Tim Berners-Lee
Date: 2022-13-29, last change: $Date: 2023/04/14 15:07:59 $
Status: personal view only. Editing status: first draft - work in progress.

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The Intimacy Gradient

A city has public places where I can do all kinds of things, and also a private house with a private room which may be by myself. In that house there are spaces where I do things with family, friends, colleagues. The web must like a well-designed building, provide a gradient of intimacy between the private and the public, so I can easily recognize the difference, easily know which I am in, and easily welcome people to come into the more intimate areas. Our Solid tools should respect these ideas.


Data in our lives ranges across the Data Spectrum, from data which is completely public, to very personal, private, data. Most of the data in between, where is shared with various people. The web must accommodate this range by providing places and features which span the spectrum. If in our systems we cater for only the public and only the private extremes, we miss out most of our lives! Most of our lives involve doing things with combinations of different sized groups of people. (Is this best when it is Fractal?)

A city has public places where I can do all kinds of things, and also a private house with a private room which may be by myself. In that house there are spaces where I do things with family, friends, colleagues.

The web too must like a well-designed building, provide a gradient of intimacy between the private and the public, so I can easily recognize the difference, easily know which I am in, and easily welcome people to come into the more intimate parts, as I want.

Pattern 125 of A Pattern Language says:

Conflict: Unless the spaces in a building are arranged in a sequence which corresponds to their degrees of privacy the visits made by strangers, friends, guests, clients, family, will always be a little awkward.

Resolution: Layout the spaces of a building so that they create a sequence which begins with the entrance and the most public parts of the building, then leads into the slightly more private areas, and finally to the most private domains.


A simple way to start making an intimacy gradient on the web is with style. The W3C website has had a variety of documents with different levels of access, but there a bunch which are public, member-only (accessible to those affiliated with W3C member companies), or team-only (accessible to W3C staff). We have had the convention that the background colors of these are white, pale blue, or straw, respectively. For one thing, for security, anyone looking at a page will know who they can and cannot share things with.

(We still had a problem with people mailing non-public things to public groups, and so we started a convention that public group names should contain the work "public-" in the name of the email address as a warning. Mail clients don't color the background of a message you are composing as a function of how large the audience is your are addressing - bit perhaps they could!)

Most email lists, also, are public or member or team distribution, and so the web archives of those lists use the same colors.

In the world of Solid Pods we are designing with the Solid Operating System, your pod has public things (like your profile), private things (like your settings and preferences), and also things you share with arbitrary groups and combinations of groups. We felt that it would be important to be able to be able to control the colors of the public profile as people in general often want to be proud of their profile, and be happy to direct others to it, and so on. Linked-in profiles are definitely like this, twitter and Instagram too. Remember myspace? Very much the places people want to control as their public image. So we allow you to specify a highlight color and background color for your profile. And this color you can also pick up when representing the person elsewhere in the web.

However, thinking about both intimacy gradients and the different styles of the W3C web site, surely we should not stop there but make sure we think about the style of the private places too. Both make the default user experience is intimate places one which respects that inimcy, but also allow users to control it.

For some of the time, the emphasis will be on the creative self-expression of the Solid profile as a myspace account. But other times the solid project gives a safe place to put personal data which they want to keep private. So let's make the private parts of a pod feel like a home.

Let's make the private parts of a pod feel like a home in many senses. In the sense that I feel secure there. In the sense that I am in charge. I need to be able to arrange all my private stuff in a way that suits me. Pick my own styles that make me feel good in that home. Allow me to file everything alphabetically if it works for me, or by date, this my home. With Solid, you can chose the apps you use for different things. So that gives you more control than just style -- it allows you to take a developer's creative ideas about how you might to be when you are at home, which you might not even have thought of.

So there is private stuff, public stuff, and shared suff on your pod. Your solid world also involves the pods of organizations -- like projects, families, companies -- which you collaborate through. So whether the you are looking for something or bookmarking something, for example, there will be private and pulic places in each community as well as your own places.

What is the intimicy gradient a gradient in, exacly? In what dimension? We started offf thinking about background colors, but clearly any different elements of what goes into a theme - fonts, and so on. What other things do you want to be different between intimate and less intimate spaces? Perhaps other settings, like the extent to which a system protects you from making a mistake, or the extent to which facts are checked as true.

Because the initimiicy gradient is a pervasive property of the solid ecosystem, it has to be designed by everyone coding up each piece of it to be aware of where in the spectrum, where in the intimcy gradient this particular interaction falls, and coding appropriately. We can start by picking up key colors from the user's preferences, and from the preferences of communties they are interacting in.


References

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Tim BL