We take as our premise that it is possible and desirable to design systems that support social processes. We describe Loops, a project which takes this approach to supporting computer-mediated communication (CMC) through structural and intemctive properties such as persistence and a minimalist graphical representation of users and their activities that we call a social proxy. We discuss a prototype called Babble that has been used by our group for over a year, and has been deployed to six other groups at the Watson labs for about two months. We describe usage experiences, lessons learned, and next steps.

The Interface Construction Set (InterCONS) is a visual language and environment. It consists of: a data flow language; an editor for building and testing data flow programs, and for making presentation views of the programs; libraries for holding completed programs; and a presentation system for interacting with finished programs and sequences of programs.