Where the Footprints Lead: Tracking Down Other Roles for Social Navigation

Abstract

In March 1998 an international group of 30 researchers attended a workshop on Roslagens Parla, a small island in the Swedish archipelago. The topic of the workshop was "personal and social navigation" of information space. Although the researchers came from a wide variety of backgrounds-computer science, human-computer interaction, social science, psychology, information retrieval, computer supported cooperative work-they shared an interest in exploring new ways of thinking about the relationships between people, technologies and information. In particular they were interested in the notion of social navigation: how to develop and enrich the experience of dealing with information within the electronic "worlds" provided by computing and communication technologies. The idea for the workshop arose from discussions within the group working on a research project called PERSONA, a collaboration between the Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SICS) and Napier University, Edinburgh. David Benyon from Napier and Kristina Hook from SICS had developed the project after their experiences working with intelligent user interfaces. Attempts to get the computer to make sensible inferences about what people wanted to do, so that it could tailor the provision of information to their needs, had not been successful (Hook and Svensson, Ch. 13). The dream of having intelligent interface "agents" was still a long way from becoming a reality because the techniques used to build agents and other "intelligent" user interfaces ignored a fundamental feature of people: people are social beings. The question for the workshop to consider was how to bring the social into information provision. When people need information, they will often turn to other people rather than use more formalised information artefacts. When navigating cities, people tend to ask other people for advice rather than study maps; when trying to find information about pharmaceuticals medical doctors tend to ask other doctors for advice; if your child has red spots you might phone your mother or talk to a friend for an opinion. Even when we are not directly looking for information we use a wide range of cues, both from features of the environment and from the behaviour of other people, to manage our activities. Alan Munro observed the ways that people followed crowds or simply sat around at a venue when deciding which shows and street events to attend at the Edinburgh Festival. We might be influenced to pick up a book because it appears well thumbed, we walk into a sunny courtyard because it looks attractive or we might decide to see a film because our friends enjoyed it. Not only do we find our ways through V vi Social Navigation of Information Space spaces from talking to or following the trails of crowds of people, we also evaluate the things we find in these spaces through understanding them in a social context. We put them in a framework of relevance. During a break at the workshop a group of participants were standing in the winter sunshine. They were considering how the results of the workshop could be more widely disseminated and about where the ideas raised during discussions might ultimately lead. A line of footprints led across the snow and into the woods. As a metaphor both for social navigation and for the unknown destination of this work, it seemed perfect: footprints in the snow.