What is Social Navigation

The process of guiding activities aimed at determining our position and planning and following a specific route based on what other people have done or what other people have recommended doing. First introduced by Dourish and Chalmers (1994), they describe it as ‘moving towards a cluster of other people, or selecting objects because others have been examining them’.

A construct that represents being aware of what others are doing as a primary guide for one’s own actions. Research on social navigation has shown that people move in an information space based on where other people are, what they have done, or what they have looked at.

The term ‘social navigation’ was first used by Dourish and Chalmers in a short paper presented at the HCI conference in 1994 (Chalmers, Dieberger, Höök and Rudström, 2004). In terms of the online world, social navigation involves your decisions being informed and guided by information about what other people have been doing online (Dieberger, Dourish, Höök, Resnick and Wexelblat, 2000). Wexelblat and Maes (1999) examine navigation in complex information spaces, and highlight the importance of interaction history or traces to guide our actions. In online spaces, problem-solving work carried out by users is said to leave traces which should be accessible to users in the future to make solving problems easier (op. cit.). Wexelblat and Maes use analogies to the physical world to describe the benefits of creating online spaces which can support social navigation. They suggest that following Norman (see the definition of ‘Affordances’)—objects that are rich in the history of use acquire new affordances which we can use for new ways of interaction, for example a library book with annotated notes is interacted with differently than a new book (op. cit.). They describe different sorts of interaction history—knowing what was done, knowing who did it, knowing why it was done and knowing how it was done. These are all important for different reasons in future actions and problem solving—for example the ‘who’ may be important as the views of domain experts have greater legitimacy as a ‘trace’ than that of an amateur (cf. Dieberger, Dourish, Höök, Resnick and Wexelblat, 2000). Dieberger, Dourish, Höök, Resnick and Wexelblat (2000) suggest that systems software is only slowly adopting social navigation. Social navigation systems exploit social behaviour and practices in order to help users explore and navigate (Chalmers, Dieberger, Höök and Rudström, 2004). People are said to transform space from their use and behaviour. However, the traces which are left behind can be sedimented and alter social practices—space is transformative and impacts on society (cf. Dieberger, Dourish, Höök, Resnick and Wexelblat, 2000), as well as society impacting on space.