Journal Article
Network Community Design: A Social-Technical Design Circle
Fulltext URI
Document type
Text/Journal Article
Additional Information
Date
1998
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Springer
Abstract
Network communities are especially interesting and useful settings in which to look closely at the co-evolution of technology and social practice, to begin to understand how to explore the full space of design options and implications. In a network community we have a magnified view of the interactions between social practice and technical mechanisms, since boundaries between designers and users are blurred and co-evolution here is unusually responsive to user experience. This paper is a reflection on how we have worked with social and technical design elements in Pueblo, a school-centered network community supported by a MOO (an Internet-accessible, text-based virtual world). Four examples from Pueblo illustrate different ways of exploring the design space. The examples show how designers can rely on social practice to simplify a technical implementation, how they can design technical mechanisms to work toward a desirable social goal, how similar technical implementations can have different social effects, and how social and technical mechanisms co-evolve. We point to complexities of the design process and emphasize the contributions of mediators in addressing communication breakdowns among a diverse group of designers.