Social positioning: Designing the Seams between Social, Physical and Digital Space

Rudström, Åsa and Höök, Kristina and Svensson, Martin (2005) Social positioning: Designing the Seams between Social, Physical and Digital Space. In: 1st International Conference on Online Communities and Social Computing, at HCII 2005, 24-27 July 2005, Las Vegas, USA.

Another paper argumenting for seamful design (exposing the connections, gaps, overlays and mismatches within and between physical, digital and social space. The authors introduce social positioning as an alternative and a complement to the current strive for seamless connectedness and exact positioning in physical space.

Digital space is often viewed as a model of physical space, where every piece of digital information can and should be tied to a specific physical location. Such a view is unnecessarily restricted. The digital medium allows for the construction of parallel digital spaces, for time travel and personal views. In addition, there are other aspects of the physical that can be considered for positioning. Instead of positioning a user in relation to her geographical coordinates we opt for a position that relates her to other inhabitants of the space.

They make similar critisim than me on the quest for seamlessness and perfect positioning (I would call rather call it the quest for appropriate positioning):

Most developers and researchers of mobile services make the assumption that users should never have to worry
about when and how they are connected to the digital space – they should always be seamlessly connected. To strive for such perfection is probably a powerful vehicle for the mobile industry. But reality is and will continue to be less than perfect. Pursuing seamlessness at any cost might not only be an impossible goal to reach but possibly even be harmful. If led to believe in continuous connectedness, users will be annoyed, frustrated or confused when faced with anomalies.

Relation to my thesis: I too challenge the two current trends in mobile research and industry of striving for seamless, continuous connection, and for perfect positioning. I always mention the mismatches between the physical and digital without taking into account the social space. Mainly because I have not focused on collaborative issues yet. The answer to whether exposing the seams allows a better understanding of the resulting combines space has still not been answered yet. This paper argues for the exposition of seams to users for better functionality and to make sense of the digital space that is layered on top of physical and social spaces. Some studies in geographical information visualization showed some drawbacks displaying uncertainties (it can discredit the whole system).