Yesterday was the opening night and things went very well… It was a great party, thanks to Liz DiNapoli…

It was very nice to see people going through the maze, to see the text reflecting on them, enveloping them, diffusing through the different layers of fabrics. Someone told me that it was hard to read and I agreed and replied that we did not aim people to be able to read. Text was for us  a material, a texture. The panels are not screens; they are support for diffusion… they are the invisible structure for the text to “materialize”.

A few people ask us about the structure and why we chose to use this “structure”: a maze “floating” from a web structure. Part of it was because of the experience we were trying to convey: we explored many materials; we thought at one point of having a stand alone structure (in plexiglass or glass) but we thought it would then become a form of its own - a sculpture - instead of just being the support for the words. We wanted the fabric to disappear behind the words. We also responded to the structure of the building: we could not touch the ceiling or the floor; there were symmetrical ledges…

Another thing that occurs to me yesterday listening to people was how the installation conveys an idea of lightness and of materiality. It made me think of the discussions we had about virtual space and the fact that virtual space is not immaterial, but in fact it is deeply material. In a similar manner, the light structure of the maze requires the wired structure.

As Laura’s noted in her post (thanks for the nice pictures!), it was amazing to see people constructing the space through their posts. One more step toward collaboration!

From a personal perspective, it was really neat to see an idea that I had a bit more than a year ago “materialized” and it was as I “wanted” it to be. Aileen and I had this big smile Tuesday night when we were nearly done and we stayed in the space with. Yet, the form could have been enacted differently (through different materials), but the experience could be the same.

And that’s the experience, the environment, that we created that mattered to us… and the questions it raised.

Thank you to all the members of this blog and for their great conversations and insights (and we hope this will continue) and thanks for all the visitors…

al

Hello, this post grew as a response to paragraphs 4 and 5 of Al’s post of 6 December. I wanted to comment on how we translate from the physical domain to the virtual domain the question about changes to the environment affecting interactions. And I realised I had more to say than I expected, and decided it was worth trying to set it all out in a post of its own to clarify my ideas and to see if other people find this way of looking at things useful. Then the post grew some more and I split it into two… So here’s the first instalment:

I’d like to try and draw some distinctions that might be helpful in thinking about the different features of online environments that affect the kinds of interactions that take place in virtual space, and how we go about making comparisons with co-located exchanges.

In previous posts, Anne-Laure has mentioned examples of how the physical space in which an interaction occurs can change how people engage with each other. Take for instance her research on the photocopier room, where the kinds of things that affect exchanges and how the room is used might include whether it is at the end of a corridor or on a common landing, whether there are other machines there, whether people have other reasons to be there, how private or public the space is, etc.

Then we ask the question, What are the equivalent cues in an online environment?

One example Al discusses is a case where the different styles of two respondents to a question [one open and friendly and one more brief and direct] elicit different kinds of reply [discursive and chatty or dry and minimalist, respectively] from the same person.

Now, clearly the style and type of discourse used in online forums have an effect on interactions. In fact, style and type of discourse have an effect on face-to-face exchanges too, along with many other cues like tone of voice, facial expression, body language, etc. I want to call these kinds of features of exchanges that affect interactions, whether online or face-to-face, interpersonal cues, and will return to them later.

First, though, I want to consider features of the online environment that I will call architectural cues, which may affect virtual interactions in ways that seem to me to be more directly comparable with the sorts of cues discussed for the physical world in the examples of the photocopy room or museum.

For while it is true that when we interact online we are “Building space with words”, we are not doing so in a vacuum but within a space that is to some extent defined and shaped by the constraints and format of the software programme and blog template that we’re using. These features can affect interactions in the same way that location, size, other activities etc. affect interactions in the copier room.

