Community Bar: Designing for Informal Awareness and Casual Interaction

McEwan, G. (2006)
Community Bar: Designing for Informal Awareness and Casual Interaction. Master's thesis, Department of Computer Science, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada, September.

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Abstract

The Community Bar (CB) is groupware supporting informal awareness and casual interaction for small social groups of people with a common purpose. CB's design supports how communities of ad-hoc and long-standing groups are built and sustained: by maintaining awareness of one another and being able to casually transition into interaction. I begin this thesis by deriving design guidelines for awareness and interaction, primarily based on a comprehensive sociological theory. I then describe how CB was implemented according to the guidelines. I also describe the architectural design that supports awareness and interaction within a distributed group, including an extensible plugin architecture allowing customisation of CB's functionality. Finally, along with some colleagues, I conducted an in-depth field study of CB. We used results from this study to reflect upon the matches and mis-matches that occurred between the theoretical usage behaviour predicted by the design principles versus the actual usage behaviours observed in the deployed implementation.

Bibtex entry

@MASTERSTHESIS { 2006-McEwan.MScThesis,
CLASS = { THESIS },
AUTHOR = { McEwan, G. },
TITLE = { Community Bar: Designing for Informal Awareness and Casual Interaction },
SCHOOL = { Department of Computer Science, University of Calgary },
ADDRESS = { Calgary, Alberta, Canada },
YEAR = { 2006 },
MONTH = { September },
}