social media | Semantic Foundry

The Hyper-Social Design Studio

May 26, ’11 8:47 AM

Hyper-Social Design Studio Overview

A thoroughly new remix technique: combining a focused UX Book Club idea with Design Studio Methodology. Starting with the book “The Hyper-Social Organization“, participants including designers (service, experience, interaction, organization), creative technologist, strategists and product managers will read the book. On the day of the studio, each partipant will present key concepts to one chapter, having only 5 minutes to do so, with no more than 5 slides in power point. After a quick break, participants will break into teams and explore concepts introduced in the book to a specific business case study and have a limited amount of time to explore, ideate, sketch and deliver innovative solutions to the problem space which is broken into seven separate functions within an organization.

Saturday, Fall 2011 1PM – 530PM

Location: SoHo, New York City

Price: Free, but a commitment is required.

Interested? Contact me

Schedule

100 – 115 Introductions

115 – 230 Lightening Presentations: 5 Minutes, no more than 5 slides (template to be provided) All slides due 1 week before Saturday

230 – 245 Break

245 – 300 Game Storming – Intro to 3 techniques

300 – 400 Design Studio

One case study will be presented – a company with background information on their structure, management, customers, and suppliers. Additional information about the company’s brand and product lines, as well existing customer touch points will be presented as background material. All teams of 2 will break off to take that shared problem space and use design studio to explore potential solutions enframed by their topic area, i.e. PR, Product, Innovation, Leadership, Customer Service, Sales, etc. Each team will, at the end of the time, present designed artifacts of processes, concepts, and strategies to the problem space using the book as the framework.

415 – 5PM Team Presentations

Post Mortem and Lessons Learned.

Goals

Gain a solid understanding of the book, especially the SEAMS Framework
A collaborative exploration of the problem space
Explore a framework for organizational change addressing multiple vectors
Design compelling and differentiated product solutions

Considerations

All Slides from Lightening Round will be combined into 1 Power Point deck and socialized on Slideshare.

All Designed Artifacts from Design Studio will be captured and posted online.

Session will be photographed.

Still Interested? Contact me

Background on The Hyper-Social Organization

The book starts with a simple explanation: “Human 1.0″ is the way that people have interacted and worked together for thousands of years. Only recently (the last few decades) information technology has forced people into working in much more constrained ways. Mass media brought the rise of companies that communicated with the masses through a corporate voice, which has had the advantage in telling people what they want and what they can have. Social media flips the mode, and brings us back to communicating one-on-one. This is not a new way of working, it is actually the original way that people worked, it is just that social media allows this to happen on a scale never before contemplated. A Hyper-Social organization is a return to the natural way of interacting, which is why the authors make a compelling argument that it is inevitable.

After the introduction, the first half provides four pillars of hyper-social society:

Forget market segments. These were just constructs to allow corporations to coordinate their approach, offerings and message to the market. Instead, you need to think about tribes and humans. A tribe is a group that identifies in some way with each other, and will be the most important way of influencing purchasing patterns. Identifying tribes is the secret to success.
Forget company centricity, and think human centricity. Hyper-social organization can be more personal at all levels, and engage customers to focus on and satisfy their needs directly.
Forget information channels, and think about knowledge networks. Companies could prepare mass market messages to push through well known channels such as media and events. This communication was the only option that the consumer had, and corporations could control what the public knows. But in a social world the customer already has contacts to other members of the tribe, already is finding out accurate information about your products from others online. Pushing a company line will not work. Instead, share knowledge well, and work to gain trust.
Forget process and hierarchies, and embrace social messiness. They recommend something they call SEAMS: sensing, engaging, activating, measuring, and storytelling. The processes will be less and less pre-defined, but embrace that, and allow people in the organization to interact as humans.

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Designing for Sociality in Enterprise Search

Dec 1, ’09 4:25 PM

A few weeks ago, I was able to collaborate with Brynn Evans in creating a presentation for Enterprise Search Summit West. Here is the description of the presentation as well as links to the original on SlideShare.

Social search has the potential to improve search practices beyond what is possible with traditional informational retrieval algorithms. Two different models of social search should be incorporated into enterprise and conventional search systems today. Collective Search involves aggregating social metadata, trends, and previous tags, bookmarks, or information shared by social networks. Collaborative Search, or question-answering, occurs when two or more participants actively engage in an information seeking task. Interactions include everything from replying to a one-time question to dually negotiating the query formation and relevancy of specific results to arrive at a shared consensus of best fit.

This talk will frame the relevant models of social search in the context of Brynn’s research, and discuss the potential benefits for both users as well as organizations. We will extend these trends and findings to concrete design considerations that we encourage system designers to consider in order to leverage social search capabilities within the enterprise.

Designing for Sociality in Enterprise Search

Complete notes and citations were done by Brynn and everything can be found here.

Just got a nice review in EContent Magazine.

Fittingly, the ESS West track ended on Thursday with “Designing for Sociality in Enterprise Search,” presented by Will Evans, director of experience design, Semantic Foundry and researcher and author Brynn Evans (no relation. The duo delivered a highly conversational presentation about social interaction design, or what they call “SxD,” in a truly interactive way. As a team, they explored the various stages or manifestations of social search and provided a graphic look into its potential impact in the enterprise, revealing ideas about a potential engine and how it might work; incorporating things like “friend filtered search,” “social scents,” and even a suggestion box that says something like “You seem to be having trouble, would you like to ask your network for help?”