If the blog is our “room”, here are some examples of the kinds of architectural cues it contains that I think affect interactions and can be manipulated to create different sorts of exchanges. This is just an initial list with some immediate observations. I hope as you read this you will think of more examples and instances of your own experiences online of how features of a blog have shaped your interactions with it and other users, and add them in the comments:

Links

- Whether a blog has sidebar links to other sites of interest relevant to its readers can affect usage and interactions directly and indirectly. Links to external sites make the blog not just a destination in its own right, but a gateway to other resources, a portal, an information filter. [Compare, whether a copier room is at the end of a corridor, or only has one machine in it, or whether it’s used by people from different floors or departments of an organisation.] Extra links mean there are more reasons to visit a blog, and varied links can ensure people from different backgrounds want to look at them or add to them, which increases the number of disciplines potential contributors come from.

- If the links are static and remain the same, eventually people may bookmark them and visit external sites directly without going through the blog. If the links change regularly [quick hits, or news related links with a particular slant, etc.] then the blog itself becomes the only place where that particular set of pieces of information is available, and the first place you’d look to find out certain kinds of things, which adds to the sense of community.

Comment options

- Ease of commenting affects exchanges, whether you comment at all, how you comment and what you say. Factors like whether you have to log in, whether you have to leave a name or are allowed to comment anonymously, whether you have a unique identifier so that you can maintain your online character without being impersonated. Or whether word verification or comment moderation is enabled [often on Blogger for instance I’ve seen people comment on the word verification sequence itself if there seems to be a random connection between the word that the letters sound like and the subject of the post or of their comment].

- Within comments, it may make a difference how easy it is to use html tags to make what you say clearer; whether for instance there is a blockquote tag that allows you to cite the section of the text that you are responding to so that you can focus on that part specifically and cut down on having to paraphrase what someone else said, or point to a certain paragraph or line to pick it out. [In practice where this feature is available comments  look more like when people do email replies by writing answers to individual points directly underneath the relevant bit of text which is more conversational than a whole load of text at the top of the message.]

Feeds

- Options of notification of updates can affect interactions, speeding up responses, alerting readers to new content, making them feel more connected to other users of the space across different timezones.

- The ease with which you can track which threads have been commented on, and by who [as we have in this Wordpress blog] facilitates joining in conversations rather than having to trail through old posts to see if anyone has said anything on a previous entry. A new widget on Blogger has a rolling headlines or recently updated feature that allows sidebar links to show titles of new posts and when they were put up, which gives you a sense of what is happening in the online community you are part of and what are the hot topics at any point in time.

More generally, it occurs to me that it might be worth talking to people who design blogging software to see what type of interfaces they are developing and what has been particularly successful in facilitating online interactions and what the current big stumbling blocks are perceived to be. All of this should give us more ideas about the features of online environments that help or hinder our interactions.

Part 2 to follow shortly. Sorry this is long. Please let me know what you think in the comments. Cheers, milena.

Hi,

Thursday I went to the Van Alen Institute (NY) to attend a workshop for the launch of the OOz project by Natalie Jereminjenko (one of the authors on this blog) http://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/ooz/Natalie - who is a scientist, engineer and artist (I hope she’ll share soon her thoughts about the interactions between these different disciplines and about her very interesting projects). The OOz project explores the interactions between human and non-human agents, in this case, animals and ask us to question our mode of interactions with animals, and especially those influenced by the model of the zoo (e.g. animals in cages, “don’t feed the animals”).

The OOz project as well as many other projects by Natalie (such as the Environmental Health Clinic she opened at NYU) are projects that interrogate our interactions with the environment and try to think ways of stopping the mess we made with the climate and the environment.

