Social software design and the technological horizon

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Laura Bordin Social Software Design and the Technological Horizon

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Declaration of originality I submitted this document for the exam on the 17th of April 2008 of the Interaction Design Theory 2 course (Telecomunicazioni) given by Gillian Crampton Smith with Philip Tabor at the Faculty of Design and Arts, IUAV University of Venice.

For all word-sequences which I have copied from other sources, I have: a) reproduced them in italics, and b) placed quotation marks at their start and their end, and c) indicated, for each sequence, the exact page number or webpage URL of the original source. For all images which I have copied from other sources, I have indicated: a) the creator and/or owner of the image, and b) the exact page number or webpage URL of the original source.

I declare that all other word-sequences and images in this document were written or created by me alone.

10.04.2008 Laura Bordin --------------------------------------------------------------------------

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Laura Bordin Social Software Design and the Technological Horizon

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Contents --------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hello!

P. 7

The Web and the Social Network P. 8 Origin of the Web P. 8 Principles of the Web P. 9 The Social Network and its challenge P. 9 Web technologies P. 12 HTML and the web graphics management P. 12 Electronic mail P. 12 Instant Messaging P. 13 Rss P.14 Audio/Video Streaming P. 14 Mashups P. 14 IUAV-cast: a concrete mashup example P. 14 Possible futures

P. 15

Web better than TV P. 15 Internet of the objects P. 15 Online Psychological Assistance P. 16 Web based social experiences P. 17 Goodbye!

Source list

P. 19 P. 20

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Hello!

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Figure 1. We are going fastly to a complex future.

Reading a book of psychology1 few weeks ago, I found an interesting point of view about the future.

The author, Robert B. Cialdini, spoke about our sophisticated mental apparatus that allowed us to build an environment which is “complex, feverish and full of informations” and where we have to use “the animals’ method, in order to deal with”2.

In other words, because of the huge quantity of data we have to deal with every day, most of time we choose to see only a minimum part of a whole situation. Trying to analyse it in every part would ask us a much bigger effort.

The human knowledge has been built up gradually for epochs, until few years ago, when it knew an exponential growth. This changed not only the cultural field, but the life itself: we travel more, further and faster, we often change abode, we get in touch with more people, but our relationships are briefer, we buy technological objects that become obselete in six months...

All of these changes are possible thanks to the technological development: through the results of new technology, we can collect, store, share

and communicate lots of information. Our main medium is the personal computer: millions of ordinary people work, play and interact with this machine that can “present and analyse enough data to drown Einstein”3.

Since the progress in the technological field is really faster than the human species development, our natural capacity of elaborate and store data won’t be enough to manage the overburden of changes, choices, and novelty we are submitted to.

In my opinion what we don’t have to forget is that computers and objects are things, maybe beautiful, maybe with an emotional value: they are something built to help us in our lives, they are not our lives!

What I like in Social Service and Applications Design, is its necessary relationship between people and technology.

In this booklet I will try to show how and what technologies are used in this field and how its development could change our lives and our perception of the human society.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------The book is: R. B. Cialdini, Le armi della persuasione, Giunti, Prato 2008.

2 R. B. Cialdini, ivi, p.282.

3 R. B. Cialdini, ivi, p.284.

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The Web and the Social Network -------------------------------------------------------------------------Origin of the Web The earliest idea of a computer network was thought by J. C. R. Licklieder in 1962, when he wrote memos about “Intergalactic Computer Networks�.

Licklieder became head of the Behavioral Sciences and Command and Control programs at ARPA, the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the US Department of Defense, where convinced his collegues (above all Ivan Sutherland and Bob Taylor) that his idea could be the right solution for the security problems in military communication.

The project was realized during the Cold War, in cooperation with various American University such as UCLA, Berkeley, MIT, etc. Actually the first communication between two computers happened in 1969 between ARPA and UCLA. The born of Internet is set in 1969, when Leonard Kleinrock, who worked at the UCLA, was charged to build the first telephone relay between a computer set in his University and a computer at the Stanford Research Institute, making them the first nodes of this packet switched network.

