Thinking About Designing for Talking: Communication Support Systems

Abstract

Supporting communication between people has become a major component of popular information systems for work and play. Once confined to office systems, nowadays communication support is pervasive; it is either the primary function of a system (such as email and social media) or an important complement to other functions (such as computing, data processing, e-commerce, medical treatment and decision making). Clearly, communication is prevalent in information systems. Knowledge about communication is therefore an important piece of a developer's kit box, or at least it should be. Unfortunately, it isn't, not in any systematic form. Information systems developers rely on their good judgment and on their own experience with email, instant messaging, tweets, video conferencing and others. I ask in this article - can we do better by building on theory?