Resumen
The article focuses on designing social infrastructure that makes collective activity visible. Humans are remarkably skilled at using subtle cues about the presence and activities of others to govern their interactions. Designing digital systems that make perceptually based social cues visible to their users is required. Such systems-by supporting mutual awareness and accountability makes it easier for people to carry on coherent discussions, to observe and imitate others' actions, to engage in peer pressure, to create, notice and conform to social conventions and to engage in other forms of collective interaction. The phrase social translucence is used as a rubric for our approach to designing such systems. The article describes a number of systems that illustrate social translucence. In particular, we introduce the notion of the social proxy, a minimalist visualization of people and their activities. The primary example is a system called Babble that has been designed and studied.