Summary
The first article “Social Translucence: An approach to Designing Systems that Support Social Processes” focuses more on how exactly social interactions are developed with one another and how this translates to an online version, or at least how they think this should translate to an online version. This paper then relates it to the design of an application called Babble. While the other paper “The Chat Circles Series: Exploration in designing abstract graphical communication interfaces” focuses on the functions of the application called Chat Circles and how this related to interactions physical social realm, but less focus on how exactly those interactions are formed in the physical atmosphere.
The main concepts that were focused on in the paper constructing this idea of social translucence was around the concept of how to build a system that allow users to see behaviours and activities of others as we would see in the physical world. The main idea this was based around was the idea of how to define a social interaction and create the conversation that builds social interactions like it does in the physical world. The three main characteristics that define a social interaction are visibility, awareness, and accountability. They use an example of replacing a solid door with a glass door to ensure individuals using the door would think about the people on the outside of the door before opening it expressing these three key main ideas. Representing this interacting in an online medium to create natural conversation by these key factors: activity support, organizational knowledge spaces, conversation visualization, and restructuring. This article talked very little about the actual Babble application specific implementation of said functionality but did express the need for more research in the area to begin to develop a better social medium for conversations. However, it did make an interesting point (that is still relevant today even though this article is from 2000), the systems today create a barrier between people when in fact we should be trying to build technologies to work with the social interactions and behaviour patterns we already use in society instead of new forms on the web.
The second article, was basically an in depth synopsis on how the application Circle Chat works. The concept was to build a graphical chat program to “foster social interaction and expressive communication”. Their main focuses on their design included: background space, individual representation, movement implementation, communication channels, and history depiction. One of their reasons for creating a chatting platform with a focus on the graphics of it is that often in the new forms of communication on chatting applications, tone and character are lost in just simply using words between users. In this article, they mention Babble from the other article as being an “abstract graphical interface element supplementing a persistent chat environment”. They represented users with simple 2D objects with colors and their names beside it, circles can shrink and grow as people converse. In later versions, individuals were able to spatially place themselves to express their interest in the person, the algorithm would move them closer the more the talked, but the user had control on how “close” to get to a person, just as we would in the real world.
Reflection
I personally found the second article more thought provoking. What exactly would a good interface look like for representing communication that we have in our daily lives? Currently we use systems like Facebook, Imessage, Twitter, etc to communicate, but how can we form different systems that might break some the barriers we are already used to? I think these articles brought up this point basically. I liked the concept of being about to see who is contributing to a chat conversation more easily by just looking at the visual representation. Or who talk to more over chat by how close our circle are. However, I don’t quite know how I feel about placing comments on others like “super funny” because I see potentially group bullying on someone using this tool. Additionally, I don’t know how I feel about having history that was “impressionistic” instead of “factual” I am not sure I would trust, or maybe I would trust it more. This would be interesting to study to see if people actually did trust it more or less.
I don’t have any specific research questions from these articles, but they make me think about over concepts of how we currently communicate.
