Projects Babble Loops World Jam Research Design explorations Knowledge Communities

Projects & Research

Our research aims to create next-generation digital systems that support and improve collaboration and organizational memory. To do this, we use a variety of approaches to understand how social and interactional resources are created, shared, and used in (digitally-mediated) collaborative work. These approaches can be broadly classed into science, design, and application work.

Our scientific work centers around the theoretical framework of social translucence -- understanding how making people and their activities visible to one another can make social processes more viable online, and serve as a generative resource for supporting fluid group activity. We are also interested in studying collaboration and organizational memory "in the wild," and do so both for groups using the systems we have built, and those who use other tools in their work. To this end, our work on various projects encompasses ethnography, analysis of participation patterns, interviews, surveys, psychological instruments, social network analysis, and linguistic and content analyses.

Our design work is fundamental to our "design research" approach. Drawing on fields strongly related to interaction design, such as architecture, rhetoric, sociology and anthropology, it is through our design work that much of the conceptual development of social translucence has taken place. For example, a wide range of uses for social proxies has emerged from a variety of design explorations that have taken place through reading and group discussion, paper sketches, static and interactive design prototypes, and working papers. Although current findings from our scientific research are beginning to suggest interesting directions for social translucence, the driving innovative force historically has been through an iterative process of design conceptualization and implementation.

Application of our ideas in running systems used by real people for real work is also critical to our research. The value of our ideas can only be assessed in the context of real situations of collaboration and organizational memory. Our application work involves creating and implementing socially translucent systems for deployment as well as understanding and articulating the architectural requirements for supporting socially translucent systems. Our application work has also involved working with others to create social proxies for specific digitally-mediated interactions, and creating proposals for incorporating social translucence into existing applications, such as email and other asynchronous collaboration tools.

Our research is thus informed by an overarching set of ideas and methods that emerge in different ways in different projects. Our basic approach of cycling through design, implementation, and study can be seen to various extents in different projects. Some design work never goes beyond the prototyping stage, though it may serve a crucial function in helping us to understand something that does get implemented. In other cases, such as our most developed systems (Babble, and now Loops) we traverse the entire cycle, often more than once. But our goal is always the same: to produce useful, usable, innovative ideas and systems that will help people's interactions in digital space to be more coherent, productive, interesting, and enjoyable.

More detail is available for specific projects listed above.