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

We take as our premise that it is possible and desirable todesign systems that support social processes. We describe Loops, aproject which takes this approach to supporting computer-mediatedcommunication (CMC) through structural and intemctive propertiessuch as persistence and a minimalist graphical representation ofusers and their activities that we call a social proxy. We discussa prototype called Babble that has been used by our group for overa year, and has been deployed to six other groups at the Watsonlabs for about two months. We describe usage experiences, lessonslearned, and next steps.

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