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Abstractions of Ctrl: Post(ing) Self-Similarity in Network Publics

Mar 14, ’09 6:04 PM

Syntax, dear friend, writhes as you do;
for to write is to choose at cross-roads — both true

And so I, @semanticwill, begin the “Post(ing) Self-Similarity,” series of poetic tapestry. This all started when I was thinking about pervasive control systems through mediated experience and pharmacology; the panopticon has been torn down and replaced with far more pervasive mechanisms of control through surveillance, mediation, medication; talking points replacing discourse, which started as this piece and a reaction to Adrian Chan’s post “Post Writing: Social Self, Private Self, Post(ing) Self,” and was carried out as far as my brain could free-associate, (if nothing else, perhaps we rip off the skin and peer into Will’s thought-processing (as it reacts,relates to/for), of various discussions on Twitter, and think that) modes of social interaction within the comments on the web 2.0 blog which become art, itself – relational aesthetics – symbolic tokens of signification gifted back and forth. There is an idea (if I break out, I am slip-streaming this evening — don’t expect epiphany here, or redemption, I offer nothing), You know it – I’ve been, perhaps through shear force of will, trying to unlock, accelerate the quality of the author-author inter-subjective collaboration through the intra-comments dialogue because that is where the real juice can be, hopefully, eventually – where a real stress testing of ideas can happen, perhaps, or at least something more substantive that mutual masturbation circle-jerking or mimetic emulating, emulation - setting each other on fire for some cause,

Dispersive simulation catalyzed
By melding techne with consciousness
Necessitates a new metaphysics.
Simply – technology is not the ideology itself,
as the futurists claim.

Techne becomes invisible, but not in the transition from discipline (panopticon) ala Derrida, to “C”ontrol per se, Techne shorting the distancing further than MCluhan ever thought possible. But more than shortening the distance (some think technology as a distancing tool), but it can provide a mechanism for a tighter integration of ideas, a glass arcade of inter-subjective interaction between authors, objects, pro-sumers in a strange loop. Maybe. Brain stem hasn’t received enough caffeine this morning.

But, [T]echnology is absolutely, 100 percent, The rapid flowering of ‘Californian ideology’?, in positivist concept of human evolution, drew on a long tradition which Leo Marx aptly termed the ‘technological sublime’. Sublime my ass, one function may be served by the short-circuit of the ‘new economy’ in the dot.com bust of 2001 is that it at least cleared some space for a more nuanced assessment of digital culture away and we see things as they are instead of some manifest utopia. I am that man of the crux; I photograph (see Benjamin) an image, Marx had almost nothing to say about the impact of technology on culture – a lacuna that Walter Benjamin generously attributes to the fact that capitalism was in its ‘infancy’ when Marx undertook his analysis. Benjamin’s ‘Artwork’ essay (2003), written during his exile in Paris between 1935 and 1939 (if you don’t own Benjamin Illuminations – buy it now, just for that article famously takes up the impact of ‘technological reproduction in the cultural realm).

In effect, Benjamin theorizes what Vertov’s ‘Man with the Movie Camera’ had sought to enact, positing a privileged relation between film and the demand to comprehend the illusionary nature of film (illusory nature of comments on an article as projection device) a technologically transformed world (the flowering of a simulated world between authors). For second degree; it is the result of editing (but not interaction), (how many times do you edit your live work? Re-post comments?). For Benjamin, the ‘second degree’ illusion of film shooting by the specially adjusted montage corresponds to profound changes in social photographic device and the assembly of experience as the industrial city displaced ‘nature’ as the primary lived environment. What first appears in that shot with others of the same kind. The equipment-free aspect of reality has here his 1927 essay on Russian film as the ‘dynamite of become the height of artifice, and the the fraction of a second’ becomes the ‘optical uncovision of immediate reality the Blue Flower subconscious’ of the 1930s, a technological lever capable of in the land of technology. (Benjamin, liberating the masses from the prison-house of the industrial city). However, I was thinking that it is a mistake to assume, as Mark Poster (1995) does with his ‘second media age’, that Benjamin was unswervingly positive towards ‘new media’ because he saw the shifting capability in the new medium. Film’s ‘shock’ capacity is intensely ambivalent: as much as it can blow everyday reality apart to reveal its hidden springs, it can also render the fragments indifferent to history. Cinema thus occupies a crucial place in the dialectical movement of history: it is both a symptom of the hold of modern technology over consciousness and a lever for unlocking that hold, and of course at the end we know the pervasive control systems that current media instantiate (shared hallucination of fear created by 24-hour news channels, as the most glaring example).

This ambivalence is apparent in the more sanguine formulation of cinema Benjamin offered in ‘Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, written in 1939 alongside the final version of the ‘Artwork’ essay:

There came a day when a new and urgent need for stimuli was met by film. In a film, perception conditioned by shock [chockförmige Wahrnehmung] was established as a formal principle. What determines the rhythm of production on a conveyor belt is the same thing that underlies the rhythm of reception of film. (2003: 328), and of course what is needed is a new formulation that deals with the emergence of ‘reality tv’ as a form of simulated-relative shock chair whose induced fabricated discomfort and anxiety achieves it’s intended e/a-ffect which is to render the viewing catatonic and drooling.