Gradually other Universities and military bases

all over the world connected to the Arpanet, that was later called Internet.

The World Wide Web was born from a project of CERN (European Organisation for Nuclear Research), whom purpose was creating a service based on Internet for the exchange of scientific publications. Their model was the hypertext: a space where users can jump from a document to another using the appropriate links, no matter where they are located.

Tim Berners-Lee developed the bases of this service: in 1989 the HTTP, HyperText Transfer Protocol and in 1991 the HTML, HyperText Markup Language.

After few years, when Internet had been used only by the scientific community to exchange informations, on the 30th of April in 1993, the CERN opened Internet to the general public, without asking copyrights. Thanks to the diffusion of personal computers Internet started spreading over out of the institutional and military fields and allowed thousands (and now millions) of users to connect with each other.

Moreover in 1993 Eric Bina and Marc Andreessen, two students in Chicago, designed

Figure 2. Arpanet Geographic Map.

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-------------------------------------------------------------------------Mosaic, the first “graphical Web browser”, easily usable also by inexpert users.

In 1994 the World Wide Web Consortium was founded in order to fully develope the web potentialities.

Principles of Internet When someone is developing web applications and systems, has to keep in mind some guiding principles, two of those are the universal accessibility and the universal space.4 The “universal accessibility” definition is: “The WWW has to be accessible and usable by everyone, everywhere, everytime and everyway”5.

This purpose produced different initiatives: the W3C Accessibility Initiative (WAI) which tryes to make the web accessible to everyone, including users with disabilities;6 the W3C Internazionalization Activity, that coordinates technicologies, rules, guidelines and activities in order to make the web usable everywhere; and the W3C Device Independence Activity which aims to create new methods for accessing the web everytime and everyway.

The research in these fields developed important criteria such as multi-modality (access through different interactions: visual, audible, tactile and mixed), multy-channels (different devices should be able to log on the internet, even the personal and portable ones), simplicity and legibility (the programme functions and components have to be comprehensible by reading their source code and documentation).

While the first principle regulates the access, the second one controls the web development.

“The WWW has to develope constantly thanks to the indroduction of new sources, new technologies, adjustments and personalizations where required”7. ““Interoperability” and “Evolvability” were two goals for all W3C technology, and whilst there was a good understanding of what the first meant, it was difficult to define the second in terms of technology”8.

Interoperability means the capacity of at least two systems to exchange and then use informations. Evolvability represents the possibility to update a system or one of its components and

to add new products, when they respect the official guidelines.

As we can see from these basic aspects, the web is a space that encourage a big cooperation, both in its use and in its development.

This quality has become clearly visible to everyone with the oncoming of Web 2.0. The name doesn’t stand for an updated version of technological applications used in the World Wide Web, but refers to a separation to the previous period (now called Web 1.0) when Internet was made only of static sites, e-mail, search engines and costrained the users to a linear Web browsing.

Web 2.0 aims to create a more dynamic and interactive space thanks to different tools and technologies, that allow also inexpert users to create their own web site or to interact with other realities in the Web itself, leaving comments (blogs), downloading, uploading or embedding contents (YouTube, Flickr, DivShare, etc.), sharing and modifying informations (Wiki). Moreover the “partecipatory Web” provides the tools to do all of these and other works directly online, without demanding to have particular, expensive applications installed on users’ computers (e.g. Google has developed Google Docs & Spreadsheet to create online and completely for free text files and spreadsheets; or Blogger, that is a platform which allows to create real free blogs).

The Social Network and its challenge The most important reality, born from Web 2.0, is the creation of Social Networks. “A social network is a group of people connected to each other with different social links: employment relationships, family bonds, random meetings, etc”9. On the web social networks of people that share interests, jobs, hobbies, etc. are created online using apposite softwares.

These networks grow around particular websites, that give the possibility to create a personal page or profile that allow someone to present himself/herself to other users, and provide a set of ways in which users can interact (e.g. chat, voice chat, comments, email, uploading/downloading videos/photos, file sharing, etc.).

