Summary
The article, Social Translucence: An Approach to Designing Systems that Support Social Processes, as the title implies is about designing systems with social translucence in mind. Designing a system for social translucence essentially means designing it for communication and collaboration. One overarching example used in the reading was an opaque door in a building. This door creates a problem because when people try to open this door, if they do it quickly they can hurt people on the other side. One poor solution does not take social translucence into account, this would simply be sticking a sign on it saying “Please open slowly”. A better solution involves placing a glass window into the door so people can see when there are others on the opposite side. This utilizes translucence because we use our social cues to communicate with others across the door. The main point the author makes is that the online world is built up with walls rather than windows, because we don’t usually see who we are communicating with online, so this greatly affects how we interact with others. The online environment is not built up to utilize social norms and mechanisms that exists in real-world interactions.
The other article, The Chat Circles Series: Explorations in Designing Abstract Graphical Comm. Interfaces, is about trying to create a non-textual, graphical chat program. Similar to the other article, there is a lot lost in pure-text conversations, so the researchers took a crack at designing one that could circumvent that problem. There were 5 different projects made. First “Chat Circles”, was built using a very simple design where users were represented by a basic, colored circle. This first design represented proximity, as users could move their circle around to get closer to others and participate in different conversations. The next rendition, “Chat Circles 2”, added two main features, background pictures that provoke conversations, and history so users can see where people have walked. “Talking in Circles” was the next update, this one had audio capability where people could actually talk now, circles were still used for representation and they grow bigger or smaller with the volume of the speaker’s voice. Next came “Chatscape”, the big addition here was that people now had greater customization of their avatars for more individuality. Lastly came, “Tele-direction”, this was different because users were now trying to direct a live actor to perform various actions. All of these chat environments were created to accommodate needs that arose from previous renditions, showing how important different aspects of conversation are.
Analysis
I definitely agree with the points made in the Social Translucence: An Approach to Designing Systems that Support Social Processes, article. I think we do lose a lot in online conversation, not physically seeing who you talk to or hear their voice can make conversing more difficult. I have personally noticed that it can be difficult to fully understand what someone means in a text without seeing the emotion in their face or hearing the tone of their voice. I do think that emoji’s have helped significantly with this though. They do help a lot in detecting sarcasm or understanding someone else’s tone with their message. That is one way that we have added windows to our technological interactions.
I found, The Chat Circles Series: Explorations in Designing Abstract Graphical Comm. Interfaces, interesting because it took a deep look at online conversation. However, I do think that there are some online games out there that actually do a lot of this stuff already(avatars moving with speech, proximity, etc.) So it would be interesting to study one of those and see it how it compares. I also thought the concept of seeing “lurkers” was also pretty unique. As sites like Twitter and Reddit do not represent the users who are just there to listen and do not participate in discussion.
Questions
- What is the next step beyond emoji’s for “widening the window” in the digital world?
- Is there any way to estimate the damage that has been dealt by the limitations of communicating in a virtual environment?
- How important is personalization of an avatar or other representation of yourself in a digital environment?