Here film, and its most recent incarnation as broadcast tv is aligned, not with the dynamiting of the social world by revealing its ‘optical unconscious’, but with the system of industrial training systems (but with industrial removed and replaced with ‘service industry’). Benjamin draws on Marx’s comparison between ‘training’ and ‘practice’: where practice depends on skills acquired over time from experience, training depends upon the strict division of labour and the fragmentation of work tasks. For Marx (cited by Benjamin, 2003: 329) the unskilled worker on the assembly line ‘does not make use of the working conditions. The working conditions make use of the worker.’

Post(ing) Self-Similarity

Syntax, dear friend,

writhes as you do;

for to write is to choose at the cross-roads

both true,

and untrue; and I doubt my love,

just as I, mimetic desire

that your love bleed over my face,

set me aflame,

scorch my body with searing, woe and turbulence

so my mind might

being confined in penitence prison

I come to read the signs,

across your printed skin

and know itself to be a lexicon,

of outspoken sin.

The political ambiguity of media thus turns on whether its radical impact – its capacity to break the world into fragments, dismantling old patterns and enabling new relationships to be imagined – will be reduced to another mode for industrial training of the senses. For Benjamin, this is finally not so much a question of the formal process of fragmentation, as Adorno feared, but a question of meaning. Can ‘distracted’ perception generate collective meaning capable of entering individual experience, and thus become the conscious basis for recognition of the conditions of one’s existence and self-creation process?

This ambiguity, described in 1927 by Benjamin’s contemporary Siegfried Kracauer as ‘the go-for-broke game of history’, is helpful in situating the ambivalence of the ‘global information society’ orchestrated by contemporary digital networks. On the one hand, technologically mediated ‘flows’ radically undermine the traditional social consequences of space and place; on the other hand, as Sassen observes, new information technologies are integral to the emergence of ‘global cities’, which concentrate command and control functions in the global economy. This produces radically uneven spatial textures in which intimacy at a distance (think about the perceived level of intimacy on Twitter between people who have never met) is juxtaposed to the disjunction of physically proximate areas and the virtual exile of communities lacking appropriate technology and resources (the digital divide has widened into the grand canyon), which brings us back to Chan:

“in the gap between the act of posting and the post itself, there seems to me to be a gap of presence. A juxtaposition of here and now, and there and elsewhere, that coincides with the act of youtubing a concert live. Why do we do it (use social media), and for whom, if and when the medium is built on a radical uncertainty of presence: a gap composed of parts discontinuity, distraction, and disconnection?” ~gravity7, Post Writing: Social Self, Private Self, Post(ing) Self

In the same ambivalent vein, decentralized person-to-person communication offers significant structural challenges to the media and communication forms that dominated the 20th century, yet ‘the technologies of freedom’ celebrated by de Sola because he was doing anything unusual or Pool (1983) are produced by corporate oligopolies deviant. . . . Data-gathering is routine, whose scale and global reach is unprecedented, and generalized, and distributed across almost every sphere of daily life. (Lyon, 2003: is matched at every step by the extension of personal 97) surveillance even with the “radical uncertainty of presence.” New media networks enabled the rapid coordination of rolling global political campaigns against war in Iraq, yet the health of workers making computer chips, like the disposal of old First World computer equipment in the developing world, remains largely invisible. And, despite the pervasive rhetoric of freedom, the potential of peer-to-peer networks is being reshaped in the wake of Napster via a combination of technological and legal patches designed to protect existing content owners, who are fast shifting consumers to lucrative time-based licensing models of consumption. Again, technology tooled for subversion is appropriated into the system as a new instantiation of control systems by the media oligopolies – which we see right now with the proliferation of social media “experts,” attempting to teach those media conglomerates how to co-opt the subversive nature of talk on twitter to carpet bomb the memespace of constructed identities within the social networks.

In Gilles Deleuze’s terms the digital era represents a shift from ‘disciplinary’ to ‘control’ societies (and now we come full circle back to the idea of mediated | medicated). Where disciplinary societies depended on moulds, physical structures such as Bentham’s panoptic architecture, control societies operate by modulation, a flexible form of active molding defined by the ubiquity of digital information. Yet the flood of information that characterizes digital culture is both the extension of control and the possibility of its disruption. The crucial issue is still the threshold Benjamin identified as a consequence of the techno- the old sovereign societies worked with logical destruction of aura: how to develop a ‘politics’ simple machines, levers, pulleys, clocks; commensurate to technological modernity, so that but recent disciplinary societies were information can be made meaningful, not just as the equipped with thermodynamic machines stance of isolated individuals but as a collective presenting the passive danger of entropy understanding capable of entering individual experience the active danger of sabotage; control presence of the technologically transformed world. The societies function with a third generation widespread and unfulfilled demand for a new social-of machines, with information technology extending beyond the confined technological and computers, where the passive danger boundaries of the market is registered in the is noise and the active, piracy and viral advertising strategies of mobile phone companies, as contamination. Much as in contemporary art, which can be characterized in terms of ‘relational aesthetics’ manifested in the emergence of artworks which are no longer objects or images but modes of social connection and interaction on Twitter. (oh shit, here it comes), so I’ll leave it with this stream of consciousness, since I seem to be losing traction here:

“caught in the cuts of life, The end of man
often lies at hand, his tribal voice cut out
but whereof can one
not speak? It is on the table;
it is in my grasp;
it has soaked into the carpet. As a man,
my permission opens me aimlessly:
I move my mouth and walk therein,
stride with confidence into a the empty room
of my detachment,

I            swallowed hard the whole bottle of your silence
and slipped into the cup of a nightingale’s tear—

Will    memories of your touch, will

you become my fragrant flash of searing pain,
my dusted desire to be right up against it

Feeding       —     on tears of sight,
pull the blinds, hidden beying veils of disguise
beneath the covers, one leg stretches
beside a leg outstretched, These dance and meld, and
should point recursively back to relatively simple declarative sentences,

“Emersive simulation catalyzed by melding techne with conciousness”

state their assertions and are done with it,

but as lines of verse they are just begging for

some leg room, or for some breathing space.

It’s tempting to conjecture,

that “feeding on tears of sight” are here reflected in the caesurae,

but if that is indeed the case, the effect is entirely (in-betweening), no

rhythmic division is enhanced, more conflation, no, more on that later,

thinking that I want my enjambements to be like tourniquets, cutting off the blood,

or, rather,

the breath of this streaming, no?”

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The Social Software Primer: 13 Books You Must Read

Mar 1, ’09 10:21 AM

“To design an interaction you must commit to writing a narrative of human behavior mediated through time and space.”

To discuss social media strategy in the context of design choices affecting application design, functions, as well as user-centricity in social media design, the unique attributes of online communication which can only steer individual and aggregate engagement within the social network through cues, incentives and community enforced social norms must be well understood. Further, to discuss strategy and design patterns in social media site architecture/design and their impact on human behavior requires at the very least a general understanding of the writing on topics concerning sociology, social networking theory, anthropology and marketing. Taken one step further — to adequately advise companies seeking to leverage social media effectively as part of their customer communications and marketing strategy requires a rigorous, and not haphazard understanding of these new channels – attributes unique to them, because they are social in nature.

Until now, at least, I have not seen a list compiled of essential reading. Many people herald themselves and promote others as ‘experts’ and ‘gurus’ when it comes to social software, social media, and the design of strategies, platforms and solutions around these topics for enterprises and government entitites. I thought to myself that this expertise must be born of something more significant and tangible than simply writing a blog about the topic, or having a vast number of connections (friends?) on Facebook or Twitter. I needed some metric, some standard by which I could discern charlatans from strategists. This is my measuring stick. When I rant/rage/ruminate about social media douchebags, I should define my terms and set my standards. This list is an effort to do so. You certainly don’t need to read these – but these are how I measure. To toss around social media douchebag with no standard by which to hurl such an accusation would be as intellectually bankrupt as those that would seek to raid the coffers of well-meaning companies without the skill, passion, or empathy required to deliver real results. This is my list. This is my yard stick.

Needless to say, I just included the Amazon.com reviews or descriptions for lack of time, but all these come highly recommended. These are definite (actually – not quite, but this is all I have read) – these are the shit!

If you have recommendations to add to this list – please chime in, because it’s important. This list is a living organism that must be fed.

13 Books You Must Read – Social Software, Social Networks and Social Media Primer

Designing for the Social Web (Voices That Matter)

Joshua Porter

Designing for the Social Web

Description: Josh is a web designer, researcher, and writer living in Newburyport, MA, USA. He run a web design and consulting company called Bokardo Design. From Amazon: No matter what type of web site or application you’re building, social interaction among the people who use it will be key to its success. They will talk about it, invite their friends, complain, sing its high praises, and dissect it in countless ways. With the right design strategy you can use this social interaction to get people signing up, coming back regularly, and bringing others into the fold. With tons of examples from real-world interfaces and a touch of the underlying social psychology theory, Joshua Porter shows you how to design your next great social web application.

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Electronic Tribes: The Virtual Worlds of Geeks, Gamers, Shamans, and Scammers

by Tyrone L. Adams (Editor), Stephen A. Smith (Editor)

Electronic Tribes

Review: The major contribution of this book is that the idea of ‘tribe’ is fully and robustly explicated in ways that challenge existing wisdom, particularly the idea that Internet users are best understood as communities. . . . The richness of diverse research resources is evident in every chapter. I particularly commend the editors on the international perspective and the inclusion of such a surprising array of subcultures. (H. L. Goodall Jr., Director, Hugh Downs School of Human Communication, Arizona State University )

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First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game

by Noah Wardrip-Fruin

First Person

Review: “You have entered the rotunda of a gleaming, new conference center. Above you hangs a banner: ‘Welcome to First Person.’ In front of you, you see doors leading into separate conference rooms, each of which is marked with a sign in large, Futura Bold letters: ‘Cyberdrama, ‘ ‘Ludology, ‘ ‘Simulation, ‘ ‘Hypertext and Interactives, ‘ and so on. You soon discover that every room in this virtual conference called First Person is filled with informed discussion and lively controversy from major figures in the emerging field of Game Studies. Some are arguing that digital games (as the heirs of the novel and of film) constitute the next great arena for storytelling; others respond that games are not narratives at all and require a different theoretical framework and a new discipline. Still others are describing their own exciting contributions to interactive fiction, poetry, or visual/verbal art. By the time you return from this virtual tour of the world of Game Studies, you realize that all of these rooms (and all these topics) are connected in an intricate and compelling architecture of ideas. You begin to understand the rich possibilities that computer games offer . . . as drama, narrative, and simulation. You come to appreciate the great theoretical task that lies before us in exploring both the formal properties and the cultural significance of computer games.” –Jay David Bolter, Wesley Professor of New Media, Georgia Institute of Technology