Designers of web-service or social softwares

-------------------------------------------------------------------------To know more about that http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/ Evolution.html 5 V. Roberto, M. Frailis, A. Gugliotta, P.Omero, Introduzione alle tecnologie web, McGraw-Hill, Milano, 2005, p. 9.

6 Law n.4 of the 9th of Genuary in 2004 of the Italian 4

legislation, conforms to a WAI document that encourage the universal accessability to the information media.

7 V. Roberto, M. Frailis, A. Gugliotta, P.Omero, ivi, p. 12.

8 http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Evolution.html (Introduction) 9 http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rete_sociale

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-------------------------------------------------------------------------have accepted a big challenge: in this moment there is a proliferation of websites about lots of topics and there are lots of tools for creating them easily. What is difficult now is creating new, interesting contents or new, interesting and convincing ways to display them. The main problem of the web structure is a poor control over it: in the past years everyone who wants to take part in this world could do it, no matter what kind of contents he displayed. Unfortunately this leaded to big quantity of banal, unuseful and notupdated contents in the Internet that suggested someone to rename World Wide Web with World Wild West.

As Dan Saffer says: “It’s easier to create the form of a digital service than it is to create the content in that service”10.

Designers must keep in mind that a service doesn’t exist without someone who uses it: the fulcrum of their researches are people. Designing a service is something really different from designing an object: in both cases designer has to give affordance to what they are producing but while in product design they focus on the interaction between the person and the product, in service design they connect “people to people, people to machines, and machines to machines”11. Moreover an object is something physical, something that could bring with itself an emotional value, and a service is something invisible, a medium that allow us to reach something. There is no attachment to that: if someone realized a better service (better for what concerns given opportunities, or more interesting for other aspects like the graphic value), people will move to the new one, without regrets!

An example of this is the great use people is doing of Issuu. Issuu is a social online application which allows you to upload pdf documents, show them to others (without asking them to install Acrobat Reader) and embed this “viewer” on your website.

A similar service was given by Scribd which supported not only pdf files, but also doc, ppt, xls, txt, ps, and lit ones.

Both in Scribd and Issuu a user can vote, leave a comment, share the documents, but in Scribd he/she can also download them in various formats, even turning the original text in an audio file MP3 (English language only). Both the services allow users to create their own page, to have a

friends’ list (in Issuu is really complex to find a friend without having his or her email address), to manage their uploaded contents and to embed them on a website... From the way I described them Scribd, although is older than Issuu, appears more complete, more valuable than the other one.

So why Issuu is having such a great success?

Because of its graphic development. The files in Issuu are visualized as 3D magazines that visitors can flip through, no matter what the pages’ size is. Moreover all the user uploaded documents are clearly visible in the “My publications” section as little previews of the final viewer.

Figure 3. Scribd website

Figure 4. Issuu website

-------------------------------------------------------------------------D. Saffer, Designing for Interactions, New Riders Publishing, Berkeley, 2006. p. 197.

11 S. Evenson in “Shelley Evenson on Service Design” in D. Saffer, ivi, p.185.

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Web Technologies -------------------------------------------------------------------------In this chapter I’m going to describe some of the basic technologies that are used in the most famous Social Softwares and Web Services.

HTML and the web graphics management HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is the main language for creating webpages. It is not a programming language, but a description one.

This means that its task is just to define the visual aspect and the position of the contents (texts, images) in the page, and to create hyperlinks between different pages.

The language is made of tags, little words written inside angle brackets. Each page has the same basic structure which is: <html> <head> <title></title> </head> <body> </body> </html> The <head> of a .html file contains all the informations that the browser12 has to know before loading the page, but that won’t be visualized (e.g. the page’s title or the link to a CSS file).

In the <body> section there are all the contents that will be shown in the page by the browser.

At the beginning, when websites could only be static, the graphics of a page was given by HTML itself, but this implied a huge work when the site’s owner wanted to change the visual aspect of it: infact he had to change the HTML code in every site’s page. For this reason the W3C decided to separate the contents from their visual aspect using CSS documents (Cascade Style Sheets), that are called from inside the .html page. This

separation make the HTML files lighter and formatting faster, because all the site’s pages can refer to a single CSS documents, easy to change.

