Feature: An Interview with Tom Erickson

Over the past few months, I've attended several meetings remotely, either from home with colleagues who are in the office, or from the office (IBM Hursley Labs, Winchester, UK) listening to a conference call in the US or Canada. What strikes me most is that despite the high technology that IBM produces, meetings via a telephone, maybe with slides, more often than not feel incredibly low tech. It's frequently difficult to hear the other participants in the meeting, especially if the majority of them are sitting in the same room and they forget that you're not, or even just because they're not used to having to raise their voices so that the phone's microphone in the centre of the table can pick up what they're saying.

'The biggest technical problem is sound,' says Tom Erickson of IBM's T.J. Watson research lab in New York. 'Apparently, it's very difficult to solve. So, in videos and teleconferences it's very difficult, for example, if someone's not on mute, or if someone's got bad feedback that's interfering with the call; you have to spend time debugging the problems.'

Erickson is probably more experienced than most of us at taking part in meetings from a remote location. Although he's employed by IBM in New York, he actually lives in Minneapolis and works, much of the time, from home.

I met Erickson recently at HCI 2004 at which he was a keynote speaker. Erickson is interested in – his 'core obsession' is – supporting mediated communication. That is, supporting communication that is mediated by computers, telephones, and so on, rather than being face-to-face.

Sound quality is only one of the problems with attending remote meetings. As Erickson says: 'When we're talking face-to-face, we're constantly, and in parallel, giving and receiving social cues.' For example, we can gauge people's responses to our contribution in a meeting by their body language and facial expressions. If you're in a meeting with people who don't know each other, you can easily 'go round the table' getting everyone to introduce themselves. But, how do you do that when there is no table?

Erickson tends towards simple, rather than complex, solutions: 'We can definitely get a long way with very little.'

For instance, you could 'invite everyone into a 3D environment with avatars and you press a button to make your avatar smile to provide a cue. The problem with that is that, for a start, it's very technologically heavyweight right now. Also, you have to very consciously send the cues so it disrupts the flow of the conversation. Finally, computers, virtual space, or whatever, are very different from the physical world. It always happens that when something new comes along, we try to imitate what preceded it. Like when cinema was invented, we tried to imitate theatre (even now, you get curtains over cinema screens). Gradually, though, the new thing evolves and finds its own more appropriate way of doing things. Digital communication will do the same.'

Part of Erickson's contribution to this digital evolution is Babble, a 'social proxy' system that allows the users to see the presence of others online. A social proxy is a digital system that supports computer-mediated communication by providing the much-needed, and often much-missed, social cues that are lacking in the virtual world. Erickson talks about providing 'social translucence'. Social translucence is about providing artificial social cues but doing so in a subtle, natural way so that the users can concentrate on the task in hand.
Babble incorporates a 'chat' facility that can be used for synchronous (instant) messaging but is also persistent and so can be used asynchronously.

A circle in the corner of the chat window contains little dots; each dot represents one person in the 'room'. If someone in the chatroom is speaking, their dot moves toward the centre of the circle. The dot gradually drifts outwards unless the person speaks again. The idea is to give you a sense of how many people are in the room and, of those, how many are actively participating in the discussion.

In the 'round the table' situation, Erickson proposes: 'You could have something like Babble that shows each person as a dot in a circle. Then the meeting leader asks the person at 12 o'clock to say a few words of introduction. And go clockwise round the circle. As each person 'steps forward', their dot moves to the centre of the circle. Late-comers can then see what's happening as each person speaks and then their dot drifts back to the edge of the circle as the next person steps forward. On Voice Over IP, each person can be identified easily and the diagram can easily fit on a telephone.

But what about video conferencing?

'I've experimented with video conferencing but using video to my home, well, across the bandwidth it isn't good enough. I've never attended a video conference that's made me think that video is worthwhile.'

So, say we decide to make community websites and common applications like email and instant messaging more socially translucent, would it take a big shift in mindset for designers to produce systems like these?

'On the one hand, it's a big mindshift because lots of people don't instantly get it. But it should be easy because everything is about finding an analogy in the physical world. Like, one person talking to another – that's the same thing whether you're in the physical or virtual world. You just need to attune yourself to what makes interaction work; what people need to communicate, and how to translate it into the digital world.'

If you still don't get it, or if you're fascinated and want to know more, have a look at some of Erickson's many, very readable papers and essays on his website (linked below).

Laura Cowen
laurajcowen@yahoo.co.uk

This interview also appears in Interfaces (issue no 61), the BHCIG member's magazine. If you want further Interfaces wisdom delivered to your home, join the British HCI Group at their website: www.bcs-hci.org.uk/.

Associated Link: Tom Erickson's website

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