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Greenberg, S., McEwan, G. and Rounding, M. (2009)
Reflecting on Several Metaphors of MUD-based Media Spaces. In Media Space: 20+ Years of Mediated Life. (S. Harrison, Ed.), Springer, pages 425-440.
Type: Book chapter. See also: This paper extends a shorter, earlier one in Proc. CSCW’06 Workshop on Media Space – Reflecting on 20 Years.
DOI: 10.1007/978-1-84882-483-6_27
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Abstract.
Over the last decade, we designed and used three media spaces: Teamrooms, Notification Collage, and Community Bar. All were oriented towards creating a shared environment supporting a small community of people: about two to around twenty members were expected to inhabit the media space. All provided others with a sense of presence through portrait images and/or snapshot-based video of its members, and all emphasised creation and sharing of real-time groupware artefacts. They differed in that each was designed around a different metaphor: multiple rooms for Teamrooms, a shared live bulletin board for the Notification Collage, and an expandable sidebar that contained multiple places for Community Bar. This chapter briefly reflects on how the systems and their metaphors served as a communal place. We saw that many factors – both large and small – profoundly affected how these media spaces were adopted by the community.