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Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies

by Charlene Li, Josh Bernoff

Groundswell

Description: Corporate executives are struggling with a new trend: people using online social technologies (blogs, social networking sites, YouTube, podcasts) to discuss products and companies, write their own news, and find their own deals. This groundswell is global, it s unstoppable, it affects every industry and it s utterly foreign to the powerful companies running things now.
When consumers you ve never met are rating your company s products in public forums with which you have no experience or influence, your company is vulnerable. In Groundswell, Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff of Forrester, Inc. explain how to turn this threat into an opportunity.

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Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means

by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi

Linked

Review: How is the human brain like the AIDS epidemic? Ask physicist Albert-László Barabási and he’ll explain them both in terms of networks of individual nodes connected via complex but understandable relationships. Linked: The New Science of Networks is his bright, accessible guide to the fundamentals underlying neurology, epidemiology, Internet traffic, and many other fields united by complexity. Barabási’s gift for concrete, non-mathematical explanations and penchant for eccentric humor would make the book thoroughly enjoyable even if the content weren’t engaging. But the results of Barabási’s research into the behavior of networks are deeply compelling. Not all networks are created equal, he says, and he shows how even fairly robust systems like the Internet could be crippled by taking out a few super-connected nodes, or hubs. His mathematical descriptions of this behavior are helping doctors, programmers, and security professionals design systems better suited to their needs. Linked presents the next step in complexity theory–from understanding chaos to practical applications.

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Networked Publics

by Kazys Varnelis

Networked Publics

Review: “Networked Publics is a lucid, timely, and broadly interdisciplinary look at the most important technological and social change of our time: the sudden wiring and un-wiring of the planet into a broadband network, with communication devices in the pockets of a significant proportion of the world’s population. There is very little that is more important, more discussed, and less widely understood than the meaning of the emerging technosocial networks that are adopting digital media for a wide range of social, cultural, political, and economic ends. Bringing together an interdisciplinary team of anthropologists, economists, educators, designers, political scientists, computer scientists, legal and policy experts—the Networked Publics group—was the only way to try to capture the meaning of a phenomenon that is interdisciplinary by its nature. The team project blog was a beacon of clear thinking while the project was in progress, and the book is a sound foundation for debates about what networked publics mean, how they can be encouraged, how they should be regulated, how to protect against their dangerous aspects.”
—Howard Rheingold, author of Smartbombs: The Next Social Revolution

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The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

by Erving Goffman

The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

Description: A study of human behavior in social situations and the way we appear to others. Dr. Goffman has employed as a framework the metaphor of theatrical performance. Discussions of social techniques are based upon detailed research and observation of social customs in many regions.

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Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age (Open Market Edition)

by Duncan J. Watts

Six Degrees

Review: You may be only six degrees away from Kevin Bacon, but would he let you borrow his car? It depends on the structures within the network that links you. When the power goes out, when we find that a stranger knows someone we know, when dot-com stocks soar in price, networks are evident. In Six Degrees, sociologist Duncan Watts examines networks like these: what they are, how they’re being studied, and what we can use them for. To illustrate the often complicated mathematics that describe such structures, Watts uses plenty of examples from life, without which this book would quickly move beyond a general science readership. Small chapters make each thought-provoking conclusion easy to swallow, though some are hard to digest.

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Small Worlds: The Dynamics of Networks between Order and Randomness (Princeton Studies in Complexity)

by Duncan J. Watts

Small Worlds

Review: An engaging and informative introduction. Science Playfully and clearly written… [Watts] uses examples adroitly, and mixes abstract theory with real-world anecdotes with superb skill… I have not enjoyed reading a book this much in a long time. — Peter Kareiva Quarterly Review of Biology [Small Worlds] will be seized on by those seeking a first rough map of this fascinating new mathematical land. Those entering can expect to find some amazing connections between areas of research with apparently nothing in common, such as neurology to business studies. But then, it’s a small world. — Robert Matthews New Scientist Informally written and aimed at a wide audience, this book shows how mathematics yields new vistas on ubiquitous and seemingly familiar aspects of our world

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The Social Atom: Why the Rich Get Richer, Cheaters Get Caught, and Your Neighbor Usually Looks Like You

by Mark Buchanan

The Social Atom

Description: Buchanan (Ubiquity: The Science of History) reaches out to the audience for pop social science like The Tipping Point and Freakonomics with the concept of “social physics,” a scientific model for the patterns that emerge from the interactions among large groups of people. Though his observations that people excel at imitating the successful behavior of others and will often form collective bonds over such fundamental pretenses as shared ethnic heritage aren’t startling, Buchanan leans on his background in theoretical physics and treats these ideas as “a quantum revolution in the social sciences.” His presentation is muted by a tendency to talk around the subject, recapping prior discussions and promising future developments instead of establishing a clear, compelling thread. Though the real-life scenarios he uses to illustrate his theories—such as the unexpected revival of Times Square or the outbreak of ethnic violence in the former Yugoslavia—are engaging, some sections draw upon computer simulations of arbitrary behavior that illustrate his thesis but don’t command equal interest. This is a great idea for a magazine article, but awkward at book length. (June)

