In Pursuit of Constructive Communication: Designing Tools to Support Development of Constructive Communication Metrics

Margaret A. Hughes, Brandon C. Roy, Deb Roy

Abstract: Toxic polarization on social media as well as growing intensity of in-person civic debates have sparked a renewed energy within civic communication spaces to design healthy venues for deliberation and discourse in the public sphere. Emerging work explores how we might define, measure, and evaluate constructiveness of communication, and through practice, it is clear that apart from the topic and style of contribution, how participants engage in relationship to one another is key. Do they build upon what others have said, offer new ideas, impact other’s contributions? With such complexity is an opportunity ripe for design intervention and exploration. In this paper, we present our conversation visualization tool to support our development of constructive communication metrics. We explore responsivity between participants as a measure of constructive communication, and discuss implications of exploring relationship in metrics and visualization of conversation.