These are topics dear to my heart, but the OOz project also raises questions related to topics we discussed on BSWW. First of all, I’m sure the concepts of human and non-human agents remind you of our discussion about technology and the notion of non-human agents proposed by Bruno Latour (see the post of November 29). Natalie is also questioning our definition of agency asking to rethink our relationship to animals as a relationship of reciprocity and not of superiority and fear (trying to keep them as far as we can). It’s interesting as Latour also referred animals, and particularly primates, to question the definition of agency. In a 1994 paper, Latour argues that the studies showing how primates develop complex social interactions question our usual definition of social interaction and social structure. He claims that these studies call for a reassessment of the usual distinction between the human agents and the others defined by the ability to enact complex social interactions. In OOz, Natalie introduces two types of non-human agents: animals and robots which look like animals (e.g. goose robots http://www.vestaldesign.com/design/ooz-goose/) with which, through which we can interact with animals. 

At the beginning of her presentation, she showed a small video animation about interactions in a museum. The museum is an institution with quite well-known scripts that, yet, have evolved with the technology. People don’t talk in museums. They go and look at the art silently. At the beginning of the room, there usually is a panel with the curator’s text - her / his discourse about the art work. People go in the room, read the panel and then go and look. Often, several people stand in front of the panel, but they rarely talk (a similar pattern occurs in front of the art works). Lately, the written discourse has been replaced by a sound device which leads to even less interactions  as these sounds device are individualistic. Natalie’s question is how the environment, space, a device, can shape the structure of the interactions? What happen if you change the device, and you make it a sound shared device? Will people start interacting? Will they move differently in the space? This seemed very close to the questions we asked with John Weeks in the context of the workplace: what happens if the copier machine is in a tiny room, with no other resources at the end of a corridor, or if it’s on a central corridor (e.g. nearby the elevator or the staircase) and/ or if it shelters other resources - such as the fax machine, the supplies cabinet, the mailboxes? 

In the context of online forums the question becomes: what happens if the founder or the first participants post very friendly messages, where they always say hi, ask for feedback, and say by or if, on the contrary, they post dry and short messages, with no relationship management? What kind of interactions will emerge in the forum? Can these interactions evolve in a different direction? If yes, what will trigger the change? I remember noting in some forums, the change of style for some participants depending on the style of the message they were replying to. For example, one participant (let’s call her Jeanne) posted a message and got two replies: one quite developed with some relationship management (Hi Jeanne, I found your question really interesting… Here are some thoughts. I hope this helps. Please let me know what you think, Joe) and another much dryer (Hi [no name]. Here is [the answer]. Mark).  What was interesting was how Jeanne’s responses differ depending on the style of the replies: she kept her nice friendly style in her response to Joe and adapted a dry minimalist style in replying to Mark. This was one example among others. More generally, forums develop their “style” (rarely explicitly defined, but implicitly emerging) and if one participant does not follow the “rules” of the forum’s language game, other participants will react - either telling them clearly that this not a suitable way of interacting, or just by ignoring them. These are the examples I am thinking of when I am suggesting that through discourse we are enacting affordances that trigger (or don’t trigger) interactions. 

Last, as I have lately been reflecting on the different disciplines I have been influenced by, I wanted to share with you this anecdote: listening to Natalie’s Thursday talking of bats, Thomas Nagel’s famous article “What is it Like to be a Bat” (1974). I could not helped smiling when Natalie refers to Nagel’s article!

 Have a nice weekend,

al 

Hi, I’m not a game player but I’ve always been amazed by people who can go and take on roles in games (e.g. MUD) like World of Warcraft. Second Life is also an interesting example: how to create a virtual world, recreate one’s identity and a “second life”?I am not an expert but what I find fascinating is that people seem to reproduce what they do in the “real world” in this Second Life environment. Our project with Aileen concerns different types of environment - text only, yet I find it interesting that people seem to recreate similar environments when they are online instead of imagining completely different environments? It would be interesting to do an ethnography of public (or semi-public spaces) in Second Life and see what are the affordances of these spaces that trigger informal interactions?See this article in NY Times from 2 years ago: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/19/technology/19virtual.html?_r=1&em&ex=1161489600&en=128963ee911b8e6c&ei=5087%0A&oref=slogin    Any thoughts? I’d like to hear the experiences of people who go and spend time in these online environments. Thanks! al