Now dynamic websites’ pages adapt their content and appearance on templates, that are tools for separating contents from graphics and for producing sites with great amount of pages.

Contents can be changed on the client side by using CMS (Content Management System) applications.

Also the template basic carachteristics like text colours, background images, etc. are changeable from the CMS itself, modifying directly the code.

Many templates are freely downloadable on the web. Once a user has got his template, he will go inside the HTML section of the CMS editor and copy its code deleting the previous one. Templates support blog structure, photo galleries, audio and video files, login area creation.

Electronic mail This is one of the earliest services given by Internet. It allows the exchange of text documents among two or more users. It’s based on SMTP, Simple Mail Transfer Protocol.

Let’s see what happens when someone (the sender) wants to send a mail to someone else (the receiver).

He composes its message using a MUA (Mail User Agent) a software like Mail or Outlook that allows users to read, reply, save and forward messages.

The MUA turns the inputs into the standard format of electronic mail messages and send them to the SMTP server. This has a mailbox for each registered user with which it manages files. When the server receive the message it will find where the receiver system is located and send the mail to it. The SMTP protocol sends the message to the

Figure 5. Evolution of graphics management.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------A browser allows users to visualize and interact with the contents of webpages and websites in general.

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-------------------------------------------------------------------------local mail transfer agent (MTA) to the receiver’s one. It verifies if the receiver’s address exists and solve possible group-user name, “consulting” the Domain Name System.

The DNS server for the receiver domain, responds with an MX record (a type of resource record in the Domain Name System (DNS) which specifies how Internet e-mail should be routed) listing the mail exchange servers for that domain.

The sender’s SMTP server sends the message to the MX server of the receiver using SMTP. The receiver presses the “get mail” button in his MUA, which picks up the message using the Post Office Protocol (POP3).13

Figure 6. Email process.

It is possible also to attach a file to your message and send the mail and the attachment as a single thing. MIME is the standard Internet e-mail format for that.

Mail providers impose a maximum size for attachments, in order to not overburden their servers, which is usually 30 Megabytes, but they studyed different ways to send files up to 2 Gb (e.g. Maximail, a service provided by Virgilio allows users to upload their files as a FTP system on a server. The receiver can download them using the same method. Senders have to indicate how long they will be available, because after that (short) period they are deleted from the server).

Instant Messaging Instant Messaging is another way of communication provided by social software like MSN and Skype. It is different from email communication because of

its “real time” exchanging of sentences and short texts between two or more users.

Quite often IM applications provide other services than only typing in texts: creations of user profile, visualisation of users statuses, using of webcams and microphones for video-chat, group chatting, call to phone numbers all over the world, file transferring, storage of whole chats and informations about successful or failed sending activity.

An IM system is made of a central server application to which client applications (on users computers connected with Internet) are joined.

This is what happens when someone, for instance Paola, uses an IM software: Paola opens the client on her computer.

The client connects to the central server, using a proprietary protocol for communication.

Paola enters her nickname and password to log in to the server. If this is her first time on, she has to register a new account, but, after that, can immediately begin using it.

The server verifies her name and password, and logs her in.

The client sends to the server the connection information (IP address and number of the port assigned to the client) of the computer she is using and shows to Paola her contact list.

The server creates a temporary file that has the connection information for her and her contacts and verifies if any of her friends are logged in.

Then sends to the client this information and the client changes the status of Paola’s friends to “online” or not.

Clicking on a “online” friend name (e.g. Mauro) will open a window where she can type text and click “send” to communicate with that person.

Her client has the IP address and port number for Mauro’s computer, so the message is sent to the client on that person’s computer, without passing through the server.

Mauro gets her instant message and answers.

The windows that each of them sees on their screens is the same and will expand to include a scrolling dialog of the conversation.

