Socially translucent systems: social proxies, persistent conversation, and the design of “babble”

ABSTRACT

We take as our premise that it is possible and desirable to design systems that support social processes. We describe Loops, a project which takes this approach to supporting computer-mediated communication (CMC) through structural and intemctive properties such as persistence and a minimalist graphical representation of users and their activities that we call a social proxy. We discuss a prototype called Babble that has been used by our group for over a year, and has been deployed to six other groups at the Watson labs for about two months. We describe usage experiences, lessons learned, and next steps.

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Index Terms

• Human-centered computing

  • Collaborative and social computing

    • Collaborative and social computing theory, concepts and paradigms

      • Computer supported cooperative work

  • Human computer interaction (HCI)

• Social and professional topics

  • Professional topics

    • Computing and business

      • Computer supported cooperative work