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Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us

by Seth Godin

Tribes

Description: A tribe is any group of people, large or small, who are connected to one another, a leader, and an idea. For millions of years, humans have joined tribes, be they religious, ethnic, political, or even musical (think of the Deadheads). It’s our nature. Now the Internet has eliminated the barriers of geography, cost, and time. All those blogs and social networking sites are helping existing tribes get bigger and enabling new tribes to be born – groups of ten or ten million who care about a political campaign, or a new way to fight global warming.

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The Wisdom of Crowds

by James Surowiecki

The Wisdom of Crowds

Description: While our culture generally trusts experts and distrusts the wisdom of the masses, New Yorker business columnist Surowiecki argues that “under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them.” To support this almost counter-intuitive proposition, Surowiecki explores problems involving cognition (we’re all trying to identify a correct answer), coordination (we need to synchronize our individual activities with others) and cooperation (we have to act together despite our self-interest). His rubric, then, covers a range of problems, including driving in traffic, competing on TV game shows, maximizing stock market performance, voting for political candidates, navigating busy sidewalks, tracking SARS and designing Internet search engines like Google. If four basic conditions are met, a crowd’s “collective intelligence” will produce better outcomes than a small group of experts, Surowiecki says, even if members of the crowd don’t know all the facts or choose, individually, to act irrationally. “Wise crowds” need (1) diversity of opinion; (2) independence of members from one another; (3) decentralization; and (4) a good method for aggregating opinions. The diversity brings in different information; independence keeps people from being swayed by a single opinion leader; people’s errors balance each other out; and including all opinions guarantees that the results are “smarter” than if a single expert had been in charge. Surowiecki’s style is pleasantly informal, a tactical disguise for what might otherwise be rather dense material. He offers a great introduction to applied behavioral economics and game theory.

The Cluetrain Manifesto

by Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls, David Weinberger

Cluetrain Manifesto

Description: The Cluetrain Manifesto began as a Web site (www.cluetrain.com) in 1999 when the authors, who have worked variously at IBM, Sun Microsystems, the Linux Journal, and NPR, posted 95 theses that pronounced what they felt was the new reality of the networked marketplace. For example, thesis no. 2: “Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors”; thesis no. 20: “Companies need to realize their markets are often laughing. At them”; thesis no. 62: “Markets do not want to talk to flacks and hucksters. They want to participate in the conversations going on behind the corporate firewall”; thesis no. 74: “We are immune to advertising. Just forget it.” The book enlarges on these themes through seven essays filled with dozens of stories and observations about how business gets done in America and how the Internet will change it all. While Cluetrain will strike many as loud and over the top, the message itself remains quite relevant and unique. This book is for anyone interested in the Internet and e-commerce, and is especially important for those businesses struggling to navigate the topography of the wired marketplace. All aboard! –Harry C. Edwards –This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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This Is [Not] Writing. A Testament to Social Media

Feb 22, ’09 11:11 AM

This is not writing, to paraphrase Magritte.

Lines insert false time. Full-stop.

Am I to take this seriously? Is there a truth time of writing and a false time?

Linguists and certain philosophers of language would lead me to believe that there is a basic level of accepted communication, an agreed upon, non-distorted, good enough environment of intimacy, intention, and reception through which we scratch symbols to each other in basic, consensual hallucinatory ways. One might take blogs as a kind of evidence for this. If this is true then there is an agreed upon true time of language which is serial, developmental, syllogistic, perhaps progressive, some might even argue aggressive. I say something, you say something back and shit! we are human and talking the talk of that.

Yet!

Yet, I am also aware, as a poet, architect, madman, that the ideal time of language is at least part constructed if not completely so. Language poetry would not exist without the Rorty-like assumption that all language is contingent and so any concept of an ideal speech community unfolding their ideas and hopes and prejudices in the “real” or “proper” time of speech-like language is a historical and ideological construct– even/especially on Twitter. The most political thing I can do is face the language and certainly the work is full of “errors”, errors of conception, expression and understanding, but also conscious errors based on the procedural rules governing the violence-composition of article/comment/connect. So which time is more false, the semiotically foregrounded temporality of poetic lineation, or the hidden, naturalised time of prose, even non-narrative prose such as we would have here if not for my sickness?

What I might be saying here pretty much agrees with a definition of a typical feature of poetry before proving through a historical event, a necessary foundation for poetry is merely a significant historical contingency whose time is already passed. However, while I look for ways to innovate poetry in prose, I have to be beware the seduction of the prose whose transparent linearity is more dangerous in that it is widespread, that narrative prose is the rhetorical preference of the state and its institutions of coercion (what is not new except a really good story chopped up into tasty morsels?) and that is it so hidden. Television’s lie is the continuity. If you ask someone to tell you how it happened, say in a court room to use a Lyotardian environment, and they tell it to you in the temporality of the poem, would that be acceptable testimony? Objection! Next witness.

