CHI Workshop on Social Navigation: Position Paper
User Profiles, Social Projection and Navigation
Paul Rankin
Philips Research Laboratories
Cross Oak Lane, Redhill
Surrey, RH1 5HA, UK
+44-1293-815066
paul.rankin@philips.com
ABSTRACT
Collaborative navigation in information space, like any
other communal activity must be grounded on a sense of the
personalities of other citizens and the building of trust in
their roles, character and skills. A crucial information flow
therefore carries the subtext of getting to know others as a
precursor to social activities. Surprisingly, the psychology
of personality projection has hardly been exploited in
virtual environments, including the web. My position is that
novel representations must be invented for users’ presence,
their internal ‘user profile’ and a new language for
supporting personality communication. Proxemics and
context should be used to moderate interpersonal
disclosure. Issues of authenticity, privacy and trust are
paramount. Putting users in control of their own data and its
disclosure requires a new type of interface so they can
comprehend and deploy their own profile.
In ‘real life’, acquaintances are rarely random, but are
biased by meeting in a common context, interest or place.
Context or setting both bias and facilitate social interaction.
The context, e.g. the specific topic of a virtual locale, will
determine who is to be found there. Setting will also affect
and bias the aspects of personality and behaviour that
people initially present to each other (c.f. cinematography).
ABSTRACT REPRESENTATIONS
Acquaintance, user profiles, privacy, navigation, virtual
worlds, personality projection.
By using abstract metaphors for places and participants,
initial appraisals might be based upon matches of interests
and other elements of personality or spirit. Abstract
representations offer expressive, appropriate visualizations
of many domains of human concern, from finance to music
[2]. With harmonious abstractions for users’ presences,
such as the ‘StarCursor’ [3] we might turn ‘information
landscapes’ into social places for communication and
community. ‘Super-natural’ mechanisms might then couple
user embodiments, both with each other, and with
information, entertainment or education content, in novel
responsive ways.
ACQUAINTANCE, CONTEXT & CHANCE ENCOUNTER
TRUST AND A MODEL OF THE USER’S INNER SPACE
Before co-operative activities such as shared navigation can
occur, new communities based on common goals, interests
or affiliations must be formed. Designs are therefore needed
to support the social browsing needed to filter the host of
humanity engaged in online activities down to those whom
we can trust in a co-operative activity. The psychology of
acquaintance is therefore key to understand and support.
New ways are suggested here to support the acquaintance
processes [1], viz. searching for like minds in a crowd,
stereotyping, grooming, presentation of self, disclosure
From supermarkets to web sites, data are gathered on us all
the time. Privacy and trust are therefore of prime concern.
Trust in the deployment of our data relies on system support
for security and privacy. However, trust also begs interfaces
to allow us to explicitly view, verify and modify our own
personal profile, controlling its context-dependent
disclosure to applications, services, on-line acquaintances
or communities. In addition, a user interface which supports
self-reflection, has value in its own right to strengthen
identity and self-knowledge.
New private or business contacts always combine elements
of chance encounter and deliberate search, seeded by some
common interest ground. The more specialized and intimate
the discovered area of common interest, the stronger it acts
as an ‘ice-breaker’ to build further common ground.
A user interface is proposed in [3] for managing this multifaceted profile, exploiting the human’s conscious awareness
of distinct social contexts and the adoption of different
‘masques’ in these different situations. The same model for
the user’s data, including for example his or her work
interests and leisure tastes, is the natural starting point for
setting up search profiles to find common or
complementary characteristics and goals in other people, to
share navigation through information or enjoy an
experience together.
Keywords
CHI Workshop 15: Social Navigation: Position Paper
CONTEXTUALISED SOCIAL INTERACTION
A 3D virtual environment for the user’s StarCursor model
to inhabit, ‘ContentSpace’ has been proposed in [3], linking
different representations at a higher abstraction level. Both
this outer space and the user’s profile model are imagined
as evolving through user activity and creativity. In this
space, zones are focused not only in their local subject
domain but also in their social properties such as seclusion,
ownership, access rights, or the type of work or play
activities found there.
Both the topic and social properties of zones refine, filter
and mediate the inter-personal exchanges they enfold.
Interactions between people and place are imagined to
always be two-way. Content walls respond personally to the
user’s virtual gaze or proximity, while a user’s profile will
accumulate detail from their activities in a zone. Such
‘wear’ patterns aid and enrich the navigation of subsequent
visitors.
A great many new research and interface design challenges
emerge: explicitly-controlled vs. automatic disclosure; new
social navigation mechanisms such as forces of social
attraction or repulsion; the social affordances of place;
representation of social aggregates of individual profiles.
Many pertinent ethnographic and psychological studies
could be done on particular face-to-face or virtual
communities, building upon the directions proposed here.
Studies for instance might be on:

