Reflecting on Several Metaphors of MUD-Based Media Spaces

Over the last decade, we designed and used three media spaces: Teamrooms, Notification Collage, and Community Bar. All were oriented towards creating a shared environment supporting a small community of people: about 2 to 20 members were expected to inhabit the media space. All provided others with a sense of presence through portrait images and/or snapshot-based video of its members, and all emphasized creation and sharing of real-time groupware artifacts. They differed in that each was designed around a different metaphor: multiple rooms for Teamrooms, a shared live bulletin board for the Notification Collage, and an expandable sidebar that contained multiple places for Community Bar. This chapter briefly reflects on how the systems and their metaphors served as a communal place. We saw that many factors — both large and small — profoundly affected how these media spaces were adopted by the community. We also saw that there was a tension between the explicit structures offered by media space design (rooms, places, bulletin boards, and so on) versus the very lightweight and often implicit ways that people form and reform into groups and how they attend to information in the real world.