Summary

The Chat Circles Series

This paper drafts the designs and observations of multiple stages in a text based communications program. The impetus behind this software was to take the now mundane and relatively emotionless activity of texting and provide it with some semblance of the life found in face to face interaction. Various methods of user representation and graphical motion are used to emulate the experience of taking part in conversation with a group of people. There are features that express distance between two people, emotional tensions, and the interactions of being in an environment with its own independent happenings (such as news that plays in the background and potentially stimulates conversation). From a minimal set of breathing circles, the software evolves into a chatroom as vibrant with stimulus and emotion as a real gathering.

Social Translucence

            This paper notes how the factors of visibility, awareness, and accountability drive certain aspects of interaction and real life. Furthermore, it explores how the absence of these factors affects virtual communication as well as what can be done to remedy this absence. These elements engage two interacting people with a set of rules that defines acceptable behavior. Without them, the gloves are off and truly genuine interaction becomes difficult. The paper provides three forms of solutions:

• Realist: Projecting social information from the physical into the digital domain.
• Mimetic: Represent social cues from the physical into the digital domain.
• Abstract: Portraying social information in ways not closely tied to their physical analog.

These solutions provide different modes of injecting virtual communication with the aforementioned factors.

Reflection

The Chat Circles Series

            I’ve always been intrigued by how some developers tackle the issue of breathing life into virtual communication. Both articles share a common ideal in this regard. The various chat circle programs seem to take a cue from the points mentioned in Social Transluence in that they seeks to represent real life social cues in the digital world through the continuous movement and manipulation of circles. I must also note that, while this goal is interesting, I question whether the general population desires it or not. I am under the impression that a lot of people appreciate the difference between real life and virtual communication. Different sets of rules afford them different abilities. For example, the proposed features of Chat Circles would allow people to see whether you’re listening to the conversation or not. However, popular chat domains like Facebook Messenger or GroupMe have no such indication. Many users appreciate Facebook’s notification that the other person ‘has seen’ your message because of the fact that one can read the message that popped up without clicking on it (thus sending the notification).

Social Translucence

I can certainly recognize how it’s not just the tone and body language of a person that affects communication but the physical environment the speakers are in.  Most social media websites are of a public nature. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram’s primary feature involves posting something for all of your friends to see. This wholly affects what you’re willing to say, how you say it, and does not really allow for intimate communication between two individuals without the use of a chat tool. It makes me wonder what a site would be like where a person has multiple friends and pages dedicated to each of them. Only the user and that specific friend could access and update that page, reminiscent of a private diary shared by two people. How would this affect their activities?

Questions

• Does the general population really want more intimate virtual chatting or do they have an appreciation for the emotive disconnect that comes with it?
• How efficiently can the models proposed in Chat Circles evoke certain powerful emotions? The article noted aggression or disdain but can such feelings be felt without true presence?
• How much extra effort do these modes of communication require with the addition of such features? If people do desire these features, how readily will they accept the extra effort?

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Summary

The article, “Social Translucence: An Approach to Designing Systems that Support Social Processes” discusses about the difficulties of digital communication and collaboration. As social creatures, people are sensitive to the actions and interactions of others, however, in the digital world there are no social cues to observe. To help solve this social blindness, the authors created a prototype digital environment that would be socially translucent called Babble. An important aspect of Babble is the social proxy, a minimalist graphical representation of users’ presence and activities. In the social proxy, the conversation is represented by a large circle and the participants are colored dots. Users involved in the current conversation are represented by having the dots be within the circle while users who are logged in but in different conversations are shown by dots that are outside of the circle. After two years of daily usage, Babble was found to be an effective environment for supporting informal group conversations on various topics.