Pace and style of reciprocal personal disclosure: What
stereotypical ‘masques’ do acquaintances adopt during
their interactions in different social situations?

How do newcomers first interact with established
community members and what initial revelations
determine their subsequent assignment of roles in the
community (‘First impressions matter’)?

How does the contextualisation of place (topic,
safeness etc.) and architecture (privacy, adjacency etc.)
influence personal disclosures?

Social affordances of the community’s meeting places:
What are their qualities and how are they read?

What is the importance of personal disclosures in the
emergence of community roles? In particular, how are
reputations of experience, skills and character such as
honesty, diligence, humour or authority formed?

What is the correspondence between ‘navigation’
through a social situation and co-operative information
browsing?
RECPROCAL PROJECTION AND DISCLOSURE
Within the environment we imagine, distant auras of
potentially interesting acquaintances would attract the
participant’s personalised eye and ear. Three mechanisms
are proposed to automatically moderate the personal
exchanges between users [4]:

The zone sets the context, which in turn brings to the
fore certain aspects and topics in each of the
participants’ user profiles

Body space and the separation between two cursors
moderates the intensity (depth) of personal disclosures
in any category of personal data.

Eye gaze can be used to scan items in another’s
profiles, categories being related to different parts of
their cursor body.
Additionally, in order to be able to proffer new information
to another user, the user can change their own StarCursor’s
posture, which results in the gaze of the other’s eye being
attracted to that aspect of self. So, the separation and angles
between two StarCursors would automatically act, like
human body space, to moderate the projections of self. By
retreating from the other cursor, less is revealed (c.f. the
proxemics between people in a face-to face encounter).
Detailed profile disclosures and examinations are thus
conducted via an abstract body language where the gaze
beam of one user’s cursor triggers the emission of
expressive multimedia objects and symbols associated with
the other’s profile from its cursor body. Body space might
be expanded or contracted to suit the user’s sociability to
friends or enemies.
CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE CHALLENGES
The attempt to unify both inner (user profile) and outer
worlds in one abstract metaphor proves richly provocative,
having implications for web designs, information
landscapes, ‘wearables’ and smart physical environments.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A team of designers contributed to the StarCursor and
ContentSpace vision, namely C. van Heerden, J. Mama, L.
Nikolovska, R. den Otter and J. Rutgers. HS Hudson, Z
Jetha, and AT Markettos provided the 3D models and
VRML prototype which can be demonstrated.
REFERENCES
1.
Goffman, E., The Presentation of Self in Everyday
Life. New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday, 1959,
ISBN 0-385-09402-7.
2.
Donath, J. S. Inhabiting The Virtual City, Boston:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology PhD thesis, Feb
1997
3.
Rankin, P.J., v. Heerden, C., Mama, J., Nikolovska, L.,
den Otter, R., & Rutgers, J., StarCursors in
ContentSpace., Proc. ACM Siggraph, Orlando, p.250,
July 1998
4.
Rankin, P.J., Spence, R. A Contrast Between
information navigation and social navigation in virtual
worlds, Ch. 10 in Social Navigation of Information
Space’, ed. Munro, AJ, Hook, K, Benyon, D,
ISBN
1-85233-090-2,
Springer-Verlag
1999
CHI Workshop 15: Social Navigation: Position Paper