Paper 1: Erickson, Thomas, and Wendy A. Kellogg. “Social translucence: an approach to designing systems that support social processes.” ACM transactions on computer-human interaction (TOCHI) 7.1 (2000): 59-83.
Paper 2: Donath, Judith, and Fernanda B. Viégas. “The chat circles series: explorations in designing abstract graphical communication interfaces.” Proceedings of the 4th conference on Designing interactive systems: processes, practices, methods, and techniques. ACM, 2002.
Social cues and signals are the most important part of any communication. Erickson et. al.’s paper discusses how subtle details and peculiarities of offline communication can improve the coherence of the online communication. They categorize the present digital conversational systems in three parts–Realist, Memetic and Abstract. Donath et. al.’s paper presents one such abstract concept–The chat circle series–to illustrate how graphical interface can make online systems more engaging and sociable. Since both the papers are considerably old, I am structuring my review as the comparison between points they make and the current systems.
- Realist Platforms: The realist systems consist of combination of physical and digital signal, for example, video conferencing, teleconferencing etc. Authors mention that such systems are expensive and require infrastructure. But, currently robust and dependable systems such as Zoom, Google Meet, Skype, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp Video Call are available for free and can be used on any platform for individual or group conferencing. Some of them also include presentation, side-chatting and commenting tools. Features such as sharing emoticons (hand raising, request for increasing volume, thumbs-up) mimic social cues. Additionally, cross domain realist systems such as watching movies together remotely (https://www.rabb.it) , listening to music remotely (https://letsgaze.com/#/) provide real time multimedia sharing experience. One concern that still remains is that, due to the quality of such video/audio calls, often, subtle expressions and poses go unnoticed.
- Mimetic Platforms: These platforms include online personas and virtual reality systems where the user has to setup their own avatars to conduct the conversations. Authors mention that it takes a conscious and continuous effort on user’s part to manipulate such systems. With the advance in sersor fusions and Augmented reality, the mimetic systems have traveled a long distance. For example, systems like Room2Room (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/room2room-enabling-life-size-telepresence-in-a-projected-augmented-reality-environment/) are able to facilitate a life sized telepresence for conversations.
Such systems can be very impactful in establishing realistic social cues and interactions, digitally. - Abstract Systems: Perhaps the most unexplored area in interactive system is the abstract systems. Donath et. al.’s paper describes “The Chat Circle” series which is designed to increase the expressiveness of the digital communication. The key element of such designs is to enable users to form impressions of the other users based on additional features provided in the graphical interface. Although the design is innovative and take insights from the real world, such designs are not widely used, at-least not yet.
[Note: I wanted to write more about using the Chat Circle, but the link is expired now and the system has no access]