What I sacrifice, that the time of the line is material, embodied, visual, disruptive, sexually potent, radical, and sharpened at both ends. Contrast the semiotics of poetic lineation to those of prose with its full-stops and alinea (paragraph breaks). The full-stop is rarely used as a disruptive strategy and certainly not in mine. Why innovate in the space between sentences– but rarely, if ever, disrupt the sentence itself?

The sentence is to language as a porn flick is to love. In other words, sentences are socialised language while poetry is somehow, in being more glossolalic, literally semiotic and so goes beyond ideology. The simplicity of the sentences is the ice pick to the brain I feel as I try to get at the ideological-linguistic fabric of post-industrian, pre-simulation social interaction. Either that or I just walked into the snow with nothing but boxers on– poetically speaking, of course.

This is not an idea, to paraphrase Magritte.

Testaments…

the wind in rustling in your hair tells a story of what has dropped off a thousand miles away is the intention to gather up and then rush at it an energy distributed then through shallowness to optics

Sepia tones of light and dust fill the room
I’d been lying in bed for a month
one afternoon

I think somewhere there is a room
in which I am living
an old man

in the future
in a windy
room where I am sitting and
glyphs scroll across my
eyes

————–

the body is what falls from me as I rise in that [bracketed way] by this this (parenthetical) to the other all it is a process of wanting to get closer to that big mooning face

trying to make out
what I had once written
in what will then be
passing for the present,
blindly

trying to remember
the room
the light the time of day
when the evil whispered
the wind

————–

even in my muteness, I too am homeless; only semi-detached I’ve been saving up for true immediacy ‘halt who lurks there,’ goes nowhere, this unfurling which is ending up interminable as a blanketing of bold insecurity and intimacy

Yellow light filled the room
Don’t let them inside
your eyes, my evil
said
and lay their eggs there

————–

Pale amber light and dust filled the room,

I have become so certain of uncertainty meanwhile el niño has given rise to cases of hurtling upwards my own super-subjectivity of a being of total dissemination whose myriad parts and I fully occupy all and at the same time…

sepia tones of light I assumed
coming through the cracked windows
but no

more a feeling, though light, too

a healing

And I saw again, September’s sunflower

————–

petal’s intense gold flames

you feel the gentle warmth on your back articulated like the spine of a vast earth goddess let loose amidst the peaks to rise as ether carrying her displacement on her back. then a passage through.

a child’s drawing
of the sun

And loved again
the absolute unsayableness
of the simplest thing in pain
the way it was, exactly

Walking out again

Into the pale yellow light.

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Pattern Languages for Interaction Design

Jan 27, ’09 7:56 AM

An Interview with Erin Malone, Christian Crumlish, and Lucas Pettinati

I stalked and captured Erin Malone, Christian Crumlish, and Lucas Pettinati to talk about design patterns, pattern libraries, style guides, and innovation. Erin, Christian, and Lucas are leading a workshop on design patterns at this year’s Interaction’09 in Vancouver; and, Erin and Christian are writing a book on patterns for designing social spaces for O’Reilly.

“An interaction design pattern is not a step-by-step recipe or a specification. It’s a set of things we’ve learned that tend to work in clearly defined situations as well as some known issues that need to be balanced or sorted out or otherwise addressed. A pattern is closer to a checklist than to a mock or a wireframe.”

How did you get your start in Interaction/Information Design?

Christian Crumlish (Xian): I came from book publishing where I wore many hats over the years (editor, author, agent). I ended up in technical publishing (“computer books”), an aftermarket made possible by shoddy user interfaces. This piqued my interest and the Web democratized information architecture, interaction and interface design.

Erin Malone: I actually started out as a print designer and Art Director. I went to grad school at RIT around the peak of CD ROMs. I did a project in Hypercard (in 1993). I thought I was going to do interactive education CDroms when I graduated but then the web happened. I taught myself HTML and came out to California to build Adobe’s first website, and I’ve been doing web applications and interactive work ever since.

Lucas Pettinati: I studied Architecture in college after realizing that one doesn’t learn how to design GUIs in a Computer Science program. My first job out of college was at an internet startup where I did general design work but it wasn’t until I created a user flow diagram that I fell in love with the principles of IA and Interaction Design.

Read the whole interview on Boxes & Arrows. »

“Designing and Building with Patterns and Pattern Libraries” workshop at Interaction‘09

Erin, Xian, and Lucas are leading a patterns workshop at Interaction‘09 in Vancouver. “Designing and Building with Patterns and Pattern Libraries” is a hands on workshop where participants will come away with some practical experience spotting patterns, describing them, and thinking about how to apply them to design work.

You can find out more about the workshop on the Interaction ‘09 website: http://interaction09.crowdvine.com/talks/show/2574

Interaction Design Pattern Libraries

Christian and Erin’s book, Designing Social Interfaces, has a website where you can contribute to, refine, and discuss social design patterns: http://designingsocialinterfaces.com/

Designing Interfaces
by Jenifer Tidwell

Yahoo Design Pattern Library
by Yahoo

UI patterns
by Anders Toxboe

Interaction Design patterns for games
by Eelke Folmer

Mobile User Interface Design Patterns
by Little Springs Design

Web Patterns
by UC Berkeley

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Heidegger 2 Twitter: Technology, Self & Social Networks.

