Summary
In the paper “Social Translucence”, Erikson looks at the importance of a socially translucent system. The importance of a translucent system is that there is still some privacy but otherwise the user can see other users. In order for people to be able to communicate in the virtual world they need to be able to “see” each other as much as possible. For an effective system, it needs to have:
- Visibility
- Awareness
- Accountability
He focuses on the basis of a knowledge community, a place where users go to share and gather knowledge. Similarly in this paper, he also looks at different designs focused on making some social cues visible to the users. Erikson used social proxies as a way to show users where other users where and how involved they were in conversations.
In “The Chat Circle Series”, Donath explores how different designs for chat systems can affect how users communicate. Focusing on:
- Environment
- Communication channel
- Individual representation
- History
- Movement
- Context
It began with Chat Circles, a basic textual chat system where people are represented by circles. A user could move their circle from conversation to conversation. From there new designs were created to tweak different aspects of the original focus. Some designs incorporated more movement to make the conversations more realistic, others would try to increase the option for more context in order to stimulate conversation. One tried to switch from textual to audio and another had the conversations focused on moving toward a common goal to control an actor.
Reflection
Finding ways to bridge the gap between conversing in the virtual world vs in real life is an admirable goal. It is difficult to reflect aspects like intonation and facial expressions, key pieces to communicating, in a virtual space. I found it interesting that personal boundaries still existed even though a person can be represented by something like a circle. Social cues that you would think would only exist in real life were still present in the virtual world, such as the appropriate distance to maintain from someone when talking to them. The use of social proxies is an interesting idea to help users be aware of what other users are doing and how involved they are.
Questions
Would personifying the icons more increase the appearance of social cues?
Would experimenting with more or less social conformity effect conversations?
Is there a way to reflect intonation in a text based chat?
