ISD Lecture

When Worlds Collide: Designing social networking services that span physical and digital places

Tuesday, October 9, 2007
5:00 pm to 6:00 pm
Elizabeth Churchill, Yahoo! Research

In this age where QWERTY communication and point-and-click are implied when I say social networking, face to face can sometimes seem like an inappropriate intrusion and unnecessary add-on — certainly something that we don't need to design for when we outline our services. I will describe a series of studies we did where we blurred boundaries between online and physical space social networking using desktop, personal device and public screen displays, and recent work on the move from online socializing to offline meeting among internet daters. I will use these studies to highlight the omissions in our design reasoning and concomitant surprises. I will more generally speculate on some issues that arise when we extrapolate tacit or explicit metaphors of online sociality to the offline world, and vice versa.

Last updated:

August 23, 2016