How can we empower people to find, choose between, and make use of the
multitude of computer-, net-based- and embedded services that surround
us? How can we turn human-computer interaction into a more social
experience? How can we design for dynamic change of system
functionality based on how the systems are used? Tackling these issues
is the core of the work we are doing in the area of social navigation. Our solutions are
inspired by observing that much of the information seeking in everyday
life is performed through watching, following, and talking to other
people - what we name social computing.
If you enter a room in an unfamiliar environment, and you see that
people are sitting on chairs, silent, looking down into their papers,
you will do the same, silently awaiting what will happen next. Or
imagine walking down a street in your hometown, trying to decide what
to do. You notice a crowd outside your favourite cafe. Knowing that
the caf often has live music, you can guess that there must be a
special event on tonight. You might decide that you're in the mood for
a lively evening and join the line, or you might decide that you
prefer a quiet night and go look for a different cafe. Or imagine
you're in a library, looking for a book about interface design. One of
the books on the shelf is much more worn and well-thumbed than the
other, suggesting that lots of people have read it. You may decide
it's a better place to start learning than the pristine books beside
it on the shelf.
Unfortunately, in most computer applications, we cannot see others,
there are no normative behaviours that we can watch and imitate. We
walk around in empty spaces that very well might not have been visited
by anyone else before us for as for as we know. In our word processor,
we might be lost for hours with no guidance whatsoever. On the web,
there is no-one else around to tell us how to find what we are looking
for, or even where the search engine is, there might very well be lots
of services that we badly need, but that no-one tells us of, and once
we find a service, we do not know how to interact with it, nor whether
it can be trusted.
This is why we have been developing the idea of social navigation
(Munro Höök Benyon 1999, Höök, Benyon and Munro
2002). By showing the traces of other actors or allowing
actors to speak to one-another, we believe that they will more easily
find what they look for.
It feels like a truism to point out that people are social beings,
that our curiosity is easily raised by watching what others do, their
relationship to one another, and the gossip around these events. Still
we design computer interaction as if people were only work-oriented,
objective, emotionally void, entities.
The aim of our social computing theme is to make computers to work
like our everyday language or the way a city grows. Language has been
around for a long time, it is democratic in the sense that anyone can
add to it, words can shift in meaning as they are being used, it is a
tool that never ceases to work, it is multipurpose, and
beautiful. Language is therefore a dynamic, on-going, social
process. The way a city grows is similar. Take for example Stockholm,
it does not get released in new versions every year, instead it
changes with what people do in various parts of the city: building new
houses, taking new paths into usage, moving caf s and
restaurants. Computer systems in general should have this quality: as
they are used, actors change their functionality. Social computing is
one way of achieving this. As a system is used, the usage will leave
trails in the system that will guide future usage.
In social navigation there is a strong temporal and dynamic aspect. A
person chooses to follow a particular path in the forest because she
makes the assumption that people have walked it earlier. Forest paths
are transient features in the environment; if they are not used they
vanish. Their state (how well-worn they are) can indicate how
frequently or recently they have been used, which is typically not
possible with a road.
We see therefore that social navigation relies on the way that people
occupy and transform spaces, leaving their marks upon them - turning a
"space" into a "place" in the terminology of Harrison and Dourish
(1996). In time, the social cues they leave behind can become
sedimented and formalised, transformed into social practices (such as
letting people get off the train before you get on), rules and
regulations (such as those governing driving) or artefacts (such as
signs and landmarks). Social computing, in the sense of our individual
actions being designed around collective social behaviour, is not just
something that is "layered on top of" a space, but comes to transform
both the space and the ways that people act within it. To design with
such ideas is to leave yourself open to the possibility that actors
will render your system unrecognisable by you and your co-designers.
Acknowledgement
I have worked extensively with my previous PhD-student, now PhD, Martin Svensson on this topic.
The idea of social computing and social navigation is not something we
invented all by ourselves. It was developed in interaction with
researchers such as David Benyon at Napier University, Andreas Dieberger
(IBM, Almaden), Paul Dourish (University of Irvine, USA) and
others. It is also closely related to concepts such as recommender
systems.
References
Harrison, S., and Dourish, P., Re-Place-ing Space: The Roles of Space
and Place in Collaborative Systems. ACM Conference on
Computer-Supported Cooperative Work CSCW'96, Boston, 1996, 67-76.
Munro, A., Höök, K., and Benyon, D. (1999) Designing
information spaces: The social navigation approach, Springer Verlag,
2002.
Höök, K., Munro, A., and Benyon, D. (eds.) (2002) Designing Information
Spaces: The Social Navigation Approach, Springer Verlag, November 2002.
You can read more about what I have done in the area of social
navigation in some of mine and my collegues' papers: Kia's
publications.