When they finish conversating, close the message window. Their client sends a message to the server to terminate the session. The server sends a message to the client of each online person on Paola’s list to indicate that she has logged off. Finally, the server deletes the temporary

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email

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-------------------------------------------------------------------------file that contained the connection information for her client. In the clients of Paola’s online contacts, her name moves to the offline status section.14 Rss The web fulfills our needs in the data and informations management. Let’s make an example: everyone of us has some interests, that push him to follow them on different environment. One of these could be Internet. Because of this blooming of new information sites/blogs, the number of our bookmarks will grow more and more. Checking all of the interesting sites news will be more difficult.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) allow users to be updated about websites content in an automated way, which can be provided by special programs (e.g. Vienna) or inside other kinds of services (Mail). RSS documents contains a summary or the full text of the news and its content can be read using software called an “RSS reader”. The user subscribes to a RSS feed typing the feed’s link into the reader. “The reader checks the user’s subscribed feeds regularly for new content, downloading any updates that it finds”15. All the resources, even if they are located in different websites, are visualized at same way: it is a good way to uniform different data.

Audio/Video Streaming There are two different kinds of streaming in the Web: when audio/video events are recorded and transmitted at the same moment they happen, it’s called live or real time streaming. The other kind is called on demand streaming and concerns media files located in different servers, but always available to be reproduced.

Video and audio streaming uses the UDP (User Database Protocol). UDP does not check each packet to see if it is damaged as TCP does, because this process would slacken the data transmission.

Let’s say it in a clearer way: a user wants to see a video from YouTube, which is an example of on demand streaming. Clicking on the “play” button makes a media server starting to broadcast the video; the data are elaborated and reproduced by a client application, the player, when a minimum

quantity of data is available. Received data are located in a buffer (a temporary store). The media file is then reproduced on the user’s computer screen, but this doesn’t mean that copies of it remains on the computer memory, in order to avoid copyright problems.

The MBR (Multiple Bit Rate) encoding is been developed to solve the problems of countinuous and steady transmission (above all in real time streaming): it combines multiple streams with different bit rates in a single multimedia file. When users demand a file, the client and server together check the available bandwidth and transmit it with the appropriate bit rate. If the Web becomes more “crowded” the stream’s bit rate will decrease.

Mashups A mashup is the possibility to include dynamically informations or contents differently located.

Creating mashup is one of the fantastic things that this cooperative Web allows you to do. Users, even with few skills, can create interesting sites only embedding in them services provided by different sources in the WWW. An embedment is a really simple process: it consists in copying a HTML code, created for you by the service provider, and pasting it in a HTML element of your site.

IUAV-cast: a concrete mashup example IUAV-cast is a project born inside the course of Graphic Applications by Davide Riboli at the Iuav University of Venice. Davide Riboli suggested to his students to create a particular web-site that should encourage communication in the University.

Moreover this site should be created without spending money, only using Web 2.0, most interesting services. My team16 and I accepted this challenge and started the project opening a blog on Blogger: http://iuav-cast.blogspot.com.

The blog form allows us to receive comments on the contents we wanted to spread, but doesn’t allow the creation of a real site structure, with its homepage and sections. We solved this problem showing posts one by one and adding, on the right side bar, “links” element that connect to particular internal posts in which there are sorts of contents’

-------------------------------------------------------------------------Source: http://communication.howstuffworks.com/instantmessaging2.htm.

15 Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_(file_format) 16 My team mates are Lorenzo Cercelletta, Benito Condemi, Claudia De Angelis, Enrico De Napoli, Alberto Granaiola, 14

Matteo Mantovanelli.

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Figure 7. IUAV-cast: a concrete meshup example.

indexes.

The first idea was to create a webradio of the University, so we studyed different radio-streaming applications like Deezer, Jamendo and Last.fm and we decided to create a radio-player with this last service and embed it in our blog. So we create a label account, uplaod different MP3 files, create a playlist with them and create a player for that playlist only, in order to transmit only the music of our groups.

Gradually our ambitions grew and we started thinking about our project as a showcase for studentsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; works. This implied supporting different formats, from music ones, such as video and pdf. We included them using Youtube and Issuu services.

Other contents of the IUAV-cast site will be live broadcasts, thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s why we opened a web-tv channel on Mogulus, a great service which allows live audio/video streaming or to create playlists with YouTube videos that will be transmitted in loop.

Last but not least we chose to embed Twitter widget, to make visible the staff components statuses.

