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Inhabiting the Virtual City: the Design of Social Environments for Electronic Communities

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Inhabiting the Virtual City: the Design of Social Environments for Electronic Communities Inhabiting the virtual city: The design of social environments for electronic communities Judith Stefania Donath B.A. History, Yale University, 1983 M.S. Visual Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1986 Submitted to the Program in Media Arts and Sciences, School of Architecture and Planning, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology February 1997 © Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1996. All rights reserved. Author: Program in Media Arts and Sciences October 31, 1996 Certified by: Andrew Lippman Associate Director, MIT Media Laboratory Thesis Supervisor Accepted by: V WStephen A. Benton Departmental Committe on Graduate Students Program in Media Arts and Sciences iAR 19 1997 Abstract Inhabiting the virtual city: The design of social environments for electronic communities by Judith Stefania Donath Submitted to the Programin Media Arts and Sciences, School ofArchitecture and Planning,on October 31, 1996 in partialfulfillment of the requirementsfor the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. The goal of this work is to develop an approach to the design of on-line social environments. My thesis is that, in order to foster the development of vibrant and viable online communities, the environment - i.e. the technical infrastructure and user interface - must provide the means to communicate social cues and information: the participants must be able to perceive the social patterns of activity and affiliation and the community must be able to evolve a fluid and subtle cultural vocabulary. The theoretical foundation for the research is drawn from traditional studies of society and culture and from observations of contemporary on-line systems. Starting with an analysis of the fundamental differences between real and virtual societies - most notably, the presence and absence of the body - the first section examines the ways social cues are communicated in the real world, discusses the limits imposed on on-line communities due to their mediated and bodiless nature, and explores directions that virtual societies can take that are impossible for physical ones. These ideas form the basis for the main part of the thesis, a design platform for creating sociable virtual environments. The focus of the discussion is on the analysis of a set of implemented design experiments that explore three areas of the platform: the visual representations of social phenomena, the role of information spaces as contexts for communication, and the presentation of self in the virtual world. Thesis Supervisor: Andrew Lippman Title: Associate Director, MIT Media Laboratory This work was supported by sponsors of the Television of Tomorrow consortium, including: Eastman Kodak, Hughes Aircraft, Intel, Nortel, Philips, Riverland, Sony, Televisa s.a. de d.v., Toppan PrintingCo., Ltd. and Viacom International. 4 Doctoral Committee Advisor: Andrew Lippman Associate Director, Media Laboratory MIT Reader: Lee Sproull Professor of Management Chair, Information Systems Department A - / Boston University Reader: William Mitchell Professor of Architecture and Media Arts and Sciences Dean, School of Architecture and Planning MIT f Contents Abstract 3 Doctoral Committee 5 Acknowledgments 9 1 Introduction 11 1.1 The problem: designs for data, not people 12 1.2 The structure of this thesis 13 Part I: The virtual society 15 2 The city and the body 17 2.1 The metaphorical city 17 2.1.1 Parallels: the real and the virtual city 18 2.1.1.1 The landscape of strangers 18 2.1.1.2 The legible city 20 2.1.2 The architect and the system designer 21 2.1.3 Designing the new 22 2.2 The social function of the body 23 2.2.1 Expression 23 2.2.2 Presence 25 2.2.3 Control 27 2.2.4 Recognition 28 2.2.5 Remarks 30 3 Contemporary on-line social environments 31 3.1 Community and identity 31 3.2 Identity in three virtual environments 33 3.2.1 MUDs 34 3.2.2 Usenet news 35 3.2.3 Home pages 38 Part II: Design for the virtual city 43 4 Sociable information spaces 45 4.1 Portraitsin Cyberspace 47 4.1.1 The jury site: the web as a tool for collaboration 47 4.1.2 The exhibit 49 4.2 The Electric Postcard 52 4.3 WebTalk 55 4.4 Remarks 58 5 Visible cities 61 5.1 Visual Who 62 5.1.1 Patterns of association 63 5.1.1.1 Clusters and correlations 65 5.1.2 Patterns of presence 65 5.1.3 Design analysis 66 5.1.3.1 Information via motion 67 5.1.3.2 Color 68 5.1.3.3 Interaction 69 5.1.4 Future work on Visual Who ; 5.1.5 Related projects 71 5.2 Datascapes and cybervilles 71 5.3 Public space and privacy 73 6 Illustrated conversations 77 6.1 Conversational interfaces 78 6.1.1 