Social translucence

TLDR

The paper examines how physical‑world properties that support graceful human‑human communication can be translated into digital systems by making participants and their activities visible to one another. The authors aim to design socially translucent systems that enable large‑group communication and collaboration, and propose a vision of conversational knowledge communities for creating, managing, and reusing knowledge. They define socially translucent systems by visibility, awareness, and accountability, and describe their experience designing and deploying a layer of functionality embodied in the Barbie system to support knowledge communities. The deployed Barbie system demonstrates the feasibility of socially translucent design and highlights research issues for such systems.

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.