Design, Communication, and Technology Key Concepts

Flashcards covering core vocabulary on Design Concepts, Availability Management, Well-being, Impression Formation, Warranting, and Group Dynamics.

Affordance

The interaction possibilities of an object relative to a user, determined by physical properties, user capabilities, and perception informed by culture and habit.

Mental Models

Beliefs and expectations for how a design works, built through learned repeated interaction and feedback.

The Gulf of Execution

The difference between the user's intentions and what the user is able to do or how well the system supports those actions.

The Gulf of Evaluation

The difficulty of assessing the state of the system and how well the artifact supports the discovery and interpretation of that state, specifically regarding system feedback.

Availability Management

Behaviors that individuals undertake to manage what other people think about their availability for social interaction.

Accounts

Explanations for relational failures that reconcile violating expectations while demonstrating care, providing plausible and mutually agreeable narratives to save face.

Butler Messages

Verbal messages sent to manage one's availability or unavailability where technology buffers or mediates between the sender and recipient.

Active (Technological) Mediation

Features of a technical system that suggest or contradict particular accounts for availability.

Butter Lies

Verbal messages sent to manage one's availability or unavailability that are deceptive and knowingly false.

Availability Message Taxonomy

A 2x2 matrix classifying messages based on content (Butler Content vs. No Butler Content) and truthfulness (Deceptive Message vs. Non-Deceptive Message), resulting in Butler Lies, Butler Messages, Other Lies, and Other Messages.

Technological Determinism

The view that technology directly causes changes in human psychology, behavior, and society as a whole.

Engagement

The amount of time or number of actions that a person takes on a platform, typically measured in terms of clicks or seconds.

Well-being

A state characterized by positive emotions, effective functioning, and a sense of life satisfaction.

Displacement Theory

An explanation for loss of well-being proposing that a new activity displaces or substitutes for an old healthy activity, causing the healthy benefits of the old activity to be lost.

Goldilocks Hypothesis

The idea that too little technology deprives young people of important social information and peer pursuits, while too much technology displaces other meaningful activities.

Impression Formation Processes

How individuals use information about a person to form an understanding of who they are and how they will behave.

Impression Management Processes

How individuals attempt to influence other people's opinions or understandings of them.

Self-Presentation

A process in which people use statements, behaviors, or other strategies to convey an impression to others that is beneficial to their interests.

Self-Disclosure

A process in which people share authentic information with a partner, hoping that the partner will show understanding, care, validation, and acceptance.

Actual Self

The self representing who a person really is, which is the easiest to maintain.

Ideal Self

The self representing who a person aspires to be, which attracts new relationships and facilitates deeper bonds over values and goals.

Ought Self

The self representing who others expect a person to be, which maintains favor, status, and reputation within a social group.

Hyper-personal Model

A model proposing that when interacting over mediated communication where non-verbal cues are filtered out, people often make more extreme judgments about others than they would face-to-face.

Overattribution

A component of the hyper-personal model where people jump to broad conclusions about a person based on limited information.

Selective Self-Presentation

The deliberate presentation of only those cues that support the specific impression an individual wants others to hold.

Behavioral Confirmation

The tendency for people to try to maintain an established behavior or impression once it has been formed, even if extreme.

Social Comparison

The process of observing close peers to understand how others perceive us and whether we are meeting expectations or succeeding relative to group values.

Social Information Processing

The process wherein individuals recursively adapt their self-presentation to match prevailing impression formation norms.

Recursive Norms

A feedback loop of conformity where individuals follow and exaggerate social norms because others do, creating an ongoing cycle of mutual influence.

Warranting

A way of demonstrating or justifying that a self-claim is true, which is most effective when the evidence is hard to fake.

Cues Given

Information intentionally selected and explicitly communicated by an individual.

Cues Given Off

Information unintentionally emitted or forthcoming from an individual's presence or behavior.

Interior Residue

Cues given off by an individual's own behavior or private spaces, such as body language or room cleanliness.

Exterior Residue

Cues given off about an individual by others, such as statements or feedback from friends.

Weak Warrants

Cues given that are easy to fake or manipulate by the individual making the claim.

Strong Warrants

Cues given off that are not chosen or easily manipulated by the individual, functioning as reliable signals.

The Productivity Paradox

The phenomenon where transformative new technologies are widely visible in society but fail to show up in economic productivity statistics.

Task Coordination

The aspect of group interaction focused on whether everyone knows what actions to perform and when to perform them.

Group Cohesion

A group's overall ability to work together, reflecting their unity, mutual trust, commitment, and strength of relationships.

Law of Propinquity

The principle stating that individuals communicate more frequently with people who are geographically closer to them.

Social Facilitation

The improvement in performance on simple or well-learned tasks caused by the presence of others.

Social Inhibition

The reduction in performance on unlearned or complex tasks caused by the presence of others.

Mere Exposure Effect

The psychological phenomenon where people develop more favorable feelings toward individuals or stimuli they recognize from previous exposure.

Spontaneous Interaction

Unplanned, chance encounters outside of routine task settings that yield rich cues, foster trust, and allow informal status monitoring.

Shared Social Settings

Physical or virtual spaces defined by clear boundaries and normative expectations that provide common ground and promote group identity.

Moral Panic

A sudden and excessive feeling of alarm or fear affecting a group of people, leading to extravagant or injudicious efforts to secure safety.

Systematic Review

A comprehensive scientific report that compiles and synthesizes findings across numerous studies on a specific topic over time.

Cost of Complexity

The principle that as the number of factors requiring consideration increases, the speed of processing or execution decreases.