Socially translucent systems: Social proxies, persistent conversation, and the design of "Babble"

We take as our premise that it is possible and desirable to design systems that support social processes. We describe Loops, a project which takes this approach to supporting computer-mediated communication (CMC) through structural and intemctive properties such as persistencea nd a minimalist graphical representation of users and their activities that we call a social proxy. We discuss a prototype called "Babble" that has been used by our group for over a year, and has been deployed to six other groups at the Watson labs for about two months. We describe usage experiences, lessons learned, and next steps. Copyright © 2012 ACM, Inc.