Commentary by Mark Wahl, CISA
Organizing principles for identity systems:
Spaces vs places in Geraldine Fitzpatrick's Locales framework (20070721)
Geraldine Fitzpatrick of the University of Sussex writes in the chapter "The Locales Framework: Making Social Thinking Accessible for Software Practitioners" of Social Thinking -- Software Practice published by MIT press on metaphors for scoping interactions in CSCW systems.
In the wOrlds CSCW system, the room metaphor
"...can be characterized by notions of group related to a bounded space, where you are either in or out, and see everything or nothing. The systems engineers' work on the other hand can be better characterized by "individuals in multiple groups" who make use of a variety of physical and virtual spaces as places of work, and where notions of relationships around centers are more relevant than containment by boundaries..."
"On seeing this mismatch between the instantiation of a spatial metaphor in wOrlds, and the rich ways the systems engineers used their virtual and physical spaces, I started to think about place instead of space as a guiding design principle -- where place arises in the lived relationship between people and the spaces they use. Conincidentally others were also moving toward this notion of place rather than space (Harrison and Dourish 1996)." (p. 145)
In the later Locales framework (described in detail in her thesis),
"A social world is the fundamental building block of collective action (Clarke 1991). Members of a social world are bonded by a common, sometimes implicit, goal and perform actions toward the collective purpose. Actions are always embedded in interactions, which are continually permuting. Social worlds need "sites and means" to facilitate their shared interactions. An interaction trajectory captures the issues about how courses of action evolve over time.
The primary unit of analysis and design in the Locales Framework is "locale." Locale does not exist a priori as does a space or room. Rather, a locale is the place constituted in the ongoing relationship between people in a particular social world and the "site and means" they use to meet their interactional needs -- that is, the space together with the resources available there. As such, the framework is based on a metaphor of place as the lived interaction with space and resources.
In contrast to metaphors of space, which embody principles of boundaries and containment (e.g., see Roseman and Greenberg 1996), a metaphor of place embodies principle of centers giving rise to relationships (Fitzpatrick 2000). The shared purpose of the social world, for example, provides a center around which the people, spaces, and resources make sense. With the notion of centers come other notions, for instance, of relationships around the center, of distances from the center potentially definable along multiple different dimensions, and of dynamically varying relationships of centers to one another." (p.147-149)
In "Centres, Peripheries and Electronic Communication: Changing work practice boundaries" she illustrates an example of
"...there are multiple dimensions along which the effect of multiple boundaries can be seen in a social world, as depicted [above]. Differentiated peripheries might exist around the degree of commitment to the social world purpose. This can vary from intense commitment to wavering commitment. Differentiated peripheries can exist according to the limits of communication. These might vary from co-located face-to-face communication to geographically and possibly temporally dispersed communication via different technological media. Differentiated peripheries can also be described according to different levels of participation - these can vary from actively involved in core activities to passively involved in marginal activities. A person's 'location' with respect to the centre can be abstractly defined in this multidimensional space."
