Social Borders: Mediating Group Dynamics Through Interface Design

Can we design workspaces to improve the interplay of people working in groups? Although stereotypes suggest that computer scientists give little thought to social affairs, our group has been giving a lot of thought to interpersonal interactions. In our research on co-located group work, we noticed that many people who user-tested our systems did not “play well with others.” As a result, we began exploring ways to design our software to mitigate groups’ bad behavior, then started expanding to interfaces designed to promote desirable patterns of group interaction.