Designing from the interaction out: Using intercultural communication as a framework to design interactions in collaborative virtual communities

Group'99 Workshop, Phoenix, Arizona
Sunday, November 14, 1999

Applications for supporting collaborative communities are increasingly available. In addition, the continuing development of global networks means that the opportunities for working, learning, and sharing trans-culturally are not only more appealing, but also more feasible. Distributed cross-cultural and cross-organisational work is here, now. The emergence of synchronous post-geographical virtual communities focused around ideas raises particular issues around fostering the 'chemistry' of online interactions.

Designers are becoming more aware of the dynamically changing goals of interactions with each new development in the area of collaborative virtual communities. As social affordances become inherent in such environments we are struck by the complex considerations in bringing organizations or culturally diverse individuals and groups together.

Although we may strive to create equitable spaces, differing cultures of the creators, owners, and users of such spaces make for complex, largely misunderstood intercultural dynamics. For example, in an organizational information space how do we combine the culture of management with the culture of non-hierarchical networking? In designing environments for children, how do we encourage them to explore their own identity or the identities of others? Should we design for certain interaction outcomes? If we design from the interactions out can we achieve equity and negotiation across culturally diverse community members? When designing virtual spaces, what are we to do when one person's utopia is another's dystopia?

We define intercultural communication as the exchange, and co-creation, of information and meanings by individuals or groups when at least one party perceives itself to be different from others. In Beyond Culture, anthropologist Edward T. Hall (1976) indicated that "culture is the total communication framework." To this end, we encourage workshop participants to think 'outside the box' with regard to conceptualizing intercultural communication, culture, and design--by joining us in exploring the impact of underlying dynamics of intercultural encounters such as identity, negotiation, conflict, power, equity, and trust on virtual spaces and communities.

Objectives

· Explore how to develop tools for collaborative working that support intercultural communication, in terms of traditional (nationality, ethnicity), non-traditional (subcultures), and organizational cultures.

· Share 'war stories' and concerns for future HCI directions

· Discuss principles of intercultural communication

· Open discussion on creating equitable information spaces for business, adults, and children

· Privilege, power, and negotiation in virtual communication spaces

· Introducing trust in virtual spaces? Design issue or people (content) issue?

· Co-create new directions and areas of collaboration with workshop participants

Organizers

Elaine M. Raybourn, Ph.D.
Elaine has a background in intercultural communication, human-computer interaction, and intercultural training. She is a Senior Member of the Technical Staff in the Advanced Concepts Group at Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Before joining the think tank, she participated on a software development team and currently continues to assist in the design of an advanced information space for a multi-disciplinary team of scientists. Elaine's research interests also include intercultural communication simulations in a computer-mediated context, designing intrinsically motivating computer environments, games, creating and sustaining persistent virtual communities (MOOs), kid's collaboration in computer-mediated environments, and non-traditional interfaces.

Andrew McGrath
Andrew is a senior research designer at the Centre for Human Communication at BT Labs Martlesham. He has been involved in the design and implementation of many virtual environments over the last 6 years. In particular he was content manager of The Mirror, a collaboration between BT, Sony, the BBC and Illuminations exploring the area of Inhabited TV. A particular area of interest he has is in the use of organic or ecological metaphors to support new interfaces for information systems. To this end he has worked on the Knowledge Garden running a workshop on Arcadian Virtuality at I3 Spring days at Sitges, Barcelona in March. Andrew held a tutorial on Designing Shared Virtual Environments for Chi98 in LA last year. Andrew's main area of work at the moment is the development and user testing of the Forum. The Forum is a virtual environment for collaborative working combining audio conferencing, knowledge agents and the affordances of a spatial metaphor to support online knowledge workers.

Program Committee

Alan Munro - Napier University
Elizabeth Churchill - FX Palo Alto
Wolfgang Prinz - GMD-FIT
William Stubblefield - Sandia National Labs
Eunice Young - Sandia National Labs

Participants

We invite participants from the following disciplines - computer scientists, interculturalists, educators, designers, psychologists, sociologists, philosophers, architects. The workshop will probably number 15 people.

Details

The workshop will last one day and potential participants should submit an idea or proposal (text, photos, videos, etc.) and bring at least one resource (book, article, film, video, painting, etc.) for the workshop group. A list of resources will be given to each participant at the end of the day. Additionally, each participant will be encouraged to bring 10 images of people in 'intercultural encounters' or 'intercultural communication spaces" to bring to the workshop for discussion.

The workshop will begin in the morning with a short presentation by the organizers on the principles of intercultural communication and how these principles may serve as guidelines for designing for communication outcomes. Following the examples brought out by the presenters, there will be a brief presentation by each participant reviewing his or her ideas. Discussions will be interactive and inclusive. During lunch we would like to get together with the group to get maximum benefit out of the day for everyone. In the afternoon there will a session on deconstructing the images brought by the participants. We will then divide the remaining time to focus on the key topics that we've identified during the day. We'll leave some time at the end for a wrap-up discussion.

The workshop will need a data projector, VCR, flip charts, pens etc and Internet access.

Submissions

The workshop will be of one day duration and entry will be by position paper (2-3 page abstract), software demo or portfolio. We encourage submissions appropriate to the issues identified, and welcome new insights or topics.

Important dates:

Submission - 15 October
Notification of acceptance - 20 October

Submissions should be sent in word, pdf or plain text format to:
Elaine Raybourn, Sandia National Labs, NM, USA emraybo@sandia.gov
or
Andrew McGrath, BT Adastral Park, UK andrew.mcgrath@bt.com

Non electronic materials can be sent to Dr. Elaine Raybourn at:

Sandia National Laboratories
Advanced Concepts Group
P.O. Box 5800 MS 0151
Albuquerque, NM 87185 USA

URL's

The Mirror
Workshop on Arcadian Virtuality with Alan Munro. March 99.
Tutorial on Designing Virtual Environments. Chi 98.
The Forum
Elaine Raybourn's Homepage