Wendy Kellogg from IBM Research says that IBM replaced its solid doors with ones with windows so you could see if someone is on the other side before you slam the door into her. They call this “social translucence.” Not only can you see the person, but the other person knows that you know, which creates accountability. Social translucence is common in the real world but rare in computing systems, she says. She talks about how this got idea got implemented in the Babble and Loops projects that provide a minimalistic graphical “proxy” that provides some of the metadata that occurs naturally in face-to-face meetings. [Technorati tags: scs2005 SocialSoftware ibm]

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