Types of conversational interfaces 78 6.1.2 Avatar systems 79 6.2 The Illustrated Conversation 80 6.2.1 Project Description 82 6.2.1.1 Gaze 82 6.2.1.2 Personalized space 82 6.2.1.3 Presence 82 6.2.1.4 Video 83 6.2.2 Gaze and the re-creation of expression 83 6.2.2.1 Gaze input 83 6.2.2.2 Gaze output 84 6.2.2.3 From gaze to expression 85 6.2.3 Personalization and control in a shared space 86 7 Inhabitants of the virtual city 89 7.1 A Day in the Life of Cyberspace 90 7.1.1 Expound: rated discussion 90 7.1.2 Reveal: surveys and visualizations 91 7.1.3 Capsules & web-o-grams: persona & presence 92 7.2 The virtual (self) portrait 93 8 Conclusion: Inhabiting the virtual city 95 Appendix: Visual Who algorithms 99 Bibliography 101 Acknowledgments I have been working with Andy Lippman since I arrived at the Architecture Machine Group many years ago. Andy has given me a great deal of freedom to explore new ideas and insightful guidance about which ones to pursue. His willingness to vigorously debate any topic has been instrumental in clarifying and sharpening the concepts in this thesis. Special thanks to my committee members for their advice and encouragement. From Lee Sproull I have learned a great deal about the sociology of on-line communities. The discussions in her egrp seminar have been very useful and I would like to thank her especially for her astute and thoughtful critiques of my work. Bill Mitchell knows more than perhaps anyone about designing the virtual city and I was very lucky to have his encouragement and guidance. My work is multi-disciplinary and I have benefited greatly from being able to learn from deep and original thinkers in many fields. Aviv Bergman introduced me to the study of the evolution of communication and I have been very fortunate to learn about this field from the extraordinarily knowledgeable Marc Hauser. The knowledge imparted by Ted Adelson in the field of visual perception and by Neil Gershenfeld on modeling nature has been invaluable. Discussions with many friends and colleagues have shaped the ideas in this thesis. I would like to especially thank Abbe Don, Paul Dourish, Ken Goldberg, Steve McGeady, Michael Naimark, Howard Rheingold and Jonathan Steuer for sharing their insights and their intellectual enthusiasm. I've spent many, many hours in conversation with my office-mate, Jon Orwant. His assistance with physics and his insistence that everyone must learn perl were quite helpful in building several of the projects. Jeet Singh, Laura Teodosio, Janet Cahn, Gitta Salomon, Grace Colby, Warren Sack, Jennifer Gonzalez, Amy Bruckman, Laura Brewer, Wendy Plesniak, Shahrokh Yadegari, Diana Hawkins, Mike Hawley, Pattie Maes, and Tod Machover are some of the many friends who supplied support, advice, encouragement, and the occasional and refreshing distraction. The Garden has been my home base at the Lab. Henry Holtzman, Mike Bove, John Watlington, Walter Bender, Pascal Chesnais, Roger Kermode, Klee Dienes, and Shawn Becker are among those who have made it a very welcoming and 10 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS entertaining place. I also wish to thank everyone there, and especially Henry, for years of assistance in dealing X-windows, postscript, recalcitrant print queues, etc. The Media Lab has been an extraordinary environment in which to experiment and learn. The Lab brings together artists, scientists, and engineers in an atmosphere of creative collaboration; in my experience, the people here have been invariably generous with their time and ideas. My deep thanks to Nicholas Negroponte for creating this unique laboratory. Thanks to Linda Peterson and Santina Tonelli for their guidance through the academic process. And thanks to the sponsors of this work, the Television of Tomorrow research consortium. My mother, Ethel Donath, has always been convinced that I could do anything I really attempted. Her belief in me was especially encouraging in the long months of writing this thesis. My husband, Joe Chung, has been my closest colleague in this research. We worked together on projects and he read drafts of the thesis, provided technical assistance, and was willing to discuss issues of virtual identity and community at any time of day or night. His encouragement cheered me through the entire process. This dissertation is dedicated to the memory of my father, Stephen Henrik Donath (1914-1993). His lifelong quest to formulate the basis of a just society has been the inspiration for this work. 1 Introduction William Whyte, describing what makes for a successful urban environment, said: "What attracts people most, in sum, is other people. If I labor the point, it is because many urban spaces are designed as though the opposite were true and as though what people liked best are the places they stay away from" (Whyte 1988).
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