Social connotations of spatial metaphors to better support social navigation in information systems
Andreas Dieberger
Emory University / Information Technology Division
550 Asbury Circle
Atlanta, GA 30332
adieber@emory.edu, andreas.dieberger@acm.org
http://www.lcc.gatech.edu/faculty/dieberger/Home.html
In this position paper I want to focus on what influence the design of a spatial environment may have on social processes in this space and therefore on social navigation. A lot of these ideas are not worked out in detail yet, so my discussion has to stay on the level of 'personal reflections / experiences'.
Although I was always aware of the influence the design of a virtual environment has on the social activities taking place it, my real interest in what I later called 'social navigation' started with the design of the Juggler system. Juggler is a MOO client I built for the first virtual graduate student conference on Romanticism, held at Emory University in April '96 (see [2, 3]).
As always in such a project, users used the environment very differently than it was planned. From observing how the usage patterns differed from what I had anticipated I learned a number of interesting lessons on the design of spatial metaphors for social navigation and became aware of the importance of social connotations of space.