Designing Social Computing using Traditions of Symbolism, Personalization, and Gift Culture Patches is a wearable social networking system that is expressive and emotional, and brings meaning to social interaction
He Yin, Thecla Schiphorst · 2009
This paper explores social computing from the perspective of sociology and its effect on social networks. We focus on traditions of symbolism, personalization, and gift culture to better understand the lived experience of participants engaging in social networking tasks. Our review reveals the importance of symbolic communication, creating strong emotional ties through personalization, and creating bonds through gift exchange. These key factors can be incorporated into machine interaction in order to create socially intelligent computing that considers emotion and personalization essential in strengthening meaningful experiences. We exemplify their use through the design and creation of Patches, a wearable social networking system. In this paper, we investigate social computing from a social science perspective. We are primarily interested in the traditions of symbolism, personalization, and gift culture in augmenting human computer interaction. Traditionally Sociology and HCI have advanced as two separate areas of research. More recently, HCI researchers have started to connect the richness of social interactions with the concepts that sociology brings into computing (10, 50, 52). We feel that understanding human to human social interaction is pivotal in the development of computing systems in order to extend their capabilities to create more natural social interactions that humans are already familiar with. We believe that translating our understanding of social interactions from a human to human view to computing will aid in the creation of richer interaction and subtleties of expression in interactive machines. We begin by examining three closely-knit concepts from sociology- symbolism, personalization, and gift culture - in an attempt to gain a better understanding of the richness associated with human to human interaction and the lived experience. Too often are these terms used to describe characteristics of a system without first explaining to the reader their historical significance. Our review also identifies motivations for future work which aids the design of social computing within HCI. In this paper, we aim to give the reader a general understanding of the terms and extend their application to the digital domain. We are particularly interested in how these traditions can be used to help people to more effectively interact with machines, particularly teenagers as they represent the early adopters of social networking technology (15). These traditions act as design goals to our wearable systems research and we will primarily examine the role of clothing within these conditions. Finally, these important characteristics are applied to a tangible computer mediated social network called Patches, a wearable system that enriches social interactions.