Karrie Karahalios

Designing Mediated Social Spaces

Biography
Karrie Karahalios is an assistant professor in the computer science department at the University of Illinois in Urbana Champaign. Her work focuses on the interaction between people and the social cues they perceive in networked electronic spaces. Of particular interest are interfaces for pubic online and physical gathering spaces such as chatrooms, cafes, parks, etc. The goal is to create interfaces that enable users to perceive conversational patterns that are present, but not obvious, in traditional communication interfaces. Her current research involves integrating social catalysts into the design of interfaces for connecting spaces using audio, video, and graphics. Previous projects include: Visiphone, a communication object that visualizes conversation patterns between two spaces; Hear&Here, an augmented reality interface for placing sound envelopes in space and retrieving them with an audio interface; Chit Chat Club, a hybrid social space that combines the immediacy of the traditional cafe with the global reach and easy introductions of an online chat.

Karrie completed a S.B. in electrical engineering, an M.Eng. in electrical engineering and computer science, an S.M. in media arts and science and a Ph.D. in media arts and science at MIT.

Position Paper
This work focuses on audio-video communication links between remote spaces for sociable and casual interaction. Another way to describe this domain area is as a sociable media space. The term media space refers to any environment created using video, audio, and networked computers to support interaction between distributed groups of people. When placed in public or semi-public spaces, they are often designed for casual encounters among people within that community. Thus far, communicating via these systems has not met expectations [1][4]. Some drawbacks to such systems have been lags in interaction time, gaze ambiguity, lack of privacy, spatial incongruity, and fear of appearing too social in a work environment [3][4]. Current media space systems are also affected by a lack of mobility in the interaction.

space and a window effect, whereby the harsh edges of the rectilinear window frame further emphasize the distance in the interaction. Most systems to date attempt to mimic face-to-face interaction. The changes in scale and the clear separation of space make it apparent that this is a different mode of communication. Mediated communication interfaces need not recreate face-to-face interaction to provide an expressive and satisfying interaction [2][6]. Our approach to creating sociable media spaces is to blend the communication interface into the space of the environment through the use of social catalysts. A social catalyst is a dynamic interface or event created by an interface that focuses the attention of the inhabitants of the space on a common event and facilitates communication between otherwise disconnected strangers [5][8].

Creating a sociable media space can be described in the following four procedures.

1. Explore which social cues to transmit between mediated spaces.

2. Sense cues (gaze, agreement, etc.).

3. Visualize social patterns, feedback.

4. Incorporate cues, signals and mediated space into catalytic interaction space.

The result is an intelligent dynamic communication interface. The interface changes form as it is used by the participants in the space. One example of such is change occurs when peoples comments appear in text form on the walls as they speak. These sociable spaces create new interactions that were not possible with traditional media space environments. In creating our interfaces, we found four features that were common in all the mediated social spaces. These are transformation of space, abstraction of information, interaction in physical space, and motion in space. We find these features allow one to navigate this hybrid mediated space and focus on aspects of interaction that we have designed instead of all the surrounding signals. They provide a focus for attention, a focus for presence, and a recreation space in a social link that would otherwise be undecipherable. The transformation highlights changes in the interaction—the abstraction eliminates extra information—the physicality provides for an object to look at and manipulate—motion draws our attention and guides us about the space. Future work includes structuring a theoretical framework to better ground and evaluate the design of computer mediated social spaces.

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