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Design explorations

WHAT IT MEANS TO DESIGN

A practitioner of graphic design does more than making things 'pretty', she or he discovers meaningful ways of making things perceptible. Likewise, an architect strives to design spaces that accomplish more than the fundamental need of providing shelter; the space needs to be appropriate for the people and functions housed inside. Appropriateness takes into consideration functions, tasks, habits associated with spatial context, culture (beliefs, economics, diversity, consumerism, values, etc), identity, comfort, phenomenological relationships (meaning on a bodily scale), and contextual relationships (meaning and connection within a neighborhood or city context). Our relationship with physical space is established through our sense of sight, touch, smell and hearing. Our sense of sight is usually the primary factor in perceiving space, but because space is three-dimensional, it has the capacity of being physically shared: simultaneity of being. This introduces the idea of place: space with the evidence of presence (real or remembered). Virtual space is an interesting phenomenon that hasn't been fully considered or explored with the phenomenological sensibilities we bring to relatively more familiar physical spatial phenomena. The added component of establishing human contact and context through virtual space is another fascinating topic of exploration and improvement.

DESIGNING FOR ONLINE COMMUNITY INVOLVEMENT
Online community space needs to support users and their social activities in the following ways:
representing the extent of the space,
representing the possibilities of particular places within the space,
portraying the presence of individuals,
allowing activities of individuals to affect the appearance/structure of the space, and
offering social translucency.
"We call systems which provide perceptually-based social cues which afford awareness and accountability 'Socially Translucent Systems.' In such systems we believe it will be easier for users to carry on coherent discussions; to observe and imitate others' actions; to engage in peer pressure; to create, notice, and conform to social conventions. We see social translucence as a fundamental requirement for supporting communication and collaboration." [Socially Translucent Systems: Social Proxies, Persistent Conversation, and the Design of "Babble"] I find that social translucency is an essential dimension to an online environment, as is contextual information specific to the user group. Furthermore, just as we are able to perceive presence and surround ourselves with physical objects of our own making or choosing in our physical world, so too must our digital social environments offer evidence of each other and the making of our artifacts.

EXAMPLES OF DESIGN WORK

Our design work tends to fall into four broad categories.

The landscape proxy shown above is an interactive prototype. You will need a Macromedia Flash plug-in to view it.

1. People and their activity: The "landscape proxy" was designed to function as an information-organizer, a navigation map, and a social awareness component showing where people were within the online environment. In effect, it was a critical study regarding stand-ins for people within a hierarchy of information and conversation that was accumulated and authored by a specific group of people. The Landscape Proxy is an example of what we call a 'social proxy'.

The Landscape Proxy is intended to support a workgroup (remote and/or local) via a supplemental online environment. It features a navigational representation of categories that contains conversations and denotes where, within the categories, people are engaging in conversations (textual conversation would accompany this interface, but is not shown in the figure). Categories are rendered as circles within the larger conversational space; people are rendered as dots within conversational circles. Category circles grow with user activity, indirectly allowing users to 'author' their own virtual space.

This proxy has components important to virtual communities: presence of individuals, and allowing activities of individuals to affect the appearance/structure of the space.

Representing people and their activity can come in a variety of forms, depending on the situation. We have also designed social proxies for online lines and the auction proxy.

2. Visualizing Conversation: The ability to visualize a group's conversation gives social awareness into patterns and relationships between group members. It also is helpful with mnemonic navigation and reasoning.

3. Semi-Structured Conversation: In the event that an online group would like to collaborate with a bit of guidance toward a goal, some structure is considered helpful to a democratic collaborative process. We are exploring designs in regards to an Agenda-Driven Conversation and a Brainstorming Conversation.

4. Visualizing Global Activity & Structure: Not all activity occurs in a single community. The design challenge for the World Jam Activity Map was to depict global activity in such a way as to provide both a feeling of collective experience and to allow users to see meaningful patterns. Another sort of community depiction might emphasize the virtual structure and relationships, as seen with the 'community of communities' proxy study (image at right).

Publications about the Social Computing Group's design work are on the publications page.