Social intelligence design for mediated communication

摘要

This Special Issue of AI and Society contains a selection of papers presented at the 3rd Social Intelligence Design Workshop held at the University of Twente, Enschede, the Netherlands, in July 2004. Social Intelligence Design as a research field attempts to integrate understanding and designing social intelligence, as identified in the first workshop held in Matsue, Shimane, Japan, in 2001 (Nishida 2001). On the one hand, it involves engineering approaches concerning design and implementation of systems and environments, ranging from group/team oriented collaboration support systems that facilitate common ground building, goal-oriented interaction among participants to community support systems that support large-scale online discussion. On the other hand, it involves scientific approaches addressing cognitive and social psychological understanding of social intelligence, and provides a means for predicting and evaluating the effect of a given communication medium on the nature of discussions, interaction dynamics, and conclusions. In addition, it encompasses pragmatic considerations from economy, sociology, ethics and many other disciplines, for social intelligence design has a direct relation with the society. The engineering and analytical approaches are complementary to each other and should be integrated intimately, for good systems cannot be built without good understanding and vice versa.