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Possible Futures -------------------------------------------------------------------------Web better than TV! Thanks to the mashup technology, I think that soon the web will be full of great sites, that will combine live streaming, on demand streaming, chats, file sharing... in a few words, those sites will be complete of every interesting communication technology. Moreover on demand streaming (audio and video), allows users to have the complete control of the situation: they can choose what to see, stop it and restart it when they want, look it the number of times they want and share it with their friends. This has stolen users from common media as radio and television. In order to save itself, television is studying ways to be more creative, more spectacular and some proposals offer on demand and “interactive” TV, which means that you can vote programs, choose your videocamera shot, and other options that are still far from the idea of web sociality that Web is pushing forward.

Basically Radio and Tv are undemocratic media: they are the results of something create by few people and transmitted to everyone. Web is not like this, not anymore. Each person can create his own website using free tools and can use others’ work to make it more interesting, this is the main result of the collaborative development system.

My question is how could we transfer Web sociality and cooperation out of a computer screen?

and helpful (in its field) than it is. So create a net between objects only seems to me interesting, but not very useful at the same time.

Technologies used to create this net, already exist: mainly what can be used is RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification) tags, which are made of a microchip to store data (with a unambiguous universal number that identifies it), an antenna and, in some cases, a battery. Other ways to identify an object is to use semacodes. A semacode embeds a URL into a sort of barcode which looks like a dense crossword puzzle called the tag. The tag can be decripted by the right software and hardware and sends the user to that web address.16 The advantages of RFID in comparison to semacodes is that they don’t need to be visible to be read, can keep more informations depending on the chip tipology, and their identification happens really faster.

At the moment I can’t see a social aspect in this whole project. Nevertheless I really like the fact the we are finally thinking to decentralize

Internet of the objects Internet has diffused in record time and its progresses won’t stop here: after the development of wireless connection, Internet has easily reached the objects. Most of our home appliances will send and receive data to and from Internet, concerning themselves (location, status, owner, etc) and what surrounds them. They probably are going to communicate to each other. For instance the garage door will send the information “Bill opened me”, telling that Bill has come back home, and the bath tub will start fill itself with hot water, the heater will heat up the bathrobe, just as Bill likes!

I can’t think of an Internet of the objects that won’t include people. Maybe my point of view about design make me think always to creating something that can’t be more beautiful as it is, but at the same time it couldn’t be more usable

Figure 8. RFID-tag.

Figure 9. Semacode, detail.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------http://www.interaction-venice.com/projects/iuav07-08Lab1/ projects/masquest/more/ 17 Infact I’m not discussing the importance of computers in the business world.

18 Doctor Silvia Bianconi,http://www.psicologia-imola.it/Consu16

lenze%20-%20Rassegna.htm

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-------------------------------------------------------------------------the computer as the main objects of our lives. Videogames firstly and then social services have encouraged a new way of entertainment17, which has surely its positive qualities, but it also creates computer addictions, also slight ones, with negative consequences for our eyes, our body in general because of sedentariness (probably the Nintendo Wii Sport which had a great success is an attempt to make young people moving again!) and our mind, too: how many times we think “I have to find again the thought of that scholar... Well let’s see if Internet can help me in a faster way!”. And again, if we have to give our impression about something, most of time we look in Internet before thinking on our own. It’s obvious: search engines will be faster than our reading/thinking processes.

Different consequences concern also the social relationships: the communication through the Web is always a mediate communication, it not allows a direct contact and people protected by a screen are different, in good and bad manners.

Figure 10. Eliza working.

Online Psychological Assistance A good way to use this “protection” is helping people with problems. There are two main ways to use the Web as a psychological support, as Doctor Silvia Bianconi says, “one, maybe the traditional one, is to think of Internet as a big data bank in which you can find a name of a medical practitioner and his/ her studio. The second way uses Internet as a tool to get directly in touch with the doctor and talk to him/her through the Web”18.

