Sense of being there

My study is equally informed by research that has determined factors that may contribute to poorer synchronizing (Argyle and Cook 1976); and ‘frictions’ (Davenport and Prusak 1998) that inhibit knowledge sharing in human interaction and collaborative co-present contexts.

These are, for example, mutual gaze and trust. In effect, to be able to achieve mutual gaze has been observed as a key element in establishing trust, also in mediated interaction (Heath and Luff 1992; Heath et al. 1995; Rocco 1998; Acker and Levitt 1987; Ishii and Kobayashi 1992; Fullwood 2006). As noted by Caroline Nevejan (2007), trust is a prerequisite to the individual experience of presence in mediated environments, contributing a ‘sense of being there’ or of ‘non-mediation’ (IJsellsteijn and Riva 2003; Lombard and Ditton 1997; Held and Durlach 1992).
Trust is, further, a core element in the body of ‘informal and tacit practices’, which sustain knowledge sharing in accordance with Polanyi’s notion of tacit knowing (Polanyi 1958, 1966) and Wittgenstein’s concepts of rule-following and collectively established meaning (Wittgenstein 1953). A large body of existing research from the area of dialogue, skill and tacit knowledge (e.g. Göranzon et al. 2006) may thus be applied to presence design.
In the following, I will attempt to show how the issue of trust relates to architectural design—if by architectural design, we also encompass the spatial extensions enabled through presence design.