The article, “The Chat Circles Series: Explorations in Designing Abstract Graphical Comm. Interfaces”, discusses about the development of a series of abstract graphical chat environments called Chat Circles. The series represents the projects’ growth to more legible and engaging social environments, with each new project having some different kind of feature or fulfilling a different purpose. The article not only talks about the various projects but also discusses the differences between the projects and how those differences affected the social communication. It was found that including group information, graphics, and online speech helped foster better communication and sociable atmosphere among users.

Reflection

I think both articles bring up a valid point about how, though, digital communication has made it easier for people to connect and talk, the lack of in person interaction can affect the conversation. A large feature that is missing in online conversation is tone of voice. The tone of someone’s voice can greatly affect how a message is conveyed and how someone could respond back. For example, if someone was asked a question in a harsh voice then that person is more likely to respond back angrily or defensively than if the question was asked in a calmer voice. This kind of situation can be easily seen online, where textual conversation can come off as impersonal and cold due to lack context and tone causing people to often misinterpret other people’s intentions as explained in the second article.

The prototype Babble that was created in the first article reminded me of how a lot of online chat applications now have a way to see if your message was sent and read by the other person. The first application I thought of was Facebook’s messenger. Whenever you send a message to someone using messenger, there is a small icon that appears next to the message sent. The icon can be either a clear circle, clear circle with a check mark, a blue filled in circle with a check mark, or a small circular version of the user’s profile picture. These 4 types of icons present the status of the message. A clear circle represents that the message is being sent while a clear circle with a check mark means that the message has been sent but the other person has not received it yet. A filled in circle with a check mark means that the message has been received but unread and the circular version of the user’s profile picture means it has been read. The usage of these icons like how Babble uses circles and dots, help users feel more involved and there is less of a sense of disconnect.

Questions

• With the increase usage and popularity of emojis, is it possible that in the future people will move away from text-based messages in favor of  graphic based messages?
• Would the usage of “likes” and comments be consider a way of social cues in a digital environment?
• Is it possible that the lack of context and emotion felt through online messaging be due to how people tend to write less in online messages?
• How can people tell a happy text-based message from a sad text-based message?

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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?

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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?

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Summary

The paper “Social Translucence: An Approach to Designing Systems that Support Social Processes” focuses on designing systems that are more engaging and productive to promote communication and collaboration among large groups of people online. It mentions how current systems impose a barrier between users such that it leaves room for second guessing what is being said between users. The paper states that understanding how to better current designs is important for the development of more realistic and immersive experiences similar to physical interactions.

The paper “The Chat Circles Series” discusses the popularity of text-based chatting as well as some areas that could be improved. It centers around a collections of graphical chat programs with the purpose of improving socials interactions and making communication more expressive. Each individual program in the collection has its own variation and involvement on social interaction. The paper states that the use of a basic and open representation of the user and the environment contributes to the development of alternative to current systems.

Reflection 

I agree and can relate to how it can sometimes be difficult to figure out the intent of a person’s message through only text. It is especially difficult if there is not much context to the conversation or if the person is a stranger. However, it has become easier with emojis, stickers, and GIFs/images. Text messaging has definitely improve since the papers were published. Some of the problems discussed in the papers have been addressed. For example, many platforms indicate whenever someone is typing. I thought some of the programs in the paper “The Chat Circles Series” were interesting. However, I think a lot of them are unnecessary or not practical since it would increase the learning curve. I believe that a good text message app should be simple (as in focus on text), but have enough features to make the conversation engaging and expressive. In my opinion, the shapes and other changes allowed for even more interpretation for the ordinary user.

Questions

• Do certain words or phrases make a text message harder or easier to interpret the intent of the writer?
• Does text messaging on certain platforms (such as Snapchat vs email) help interpret messages?
• Does text messaging on different devices (such as PC vs mobile) affect the way messages are interpreted.
• What kind of text-based messaging (text messaging, email, etc.) is more productive?
• Is it possible for text messaging to ever be the same as a physical person-to-person conversation?

