Social translucence: an approach to designing systems that support social processes
Citation: Thomas Erickson, Wendy A. Kellogg (2000/03/01) Social translucence: an approach to designing systems that support social processes. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (RSS)
DOI (original publisher): 10.1145/344949.345004
Semantic Scholar (metadata): 10.1145/344949.345004
Sci-Hub (fulltext): 10.1145/344949.345004
Internet Archive Scholar (search for fulltext): Social translucence: an approach to designing systems that support social processes
Download: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=344949.345004
Tagged: Computer Science
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Summary
This article introduces "social translucence" as a design consideration for communication systems. Erickson and Kellogg claim that design that promotes visibility, awareness, and accountability will yield systems that "support graceful human-human communication" (p. 59). They offer numerous practical and recognizable examples for the value of each trait: visibility (being able to see socially significant information) is exemplified by being able to see someone else is connected to a system; awareness (knowing what someone else is doing) is exemplified by the implicit understanding of the meanings of someone else's actions or motions in the system; awareness (mutual knowledge; you know that I know) is exemplified by the bi-directional nature of a record, e.g. everyone can see what's been said on a chat channel. They clarify that they chose "translucence" rather than "transparence" because "there is a vital tension between privacy and visibility" (p. 62). The authors go on to apply their ideas about social translucence to the example of the Babble online conversation/chat system, and the domain of knowledge management. They suggest that designers may consider multiple approaches in how translucence can be achieved in a design: realist (e.g. video chat), mimetic (e.g. animated avatars), and abstract (e.g. ambient communication or text chat representation). They close with suggested future research questions.
Theoretical and Practical Relevance
This paper provides a definition and illustration of the influential idea of social translucence in design.
