![]() Introduced in 2011, the US military has a drone surveillance technology for monitoring motion over an entire city. IN A NUTSHELL: presence can be exhausting. This creates a unnamed paranoia and incentivises the performance of work rather than work itself. Whereas, in the office, people can tell that you’re working by the view of you concentrating - whether hunched over a sketchbook or staring preoccupied at the ceiling - when you’re remote, it’s totally equivalent whether you are not moving your cursor because you’re thinking harder than you ever have… or if you’ve snuck off down the shops. So you end up being ever so slightly aware that other people can tell whether you’re active on your computer or not. Not quite panoptic but sousveilled – the act of watching one-another rather than surveillance from above. ![]() The self-governing of how one is perceived by others. What happens is that the part of our simian brains that looks after “presentation of self” (per Goffman) kicks in. Some people care about this more, others are able to care about it less, but it’s there none-the-less. You can never escape the idea that other people can tell whether you are active at your computer or not. When you have “presence” as a software feature, there’s a vague sense of being monitored. HOWEVER, in solving the whiplash problem by insisting on a baseline of presence, we’ve introduced a whole new problem: being around other people is exhausting.īeing on display is exhausting! What’s at the root of that? Another hunch… Figma does it by having moving multiplayer cursors on every webpage.Slack does it by giving you a list of your colleagues who are online, with a little green dot by whoever is active.It’s pretty easy to create a sense of presence in software: If you have presence as a “default” then you can move up and down the social gradient quite happily. Presence? The solution to social context whiplash.Īs a baseline, ensure that the user always has a sense that other people are around. (I posted in January about lessons from architecture for the metaverse, drawing from A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander, and that was specially about how to design this kind of smooth social gradient.) On my desktop but with the sense that colleagues are aroundĪnd the job of the designer is to ensure that their software ensures the existence of these different contexts, instead of having the binary on-a-call/not-on-a-call, and to design the transitions between them.In an anteroom to a video call, hearing the sound of others.Instead of having two modes, “in a call” and “on my own,” we need to think about multiple ways of being together which, minimally, could be: The trick to get around this is to move smoothly up and down the gradient of social interaction intensity, never dropping below a basic floor of presence: the sense that there are other people in the same place as you. It’s not Zoom fatigue, it’s Zoom whiplash. Then high bandwidth interaction, then on your own, then high bandwidth interaction, then etc. You’re in a high bandwidth interaction (full video, full audio, conversational turn-taking, eye contact), then the call ends and you’re on your own in your room. My guess is that it’s about repeated and rapid changing social context. OR RATHER what I mean is, yes, I do indeed get fatigued from a day of video calls (evidence: how I right now), but no, I don’t think it’s down to number of hours on calls specially. I’m sceptical about “Zoom fatigue,” which gets talked about a bunch, this idea that you get fatigued from spending a ton of time over the day on video calls.
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