This chapter constitutes a possible blueprint or framework from which applications which would support trust-enabling shared contexts might be developed. The principles on which this framework is based are those which derive from insights gained in the five studies described in chapters 4-8. In the most general terms, these have to do with the kinds of information people deem relevant in different contexts and the amount of information they feel is necessary. Broadly, I aim to show that the amount and type of information people use varies considerably from context to context, but is fairly consistently applied within a context. In design terms, unless specific applications are to be built for each different context in which trust is an issue, then there is arguably a justification for ‘meta level’ approaches which facilitate contextual behaviours by allowing them to be built by participants. This is what is meant by enabling trust. Trustors and trustees build, negotiate and define trust on their own terms. By way of example, rather than assuming that familiarity is the key to trust, we recognise that it may or may not be and allow participants to build appropriate models of familiarity and unfamiliarity into their online interactions. In this chapter, I provide some detail concerning the principles upon which a trust-enabling shared context generator (see e.g., Twidale et al. 1994) might work. As an initial discussion into how to enable trust from an interactive design perspective, the shortcomings of this framework are discussed in section 10.5. For instance, the notion of risk deserves more consideration than can be offered at this point.
As mentioned in the introduction, Marsh and Dibben (2003) argue that many researchers respond to the subjective nature of trust by exploring how trust can be distilled into a formula. What follows is not an exercise in variable analysis but, in keeping with what has been suggested above, an attempt to produce ‘sensitising concepts’ (Blumer 1954) which may guide but not determine design decisions. Trust remains an obdurate problem not least because of the many different assumptions made about it and the fact that there is a sense in which everyone is an expert (Marsh 1994). Arguably, these problems are magnified by the fact that opportunities for online interactions among people who are otherwise strangers are magnified almost daily. This has led to attempts to formalise trust on
the basis of reputation, for instance. Thus, Abdul-Rahmann and Hailes (2000) describe how agents in a virtual community can judge another’s opinion via reputation and fine-tune their trust reading. Gonçalves et al.’s (2009) work explores how trading reputation information can help users to decide whether to share information and other resources in a digital environment. The nuances of reputation as a means to judge trust, for instance, problems of dishonest manipulation of information, are discussed by Gal-Oz et al. (2010). Moreover, detail about how to provide users with a sense of security and reliability in environments where security is a major issue is the focus of Murayama et al.’s research (2010). The problem here, as indicated in the five studies outlined above, is that reputation is considerably more important in some contexts than in others, and is constituted in different ways (e.g. narratively). Put simply, reputation is a loaded word. In organisational contexts, for instance, it is entirely possible that a ‘good’ reputation for one person (e.g. someone working in a managerial capacity) may be another’s ‘bad’ reputation (‘toady’; ‘yes man’). A similar argument can be applied to any of the standard terms applied in the trust literature. The point I am trying to establish is that terms like trust, familiarity, reputation, risk, continuity, security, privacy and so on are meaningless outside of the context of their application. The path explored here is that of identifying the dimensions along which trust decisions typically are made within specific contexts and how to produce a generic trust-enabling framework that allows us to consider these variations. For instance, in chapter 7, the film professionals’ project, participants drew attention to similar areas of a document as places where information might be ‘trustable’ or not. While they agreed on the relevance of certain texts, they did not necessarily agree on their significance as they applied different value systems when assessing them. This is the motivating force for developing shared contexts that give participants the tools they need to draw conclusions on their own terms. How then might these tools be constituted?
By tapping into the processes by which people establish and maintain trust and distrust, we can design elements into digital environments that trust-enable. The trick for design is to build in the relatively structured ways used by participants to form trust, but then allow the participants to configure and
appropriate a design to suit their individual priorities (in response to negotiation with others in the environment). A shared context offers this opportunity. The design sets the basic ‘playing field’ but it is up to the participant to shape the interactions. The explorations undertaken in Part 2 reveal the dimensions along which trust formation processes develop.
The shared-context framework outlined below makes two-way trust enablement possible, allowing for the positions of trustor and trustee to emerge as part of what Strauss et al. (1963) call a ‘negotiated order’. The research of Dolšak and Ostrom (2003) is useful here. They propose rules and principles about how to create environments in the context of public administration that allow individuals and communities to negotiate over matters of importance. They point out that when rules are ‘devised’ by those who will be using them, the rule design tends to be highly appropriate to the nature of the environment users are working within, users are more likely to recognise and understand the rule, and more users are likely to accept the rule constraints.
10.1 Affordances for familiarity
As reviewed in chapter 9, underlying the processes of trust is the dimension of familiarity. Researchers such as Fukuyama (1995) and Uslaner (2004) argue that people prefer to trust those with whom they share values or group membership. Nooteboom (2004), however, sees the process as being about inferring underlying motives rather than needing to share or agree with the perspective of the other. More fruitful for my purposes is the idea that the undertaking of the process itself can beget a relationship of trust (Luhmann 1979). The aim of this trust-enabling shared context is to allow users to build familiarity on their own terms, where necessary, and also to cross ‘gaps’ – to allow one to understand the perspective of another without any implication that this will result in agreement, or indeed trust. Sometimes those interacting in a digital environment may have needs that are in conflict (Dolšak et al. 2003, p. 338). The design elements described in this chapter are affordances and configurations that aim to build dimensions along which the relevances of familiarity can be gauged. An affordance (originally Gibson 1977) is a type of functionality in a design, which allows a user to interact with an