[1] T. Erickson and W. A. Kellogg, “Social translucence: an approach to designing systems that support social processes,” ACM Trans. Comput. Interact., vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 59–83, 2000.
[2] J. Donath and F. Viégas, “The chat circles series,” Proc. Conf. Des. Interact. Syst. Process. Pract. methods, Tech. – DIS ’02, p. 359, 2002.
In the first paper, the premise is around the concept of “social translucence”. A term that the authors’ claims have the characteristics of visibility, awareness, and accountability. The paper structure seems pedagogical in how the authors explain the central term and later goes on to talk about knowledge management and knowledge communities. Finally, the entire theoretical base is implemented in the system called “Babble”.
The use of urban design and architecture was reminiscent of the Open Spaces video that we watched and studied in class. It reinforced how the domains could influence HCI for the better and how past researchers have explored certain possibilities using the same. The most important question of the paper for me was “Why is it that we speak of socially translucent systems rather than socially transparent systems?”. The paper mentions that privacy and visibility have a vital tension warranting social translucence. The power of constraints is an important idea as I feel there is a fine line between the users feeling free under reasonable restrictions and them feeling restricted. As a developer and/or designer it will be an important quality that the platform we develop needs to have. The fact that the constraints we establish should be evident to all users and clearly indicative of the reasonable restriction base is one that is difficult to achieve.
Knowledge management has been one front where organizations have improved since the time of the publication, but analyzing this on a deeper level based on the previous readings would lead me to the line “But it is interesting to think about the possibilities of a system that was designed to “know” about the notions of authorship, citation, and research communities.” If we were to design an autonomous agent which could act like such a knowledge management system I can see a similar argument made for the same.
The latter part of the paper feels like the inspiration for many of the currently existing online communities, with one in particular that jumped at me viz Reddit. The needs explained in the “Activity Support”, “Conversation Visualization and Restructuring” and “Organizational Knowledge Spaces” all are captured in these social platforms to a large extent. The paper gave a strong reason for having the particular structure for these platforms.
Finally, the three approaches to implementation that the paper mentions in the realistic, mimetic and abstract I feel can be addressed more as three particular stages in HCI. The article was published in a time where the first two approaches were not feasible because of technological advances. I feel that the next groundbreaking social platform will be with the mimetic approach.
The approaches talk about different levels of interaction which gives a good transition into the second paper. Here the entire paper talks about the “evolutionary” development of a platform. The paper essentially could be a very good case study on how to implement the theoretical base we get in the first paper into actuality. The concept of graphical environment is not a new one but they do not seem to prosper long enough or have wide enough reach to contest with the existing communication platforms which are more abstract in nature. Given this fact, I still feel with the shifting paradigm and users open to use the mimetic approach the next platform can be built mimicking the Chat Circle procedure as the entire platform has been built from the ground up with each and every feature justified. At every step, the paper tries to capture the key interface elements that were listed.
As a student of human factors, I see the possible implications of each and every claim. From the multiple hues to add visual vibrancy to informative backgrounds all the way to immersive visual scenes stimulate different levels of response for the human. I can understand why and how such models are required. With the current technological prowess, I feel such an approach could result in a platform that will see a lot more success as I still feel that even though current platforms have elements mentioned in the paper an entire platform with this approach is yet to be built.