Lots of people find speaking about themselves and their problems to an unknown person really difficult. Or maybe their problem are so big that they can’t say them aloud. Other persons want to begin a communication instead of a real therapy, because are too frightened by it. Physical problems as blindness or deafness or even the distance can occlude the possibility to see and talk to a physical doctor. These are particular situations in which asking for assistence through Internet could be seen as a possibility. “Not to substitute the relationship with the physical person, but just to integrate that relationship”19. In her website Doctor Bianconi quotes two interesting technological solutions for online support: chatterbots and “Dear Uncle Ezra” service.

Chatterbots are softwares that simulate a

Figure 11. Uncle Ezra website.

real chat-partner. One of these, called “Eliza”, developed by Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT, creates a real session mood and is able to understand the patient’s sentences and reply to them or make appropriate answers20. It works recognising key words, the main topic, choosing appopriate question following rules linked to that certain keyword and formulating responses also without keywords.

I know that this project was created in 1966, so it doesn’t concern the future anymore, but I think this is a great example of helpful tools, get possible by technology.

Here you are an example of “Eliza” written conversation21: “Patient: Men are all alike.

Eliza: IN WHAT WAY? They’re always bugging us about something or other.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------Doctor Silvia Bianconi, ivi. http://i5.nyu.edu/%7Emm64/x52.9265/january1966.html 21 ibidem.

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-------------------------------------------------------------------------CAN YOU THINK OF A SPECIFIC EXAMPLE? Well, my boyfriend made me come here.

YOUR BOYFRIEND MADE YOU COME HERE He says I’m depressed much of the time.

I AM SORRY TO HEAR YOU ARE DEPRESSED It’s true. I am unhappy DO YOU THINK COMING HERE WILL HELP YOU NOT TO BE UNHAPPY I need some help, that much seems certain.

WHAT WOULD IT MEAN TO YOU IF YOU GOT SOME HELP Perhaps I could learn to get along with my mother.

TELL ME MORE ABOUT YOUR FAMILY My mother takes care of me.

WHO ELSE IN YOUR FAMILY TAKES CARE OF YOU My father.

YOUR FATHER You are like my father in some ways.

WHAT RESEMBLANCE DO YOU SEE You are not very aggressive but I think you don’t want me to notice that.

WHAT MAKES YOU THINK I AM NOT VERY AGGRESSIVE You don’t argue with me.

WHY DO YOU THINK I DON’T ARGUE WITH YOU You are afraid of me.

DOES IT PLEASE YOU TO BELIEVE I AM AFRAID OF YOU My father is afraid of everybody.

WHAT ELSE COMES TO YOUR MIND WHEN YOU THINK OF YOUR FATHER Bullies.

DOES THAT HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH THE FACT THAT YOUR BOYFRIEND MADE YOU COME HERE The capitalized lines are the machine responses”.

“Dear Uncle Ezra” is a project developed at the Cornell University in 1986. A section of its official website has been dedicated to students’ help requests and different genres of questions. “Uncle Ezra” a real professionist, answers to all of these requests through email or publishing the answers on the site. This is not a high-technological-level method of communication, but I like the fact that a real person is there to listen to others’ problem and help them.

What I think we could do in the future is trying

to mix this two different levels of psychological assistance, using technology, but making it more real, not only with 3D avatars of a doctor, but opening the communications between a patient and his doctor to other people that are in the same situation, creating communities where people could feel the magic sensation that they are not alone, to help them gradually claw back their feith into the real world.

Web based social experiences What I dream that will happen in the future is the development of special social softwares that create the situation for meeting other people, or spend a particular moment with your friends in real physical context.

According to me Internet should be seen only as a tool through which we can make the first step (maybe the most difficult one) and then leave it to give more space to a not-mediate interaction.

I’m going to explain an example of what I mean, describing a work elaborated in 2007 with Alessandro Carraretto, Francesca Cremonese and Teddy Zacchini. masQuest is a mobile phone application that allows users to play role-playing games in the streets of Venice during Carnival.

The project has a website where people can create games and share them with the community before Carnival begins. The best games will be selected to be played during the Carnival days.

Our work is born from some reflections about Venice Carnival: it is one of the most famous Carnival in the world, it involves a large number of people, but doesn’t encourage them to interact.

