Matthew Bernas
Summary
In the Social Translucence article, the writer discusses the idea of making interactions in our digital realm of information more translucent. The writer draws connections of what they mean by translucency with situations in which we utilize social cues during interactions. These cues allow us to structure our behavior and responses to these social situations and mimicking this translucent behavior in a digital architecture would provide a better experience. This new digital experience can improve communication, collaboration, and ultimately alter the domain of knowledge management. The article also includes projects that practice social translucency to support conversation to better understand how to build a socially translucent system.
The article “The Chat Circles Series: Explorations in Designing Abstract Graphical Comm. Interfaces” looks at varying graphical interfaces among chat text based communication to discuss implication among social interaction. These various chat designs were designed to foster social interaction and expressive communication. Some characteristics such as an abstract graphical environment address problem found in textual chats while avoiding pitfalls of representational graphics. A list of the rest of these characteristics include: environment, communication channel, individual representation, history, movement, and context.
Reflection
The ideas brought up by the articles are interesting and show possible new developments of online interaction. They both make me think about the dimensions of physical social interactions and how online social interactions are different. Replicating and possibly expanding on these dimensions on a canvas such as the internet points online interaction in a positive direction of development. In the Social Translucence article, it discusses how physical social interactions are translucent allowing for social cues to alter our behavior in a situation. Replicating this online could provide a new and better experience possibly improving communication and collaboration. In the “The Chat Circles Series: Explorations in Designing Abstract Graphical Comm. Interfaces” article, they talk about varying characteristics in a text chat environment to study how each provide a different dimension. The article found that altering the environment, communication channel, individual representation, history, movement, and context would improve chat based communication.
Questions
- How do we apply these to platforms such as twitter?
- How have emojis, facebook like faces, and text graphics available in imessage, added new dimensions for online interactions?
