Using visualisation to support Reflective Community Design

Abstract

Online communities have developed as a mainstay of contemporary internet culture. Their application has enabled the creation of media and software artefacts and resulted in new systems of economic and cultural production. However, online communities are notoriously difficult to build and maintain and their development can often shift in unanticipated directions. This thesis proposes an approach to the development of online communities called reflective community design. The aim of reflective community design is to enable community stakeholders make informed decisions based on an analysis of community behaviour and to learn from these decisions as the community develops over time. At the core of this practice is visual representation. As with traditional design disciplines, such as product design and architecture, visual representation enables designers think about the design space, reason about their design decisions and share their thinking with other designers. Within this context, this thesis introduces a set of design considerations for the visual representation of online communities using techniques drawn from the Information Visualisation and Visual Analytics literature. This framework then guides the development of different visual analytic systems in two independent case studies with different sets of community stakeholders. Both case studies enable the validation of different elements of the framework, allows the author to suggest alternative implementations and propose directions for improvement.