Footsteps from the Garden: Arcadian Knowledge Spaces

Abstract

This chapter describes work in progress on a new way of approaching social navigation (Dourish and Chalmers, 1994; Benyon and Höök, 1997) through the use of populated, growing, knowledge gardens. These shared virtual landscapes provide an online space where people communicate and information can be “tended” through the affordances of an ecological metaphor. If we define social navigation as “finding things or going to places via, or with, other people”, and take that the whole process of categorising and finding information is a largely social process, then these Arcadian landscapes can provide a useful approach to social navigation in cooperative information applications.