Thomas Erickson
Wendy A. Kellogg
Abstract
We are interested in desiging systems that support communication and collaboration among large groups of people over computing networks. We begin by asking what properties of the physical world support graceful human-human communication in face-to-face situations, and argue that it is possible to design digital systems that support coherent behavior by making participants and their activites visible to one another. We call such systems “socially translucent systems” and suggest that they have three characteristics—visbility, awareness, and accountability—which enable people to draw upon their experience and expertise to structure their interactions with one another. To motivate and focus our ideas we develop a vision of knowledge communities, conversationally based systems that support the creation, management and reuse of knowledge in a social context. We describe our experience in designing and deploying one layer of functionality for knowledge communities, embodied in a working system called “Barbie” and discuss research issues raised by a socially translucent approach to design.
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Index Terms
- Social translucence: an approach to designing systems that support social processes
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Reviews
John A. Sonquist
The authors set forth concepts that will be useful in designing systems that support communication and collaboration among large groups of people over computer networks. In particular, they are interested in how to design such systems so that they support communication that is deep, coherent, and productive. According to them, the principal difference between day-to-day physical communication and communication over digital systems is that physical communication takes place in a social context. Every day we make countless decisions based on the activity of those around us. We are immersed in a sea of social information. We have evolved an exquisite sensitivity to the actions and interactions of others. By contrast, digitally based systems are generally opaque to social information. When we communicate through them, our knowledge of people, our attunement to social information, and our facility for improvising go unused. We are socially blind. The concept of “social translucence” is adduced to serve as an approach to designing digital systems that emphasizes making social information visible within the system. Socially translucent systems make their users visible, aware, and accountable. This set of ideas is applied to knowledge management. What the authors refer to as “knowledge communities” are sketched briefly. Next, the authors review the tasks involved in the implementation of a socially translucent digital system. They describe relevant previous work and their own efforts in implementing the Babble system, giving credit to architecture and urban design as sources of some of their ideas. The most pressing research issues raised by a socially translucent approach to systems design are described. More specific ideas are then articulated, as a motivation for the idea of translucence. These include shared understandings between participants, physical constraints related to the participants, spatial distribution, mobility of the participants, and shared awareness of constraints. Knowledge management refers to attempts to provide formal organizations with tools for capturing and retrieving information about their own activities and disseminating it to their employees. The authors argue that the systems design concepts used in knowledge management, which involve simply putting useful information into databases, and providing schemes for organizing and retrieving it, are inadequate. The inadequacies compel users to bypass the system and to rely on their own social networks to get the knowledge and resources they need. To solve this problem, information systems themselves need to “know” about such things as authorship, citation, and the presence of communities of discourse. These concepts are further elaborated in discussions of people's motivations for communicating, conversations as interactive intellectual activity, supporting conversations via digital media, re-using conversations, and privacy. Implementation issues discussed include how to portray social cues in a digital system and the limitations of teleconferencing and video space systems. Three approaches are mentioned: realist, mimetic, and abstract. The Babble system's main ideas are reviewed. This paper focuses much-needed attention on the barriers imposed by technology instead of just discussing the technology. Its three main concepts are useful. Its principal limitation, a significant one, is that it fails to make use of ideas from that branch of social science most relevant to its concerns, namely, social network research [1]. Interested readers are referred to Wasserman and Faust [2], Scott [3], Wellman and Berkowitz [4], and Burt [5].
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