Workshop in Collab Spaces
Assignment #1
Jonah Brucker-Cohen
2/14/02

a. Date with Joanie Morris DiMicco from MITML

Although Joanie dropped out of the class, she wanted to use the time
to explore and learn about collaborative software agents. In the past,
she has worked on a market simulator and computerized pricing agent
strategies and sees voting as an important decision making tool. She's
been at some failing Dot-Coms including First Virtual and Open Sesame
a personalized entertainment-based website. Using voting as a model,
she's also interested in looking at the conditions of voting such as
when you present a question the way you present it influences the way
the question is answered.

Another example would be looking at the outcome of voting while in
different states of mind or the time one votes. She also sees the
voting interface influencing people's environments and how they
vote. She envisions a system of collaborative control on voting where
your vote controls an aspect of the system. For instance, her project
would include turning on lights in the garden depending on the amount
of people voting. The more people voting, different areas of the
garden would light up in certain areas.  

We met on the telephone but beforehand Joanie sent me an email with a
link to a picture of her visiting the Guinness Storehouse in
Dublin. That way I had a visual image of her in my mind which made the
conversation less impersonal. Compared with email, the phone augmented
our 'date' because it is a medium that allows for not only the
transmittal of information but also tone and quality of voice. Its
limitations include the lack of physical visual appearance and
non-verbal cues. In some cases those elements are second nature and
don't explicitly have to be shown, but without them it limits your
ability to discover more about someone.


b. Date with Lorna Ross from MLE

We met in a cafe on rainy Saturday afternoon. Lorna had coffee while
I had a sandwich for lunch. She likes to stir her coffee a lot. Lorna
isn't afraid to talk about her life and believes that she has no
secrets - whatever she used to be insecure of (as we all are at some
point in our lives) she no longer feels like she has to hide.  We
talked about family, work, life, dreams and hope. Lorna is hung on the
idea that we all live between memory and hope. Lorna said that she
values friendships the most in life but contradicted this by saying
that she is a loner and prefers to spend time alone.

I ordered a Hot Chocolate from a woman who was not our waiter and she
took the order. We talked some more about relationships, friends, life
and as our conversation evolved our method of speaking began to reveal
more about the content we were communicating. It was easier to talk
because we had already formed a context around our conversation and
learned little things about ourselves - quirks, habits,tics. We both
agree that the little things in life are always more important than
big, overarching issues. Eventually my drink never arrived so both of
us tried in vain to flag down our waiter. Using hand signals and
giving each other frustrated looks eventually alerted the waiter.

Looking back on our meeting it's clear that face to face communication
allows you to pick up on a lot of subtleties about someone. Eye
contact, appearance, context of your interaction (ie. in a cafC),
restaurant, outside), tone of voice, the way they look at you when you
are talking to them. Also the way you look at them and where and how
you look (both your gaze and your outward appearance) when you talk to
them comes into play. This type of interaction is more natural than
technology mediated communication because there is nothing separating
you (besides a table in our case or other physical boundaries) from
the experiencing the essence of the other person.

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