relationships intersect with virtual worlds and interactions. These intersections of digital and physical worlds are especially consequential in Third Places, different from work or home spaces, often known as spaces of leisure and community. This study utilized interviews (n= 20) in Third Places, specifically coffee shops, to explore the reasons for and meanings associated with coffee shops for their users. Using an inductive approach, this study used open coding and thematic coding to analyze transcribed interviews. Results of this work advance existing literature on the instrumental and spiritual uses of spaces, where instrumental features refer to those that directly impact concrete tasks or outcomes and spiritual qualities are those that are intangible and affective, encompassing meanings, connections, and values. These instrumental and spiritual qualities are complicated by interactions and behavior patterns mediated and transformed by digital technologies and the cybersphere. Specifically, interviewees reported differing motivations for space use, ranging from purely instrumental to highly spiritual. The findings suggest that coffee shops, while not primarily used as traditional Third Places, provide spiritual qualities of productivity, social connectivity, and identity, even among irregular space users. Spiritual meanings ascribed to physical places are influenced by past, present, and desired future identity of their occupants. Broadly, findings indicate a reveal a wide array of instrumental and spiritual meanings of coffee shops among the participants in the study.