Wearing masks and playing a real role game could be a great way to overcome shyness and create new relationships while having fun. I’m deeply convinced that the best way to break the ice in a relationship is to do something together.

The users are going to use their mobile phone as a game-board and as a tool to solve the quest at the same time. Infact the game consists in a treasure hunt, where players have to find semacodes.

A user, let’s say his name is Teddy, enters the application and chooses a category, a game (of which he can see the title, a brief description and the time of starting) and a team he will play with.

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Figure 12-17. masQuest storyboard.

The phone application will send to a server the data of the player in order to send him the right clues and the customized messages. When Teddy receives the clue, will follow its informations in order to find a semacode, and if he finds it, will send a MMS with a picture of it to the server, which will scan it and check if it is the right one. If it is, Teddy will receive a congratulations message and another clue, if it is not, the server will send him an error message.

As you see the implied technology is really simple, but what is the main aspect is that the game is play by people, in the Venice environment, physically. There will be a creation of social relationships: different groups of people, playing together already have something in common; people of the same group feel more linked to their mates, but could sympathize also with a group which is not directly against them, they could also create strategy, and so on.

This is what I want the social applications design to do in the future and technology development seems to make it possible, with Internet of objects, for example.

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Goodbye!

-------------------------------------------------------------------------As I said in the brief introduction of this booklet, probably we will spend a lot of time of our lives in front of a computer screen.

Actually every worker uses this machine, even people who do manual jobs (e.g. farmers use it to keep data about the harvest, or to keep in touch with their clients).

But let’s imagine a person sitting in front of a computer: we see him/her on his/her own, interacting with a machine, he/she is completely separated from what surrounds him/her.

To avoid computer addictions and detachment from the real world and physical society, beautiful applications have been created and put inside that machine.

Designers and software engineers allowed people to meet, talk, write, share experiences , interests, informations, developing services for every skill level.

Gradually the technology becomes more

invisible, wires are going to disappear and the Web will be inside lots of everyday objects.

I don’t want to stop all of these wonderful and incredible technologies, I use them everyday and everyday I thank their creators (!), but, as I said, I‘m more interested in those applications that allows people to know and meet in real-life context. Quite often I prefer to watch videos on YouTube or talk to my friends through Skype, than turn off the computer and go for a walk. This frightens me, I don’t want to forget that the real world is out of our computers, so... once we finish watching wonderful sunset photos on Flickr, let’s turn off the computer and see a real sunset, taking picture of it with our eyes!

Figure 18.

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Source list -------------------------------------------------------------------------Bibliography R. B. Cialdini, Le armi della persuasione, Giunti, Prato 2008.

B. Moggridge, Desining Interactions, Mit Press, 2007.

N. Plaisant, World Wide Web and Transparent Democracy, TS Press, Venice, 2007.

V. Roberto, M. Frailis, A. Gugliotta, P.Omero, Introduzione alle tecnologie web, McGraw-Hill, Milano, 2005.

D. Saffer, Desining for interaction, New Riders Publishing, Berkeley, 2006.

Gillian Crampton Smith + Philip Tabor, Lectures at Iuav Univeristy of Venice, Telecomunicazioni course, January-March, 2008, Venice.

Web reference http://www.wikipedia.org/ (Storia di Internet, Arpanet, World Wide Web, Email, RSS) http://www.w3.org/ http://www.italiasw.com/issuu-il-miglior-viewer-web-based-per-i-pdf-e-vero/ http://communication.howstuffworks.com/instant-messaging2.htm http://www.psicologia-imola.it/Consulenze%20-%20Rassegna.htm http://i5.nyu.edu/%7Emm64/x52.9265/january1966.htm http://ezra.cornell.edu/ Image sources P. 6 http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2383/2400489978_e5cbf466f4.jpg P. 8 http://www.mundi.net/maps/maps_001/arpanet.gif P. 15 http://edumicator.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/rfid-tag.jpg P. 16 http://www.psicopolis.com/artificia/img/eliza.gif P. 18 masQuest photos, by Teddy Zacchini P. 21 http://flickr.com/photos/7cero/894678418/ --------------------------------------------------------------------------

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