Translucent Privacy

Abstract

Shared spaces such as shared housing and open-plan offices provide opportunities for communication and collaboration but also introduce challenges to individual privacy. In these environments, occupants continuously interpret one another’s social cues to coordinate behaviors, yet differences in cultural background and communication style can lead to privacy misalignments. This dissertation investigates how systems can support individual privacy in shared spaces by facilitating mutual understanding through social translucence—a framework emphasizing visibility, awareness, and accountability as the basis for social coordination. Adopting a Research through Design (RtD) approach, this study explores the application and extension of the Social Translucence Framework to privacy management across three design cases. Based on insights from related work, four design strategies were developed to guide the design of systems. Each case was evaluated through a three-week field study conducted in real shared environments, revealing how the proposed design strategies were manifested in practice and how they shaped occupants’ coordination and privacy-related experiences. The findings demonstrate that translucence- based systems can support the negotiation of social boundaries and foster awareness of others’ needs in shared spaces. Building on these insights, the dissertation proposes an Extended Social Translucence Framework for Privacy, outlining design considerations regarding what and how to visualize information, and how to balance individual responsibility and system-level intervention. This work contributes (1) empirical insights into how translucence-based systems affect privacy experiences in everyday social contexts, (2) practical design strategies for developing privacy-supportive interfaces in shared environments, and (3) an extended theoretical framework for understanding and designing social translucence for privacy.