The multiple faces of social intelligence design

Abstract

Nowadays, interactions between the human and the digitalhave become paramount aspects of our everyday experi-ence. The pervasiveness of the digital has closed the bridgebetween the cyber and the human, progressing toward asituation in which boundaries that used to separate thecomputers and the world in which the subject interacts withthe devices continuously disappear. In a recent conferencepaper, Mikael and Erik (2008) pointed out how recenttrends show how their multiple studies on ‘‘digitallyenhanced physical environments, as well as by recentresearch into ubiquitous computing, ambient intelligence,and interactive architecture which all highlight the blend ofthe physical and virtual world, and the disappearing char-acter of modern information technology’’, leading them toargue that the ‘‘move towards digitally enhanced interac-tive environments has to be taken seriously by the field ofHCI’’ (Mikael and Erik 2008, p. 21).The articles included in this special issue of AI andSociety, take on the challenge posed by these authors,tackling this subject of study through a conceptual frame-work that connects the relationship between the individualand the interactive environment by means of social medi-ation. The theoretical ground to these conceptualizationscomes from the paradigm of social intelligence design(SID) as defined by Nishida that it is explained by Nijholtet al. as ‘‘the necessary ability for people to relate tounderstand and interact effectively with others’’ and theirparticular concern to understand ‘‘how Social Intelligenceis mediated through the use of emerging information andcommunication technologies’’ (2009, p. 2). This paradigmtherefore involves the development of systematic approa-ches concerning design and implementation of systems andenvironments, ranging from team-based collaborationsystems that facilitate common ground building, goal-oriented interactions among participants, to community-centered systems that support large scale online dialog andinstructional design.The multidisciplinary articles included in this specialissue are augmented versions of ten selected works origi-nally presented at the 7th Social Intelligence Design (SID)workshop held at the School of Architecture of the Uni-versity of Puerto Rico, San Juan, PR, in December 2008.As in previous SID workshops, Puerto Rico hosted for3 days a multidisciplinary group of individuals, comingfrom varied disciplines such as industrial design, engi-neering fields, computer science, human computer inter-action, communication, social science, cognitive science,social psychology, and architecture. Common to all, thesediverse minds were a shared goal to improve the means andapproaches to produce better interactions between thehuman beings and their environments by means of theprinciples stated by SID.The first two articles in this special issue deal specifi-cally with the problem of communication. The article byKatai et al. studies the fundamental structures of verbalcommunication among people by using the conceptualnotions of coming from the Leibnizian notions of space andtime. In this article, the formalization generated by themodels used by Katai et al. shed light on the pieces and