SOCIAL INTELLIGENCE DESIGN FOR KNOWLEDGE CREATING COMMUNITIES

摘要

Communities play an important role in knowledge creation by providing people with opportunities to continually learn from others, find partners to collaborate with, and demonstrate the significance of their disciplines. In education or business, it is relatively easy to find typical examples of knowledge creating communities for sharing and exchanging specialized knowledge among knowledge workers. In other domains such as NPO or local communities, people are naturally practicing mutual learning and invaluable knowledge is built as a result, even if knowledge creation is not deemed a primary goal of the community. In this paper, I present an interdisciplinary approach to augmenting the community knowledge creating process by integrating insights from social psychology, cognitive psychology, and advanced information technology. I emphasize the role of conversations and stories as a means of establishing a common background in a community. I describe several systems that primarily use the conversational modality to mediate community communication. Among others, EgoChat allows the user to make conversation with virtual ized egos responding on behalf of other users. It allows the user to take an initiative by interrupting the conversation and changing its flow. VoiceCafe allows artifacts to make conversation with people or other artifacts. It stimulates creative thinking by bringing about utterances from the physical object's point of view, which might be strikingly different from humans' view. These engineering approaches should be tightly coupled with sociological and cognitive approaches, to predict and assess the effects of community communication mediation systems on the human society. I discuss issues on designing a constructive framework of interaction for achieving practical goals without being caught by known pathological pitfalls of group interactions.