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.

Workstations and personal computers are increasingly being delivered with the ability to handle multimedia data; more and more of us are linked by high-speed digital networks. With multimedia communication environments becoming more commonplace, what have we learned from earlier experiences with prototype media environments? This paper reports on some of our experiences as developers, researchers and users of flexible, networked, multimedia computer environments, or "media spaces". It focusses on the lessons we can learn from extended, long-term use of media spaces, with connections that last not hours or days, but months or years. We take as our starting point a set of assumptions which differ from traditional analytical perspectives. In particular, we begin from the position that that a real-world baseline is not always an appropriate point of comparison for new media technologies; that a set of complex and intricate communicative behaviours arise over time; and that media spaces c...

There is a natural desire to make multi-user virtual environments large in spatial extent, in numbers of objects, and in numbers of users interacting with the environment. However, doing this brings up several problems: efficiently managing the flow of large amounts of data between large numbers of users, representing precise position and velocity information about objects that are arrayed across a large volume of space, and allowing designers to create parts of a virtual environment separately and combine them together later. Locales are an efficient method for solving these problems by breaking up a virtual world into chunks that can be described and communicated independently. While having many benefits, locales introduce a problem: finding something when you do not know what locale it is in. This is solved by the companion concept of beacons, which makes it possible to find something no matter where it is. The initial version of this technical report appeared in November, 1995. Wit...

The Community Bar is groupware supporting informal awareness and casual interaction for small social worlds: a group of people with a common purpose. Its conceptual design is primarily based on a comprehensive sociological theory called the Locales Framework, with extra details supplied by the Focus/Nimbus model of awareness. Design nuances are strongly influenced by observations and feedback supplied by a community who had been using both the Community Bar and its Notification Collage predecessor for a total of five years. As a consequence, Community Bar’s design supports how communities of ad-hoc and long-standing groups are built and sustained within multiple locales: places that offer a group the site and means for maintaining awareness of one another and for rapidly moving into interaction. This includes a person’s lightweight management of his or her membership in multiple locales, as well as ones varying engagement with the people and artefacts within them.

A major problem for users of modern information systems is the retrieval of new and previously viewed information from the system. Systems like the Word-Wide Web are heavily interlinked but do not communicate structure that helps users to navigate the information it contains. The use of appropriate navigation metaphors can help to make the structure of modern information systems easier to understand, and therefore, easier to use. We propose a conceptual user interface metaphor based on the structure of a city. Cities are very complex spatial environments and yet, people are used to navigating within cities. They know how to get information, how to reach particular destinations, and how to make use of the infrastructure. Furthermore, cities possess a unique set of navigational tools that lend themselves to creating sub-metaphors. A city metaphor makes this existing knowledge about a structured environment available to the user of a computerized information system. In this paper, we fi...

MediaMOO is a text-based, networked, virtual reality environment designed to enhance professional community among media researchers. MediaMOO officially opened on January, 20th, 1993, and as of December 1994 has more than 1000 members from 29 countries. An application is required to join, and only those actively engaged in media research are admitted. Unlike many virtual environments, the world of MediaMOO is continuously being constructed and reconstructed by its members. This paper analyzes experience with the system to date, and highlights the importance of “constructionist ” principles in virtual reality design. The philosophy of constructionism argues that people learn with particular effectiveness when they are engaged in constructing personally meaningful projects; learning by doing is better than learning by being told. This approach is most often applied to children’s learning. We believe that not enough attention is paid to its broader applicability. We have found that letting the users build a virtual world rather than merely interact with a pre-designed world gives them an opportunity for self expression, encourages diversity, and leads to a meaningful engagement of participants and enhanced sense of community.

In text-based virtual reality environments on the Internet called MUDs, it is possible to pretend to be the opposite gender. In these virtual worlds, the way gender structures basic human interaction is often noticed and reflected upon. This paper introduces MUDs, and then presents a community discussion about gender issues that MUDs inspired. Gender swapping is one example of ways in which network technology can impact not just work practice but also culture and values.

This paper describes a system that combines a textual virtual environment (MOO -- MUD Object Oriented) and a WWW browser. The MOO provides a text-only but information-rich spatial user interface in which objects and locations can be associated with pointers to WWW pages. When using a specialized MOO client, navigation in the MOO causes the corresponding Web pages to be loaded. The overall effect is the possibility to navigate the Web using spatial navigational metaphors. Textual virtual environments support the creation of diverse navigation tools and metaphors. The Juggler system we describe can thus serve as an experimental tool to explore diverse navigational metaphors for the WWW. The system uses references to Web pages which can be arranged in any possible way and allows users to overlay a new secondary structure on existing Web structures, even using Web pages not on one's own Web server. Textual virtual environments further support almost real time communication and interaction ...

this article, we examine semantically organized virtual spaces, focusing on how such spatial

Community Bar (CB) is groupware supporting informal awareness and casual interaction. CB’s design was derived from three sources: prior empirical research findings concerning informal awareness and casual interaction, a comprehensive sociological theory called the Locales Framework, and the Focus/Nimbus model of awareness. We conducted an in-depth field study of a group’s on-going use of Community Bar over several weeks. We use results obtained from this study to reflect upon the matches and mis-matches that occurred between the theoretical usage behaviour predicted by our theoretical design principles versus the actual usage behaviours observed in the deployed implementation. As a critique, this reflection is an important iterative step in considering how CB should be redesigned, and serves as a cautionary tale of the difficulty of translating theoretical nuances into practice.