async: these often involve collaborating over-time rather than in real-time, although sometimes you happen to meet and communicate asynchronously together in real-time. You also are not in the same space while drafting/creating, so only the finished product is seen, and none of the in-progress drafts.
- public posting: traditional social network posting (twitter, instagram, tumblr, facebook, etc.) and social media comments (youtube, tiktok, etc.)
- restricted posting: emails, DMs, private gardens / message boards / forums
- public submissions on non-platforms: this encompasses effectively the same “kind” of thing as the first one but done on decentralized, scattered corners of the internet which often include open-ended shapes of input (with lots of creative flavoring). For example, visitor-created sketches, a guestbook, signatures and blobby contributions, a self-destructing website, and open google docs.
- see more of these on my channel for “form websites”
Although these can feel high-pressure, I love how intimate they can feel when you are directly communicating together
peripheral & ambient computing: these reflect passive indicators of presence (either real-time or async) that communicate about your actions to others without any sort of explicit action of your own. I also group things that take an explicit action but are places off your normal path and do not explicitly notify you
What do ambient digital devices, indicators, and structures look like? I love this exploration from Google’s Seed Studio around creating “little signals”. They evoke the kinds of technology that nudge us towards the things we care about rather than binary (and necessarily drastic) measures.
For example, in (we)bsite, we have a spectrum of ambient presence, between async and synchronous: from showing past fingerprints that people have left from dragging letters to showing live fingerprints and moving cursors (of other people actively on the site at the same time as you).
- shared todo-list with jess and her friend
- typing indicators,
- co-creation / sharing the same space
- cursors / avatars presence
fully sync
- real-time collaborative writing, designing, etc. (google docs, figma)
- video conferencing
- open-world MMORPG video games