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Summary

In the paper, “Social Translucence: An Approach to Designing Systems that Support Social Processes”, the author looks at the missing social components of digital technology that are present in everyday physical conversations. One of the things that is touched on is the social blindness we have when we communicate with digital technology.  In person, we can read body language and adjust for a group’s actions, however, in a digital community these things we take for granted are normally missing. We need a way to be able to incorporate these “physical” things into a digital community. This idea of creating a socially translucent digital environment is what sparked Babble. Features such as a social proxy, allow digital users to better understand the conversation they are in and eliminate some of the unknowns of a conversation group in a digital community. These features create more openness in a group conversation and are the means for digital conversations to be even more rewarding than physical conversations.

The next paper, “The Chat Circles Series Explorations in Designing Abstract Graphical Communication Interfaces”, looked at different methodologies and benefits of some graphical communication interfaces. Chat Circles is a graphical communication interface that changes the perceived norm of messaging. Typically, a user will send a plaintext message with limited tone to a group of members with an unknown status. With an interface like Chat Circles, the user can see group information, such as who is involved in the chat, when they use it. This helps give the user a more genuine conversational feel to their group chats. Other Chat Circles variants have attempted to use conversational graphics and online speech to help foster social interaction.

Reflection

These papers helped bring awareness to me about the simplicity of our current messaging systems. While easy to use, these systems leave much to be desired when compared to everyday conversations. I have been in conversations before where the tone of a message I am trying to convey is not the tone the recipient perceives. With a lack of body movement and the assistance of audible tone, it is easy for messages to be misperceived. It would be helpful if there was some way to add physical language to a text message when it was sent. This addition would favorably be automatic, because if the user has to manually pick a physical description of themselves it is not as accurate as it would be in normal conversation. The addition of some variant of chat circles could greatly enhance a user’s knowledge of group activity and membership. Ultimately, I see that there is a major desire for more realism in digital communication. The more visible we make elements of a group conversation appear, the easier it is for users to respond appropriately.

Questions

Is it possible to eventually mimic all physical social queues in a digital conversation?

Does keeping an archive of conversations create a stigma of secrecy in digital conversations?

Is there any way to add “physical” feel to a message with recording a video or taking a picture?

Could our phone detect emotion when we send a message and attach it to our message?

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Summary

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Summary

The paper “The Chat Circles Series: Exploration in Designing abstract Graphical Communication Interfaces” discusses the design and creation of a basic graphical chat program and examines the differences between different interfaces and how they effect social communication online.  Feelings, emotions, impressions, and sometimes voice are hard to convey over text, so there are new types of communication (Chatscape and Chat Circles) based on only graphics and other visual queues.  On these platforms, people can communicate with people in ways other than text, so they can change the shape and color of their icons to help communicate with others. Chatscape also allows users to change the appearances of  each others icons in the chat space.  In the future, these researchers say that they want to continue to change and influence they ways that people communicate in online spaces and possibly create more ephemeral spaces than there currently are in Chat Circles.  Maintaining conversations and interactions in some kind of database or chat log could also possibly be in future research projects.

Reflection

This is a really interesting field of study especially because I have never really learned about it or thought how it could change the current and future internet landscape. There are other social media communication tools that do not rely on textual communication, such as snapchat, instagram, pinterest, and tumblr, and now that I think about it, sites like snapchat and instagram have changed and shaped more traditional social media sites (facebook, twitter) .  Over the past few years, instagram and facebook have adapted snapchat-like story features and facebook/twitter have both changed their timelines to focus more on photo and video sharing rather than purely text posts.  Snapchat specifically is the closest platform to being almost only based on non-textual communication.

Questions

• How has photo and video sharing effected and changed sites like twitter and facebook?
• What is the future for sites like Chatscape and Chat Circle?
• Is does youtube classify as a site without primary textual communication or is it more for broadcast?
• How can sites like twitter, snapchat, and facebook get better at enabling users to express and utilize social cues?

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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?

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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.

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