Many collaborative and communicative environments use notions of “space ” and spatial organisation to facilitate and structure interaction. We argue that a focus on spatial models is misplaced. Drawing on understandings from architecture and urban design, as well as from our own research findings, we highlight the critical distinction between “space ” and “place”. While designers use spatial models to support interaction, we show how it is actually a notion of “place ” which frames interactive behaviour. This leads us to re-evaluate spatial systems, and discuss how “place”, rather than “space”, can support CSCW design.

Although current online chat environments provide new opportunities for communication, they are quite constrained in their ability to convey many important pieces of social information, ranging from the number of participants in a conversation to the subtle nuances of expression that enrich face to face speech. In this paper we present Chat Circles, an abstract graphical interface for synchronous conversation. Here, presence and activity are made manifest by changes in color and form, proximity-based filtering intuitively breaks large groups into conversational clusters, and the archives of a conversation are made visible through an integrated history interface. Our goal in this work is to create a richer environment for online discussions. Keywords chatroom, conversation, social visualization, turn-taking, graphical history, Internet, World Wide Web

Telemurals is an abstract audio-video installation that seeks to initiate and sustain interaction between and within two remote spaces. Our goal is to improve the social aspects of casual mediated communications by incorporating events into the design of the communication medium that encourage people to engage in interaction when they otherwise would not. We call these events social catalysts, for they encourage people to initiate and sustain interaction. In this paper we discuss the design process and goals of our first Telemurals link between two public spaces, the building of Telemurals, and an ethnographic study describing how the system affected interaction between and within these two spaces based on the theories discussed in this paper.

This paper provides a unique quantitative analysis of the social dynamics of three chat rooms in the Microsoft V-Chat graphical chat system. Survey and behavioral data were used to study user experience and activity. 150 V-Chat participants completed a web-based survey, and data logs were collected from three V-Chat rooms over the course of 119 days. This data illustrates the usage patterns of graphical chat systems, and highlights the ways physical proxemics are translated into social interactions in online environments. V-Chat participants actively used gestures, avatars, and movement as part of their social interactions. Analyses of clustering patterns and movement data show that avatars were used to provide nonverbal cues similar to those found in face-to-face interactions. However, use of some graphical features, in particular gestures, declined as users became more experienced with the system. These findings have implications for the design and study of online interactive environments. Keywords Avatars, computer mediated communication, empirical

Urban Atmospheres captures a unique, synergistic moment – expanding urban populations, rapid adoption of Bluetooth mobile devices, tiny ad hoc sensor networks, and the widespread influence of wireless technologies across our growing urban landscapes. The United Nations recently reported that 48 percent of the world's population current live in urban areas and that this number is expected to exceed the 50 percent mark world wide by 2007 [1]. In developed nations the number of urban dwellers is even more dramatic – expected to exceed 75%. Current studies project Bluetooth-enabled devices to reach 5.4 billion units by 2005 – five times the number of mobile phones or Internet connections [2]. Mobile phone penetration already exceeds 80 % of the population in places like the European Union (EU) and parts of Asia [3]. WiFi hardware is being deployed at the astonishing rate of one every 4 seconds globally [4]. We argue that now is the time to initiate inspirational research into the very essence of these newly emerging technological urban spaces. We desire to move towards an improved understanding of the emotional experience of urban life. This paper describes Urban Probes – a lightweight, provocative, intervention methodology designed to rapidly deconstruct urban situations, reveal new opportunities for technology in urban spaces, and guide future long term research in urban computing. We also describe a completed Urban Probe exploring urban trash.

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People wish to maintain a level of awareness of timely information, including presence of others in the workplace and other social settings. We believe this provides better exchange, coordination and contact within a community, especially as people work in asynchronous times and distributed locations. The challenge is to develop lightweight techniques for awareness, interaction and communication using 'shared information appliances'. In this paper, we describe the design of an exploratory responsive display projected within a shared workspace at the MIT Media Lab. The system uses visual sensing to provide relevant information and constructs traces of people's activity over time. Such 'aware portals' may be deployed in casual workplace domains, distributed workgroups, and everyday public spaces.

We have been creating a series of graphical chat programs designed to foster social interaction and expressive communication. We started with a spare, minimalist interface and in subsequent programs have modified its fundamental features: background space, individual representation, movement implementation, communication channels, and history depiction. The resulting family of graphical chat programs share many interface features but differ significantly in their feel and function. This paper examines the variations among the interfaces and discusses their implications for social interaction.

Abstract. Georg Simmel [American Journal of Sociology 55:254–261 (1949)] is widely credited as the first scholar to have seriously examined sociability – ‘‘the sheer pleasure of the company of others’ ’ and the central ingredient in many social forms of recreation and play. Later Ray Oldenburg [The Great Good Place. New York: Marlowe & Company (1989)] extended Simmel’s work by focusing on a certain class of public settings, or ‘‘third places,’ ’ in which sociability tends to occur, such as, bars, coffee shops, general stores, etc. But while Simmel and Oldenburg describe activities and public spaces in the physical world, their concepts may apply as well to virtual or online worlds. Today Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) are extensive, persistent online 3D environments that are populated by hundreds of thousands of players at any given moment. The sociable nature of these online spaces is often used to explain their success: unlike previous video games, MMOGs require players to exchange information and collaborate in real-time to progress in the game. In order to shed light on this issue, we critically examine player-to-player interactions in a popular MMOG (Star Wars Galaxies). Based on several months of ethnographic observations and computerized data collection, we use Oldenburg’s notion of ‘‘third places’ ’ to evaluate whether or not the social spaces of this virtual world fit existing definitions of sociable environments. We discuss the role online games can play in the formation and maintenance of social capital, what they can teach us about the evolution of sociability in an increasingly digitally connected social world, and what could be done to make such games better social spaces. Key words: automated data collection, online games, sociability, third places 1.

Abstract—Understanding how people use online maps allows data acquisition teams to concentrate their efforts on the portions of the map that are most seen by users. Online maps represent vast databases, and so it is insufficient to simply look at a list of the most-accessed URLs. Hotmap takes advantage of the design of a mapping system’s imagery pyramid to superpose a heatmap of the log files over the original maps. Users ’ behavior within the system can be observed and interpreted. This paper discusses the imagery acquisition task that motivated Hotmap, and presents several examples of information that Hotmap makes visible. We discuss the design choices behind Hotmap, including logarithmic color schemes; low-saturation background images; and tuning images to explore both infrequently-viewed and frequently-viewed spaces. Index Terms—Geographical visualization, GIS, heatmap, server log analysis, online mapping systems, social navigation. 1