Jan 25, ’09 9:07 AM

[W]e will sing of the nightly fervour of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons; greedy raiIway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents; factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts. (Marinetti, 1909)

F.T. Marinetti, ‘Les mots en liberte futuristes’, 1919

Heidegger wrote one of the most important philosophical critiques of technology in his “The Question Concerning Technology.” He describes technology not simply as a collection of artifacts but as an all encompassing world view “the technological understanding of being.” A culture’s assembled tools and practices define for them a particular way of both seeing and interacting with the world. This has changed through a series of epochs in the western world: from a model of man amongst wild nature, to the religious world view of the middle ages, through to the modern world where technology was designed to stand against nature and satisfy desires of autonomous subjects, into an age of information, and now one of manifest networks of communities. In this new epoch, networks of social communities completely “enframes” the world, fitting everything into a grand unified ecosystem, and treating everything as a potential node to be used and exploited, friended and followed. Both object and subject are converted to a “standing-reserve”, to be disaggregated, redistributed, recontextualized, and reaggregated.

When Heidegger wrote in the middle part of the last century, the paradigm he had in mind for demonstrating the ‘enframement of being’ was the electrical grid. Hydroelectric dams convert rivers into a resource for energy, that energy is distributed across the population, and everyone in the population is reliant upon the distribution system. But the new era of networked computers fits Heidegger’s model even better. Information and our relationships in the context of social networks is the ultimate resource. It can be endlessly disaggregated, remixed and redistributed. The network ‘enframes’ our entire world, because information about anything can be sent over the network. And human individuals, who were once reduced to resources (Frederick Taylor, and the authoritarianism of Human Resource departments), or “eyeballs” in the terminology of internet marketing executives; are now the creative engines of growth, innovation, and creativity.

Albert Borgmann builds upon Heidegger’s work in his books “Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life” and ” Crossing the Postmodern Divide” (Borgmann, 1984 and 1992). Borgmann sees technology as providing the promise of a better, easier life, but it seduces us into substituting the collection of material objects for a focus on what makes the good life (family, friends, sex and food). He distinguishes two types of technological artifacts: focal things and devices. Focal Things form the loci for a set of activities that defines a form of living, places such as the kitchen provided a setting for much of family life. Devices, on the other hand, tended to be hidden and so encourage us to think of the good they produce as a commodity whose utility is to be maximized within the constraints of time and money. The device paradigm replacement for the kitchen/hearth might be a central heating unit or furnace. It provides heat, but its operation is usually hidden, so we think of the heat merely as a commodity, not as the central organizing focus for the family (Borgmann, 1984, pp. 41-42). This becomes even more interesting when we wonder about the context and meaning of start-ups intentionally exposing their office space’s ductwork – as if the open office with exposed pipes re-instantiates a manifestation of the hearth, or at least ‘un-hides’ the circulatory system of commerce.

Office with Exposed Duct Work

In his later book, Borgmann sees fit to differentiate between “modern, hard” technology, which through rigidity and control overcame the resistance of nature to fabricate durable devices, and “postmodern, soft” technology, which through flexibility and adaptiveness produces a diverse array of goods for specialized activities. Postmodern technology uses the hyper-reality of simulations to get rid of the limitations imposed by reality. The limit of postmodern reality is not the total objectification of nature, but the replacement of reality by virtual reality totally under our control. The objects of reality disappear to the extent that we as subjects gain control over them, but we are similarly reduced to “a point of arbitrary desires.” (Borgmann, 1992, p. 108) Modern computing devices allows us the freedom to do many things, but in so doing we risk our intelligence becoming diffuse, our memory lost without our electronic aids — my iPhone is my memory, contact list, communication device, assistant and extension of my central nervous system – I don’t even know my best friends phone numbers, email or meat-space addresses any longer.

Borgmann’s antidote for losing our personality to the shallowness and superficiality of hyper-reality is to return to focal activities. Focal activities are practices which center our attention on the richness of life. For example, the preparation of a well cooked meal calls upon our skill, focuses our attention on the necessities of life, and can be an aesthetic or sacramental communal activity, where as frozen dinners commodify the process of eating. Technology can assist in the performance of focal activities – witness the wide array of kitchen implements available – as long as the technology does not become the focus instead of the activity. It takes commitment on our part to engage in focal activities, but the effort affords us a chance to maintain some sense of self in the technological world. (Borgmann, 1992, p. 116-122)

Marcuse and the critical theorists harshly criticize the technological way of life. Technological thinking, by measuring everything in quantifiable terms, leads us to think in abstract and de-contextulized ways. By quantifying everything we separate the ethical from the true, and values are relegated to the subjective. Thus technological rationality can claim that technologies are value neutral, and only uses are good or evil, despite the fact that the uses are shaped by the technologies. And technology leads to new forms of domination. For the critical theorists history has always had domination, but in our time domination has changed from master over slave or lord over serf to the domination of humanity by economics and the market. We are given the illusion of liberty, but that is simply the freedom to choose between brands of mass-produced products. Computer technology further de-contextualizes human experience by emphasizing information over understanding. And computers further domination by providing new means of tracking the productivity of workers to the corporation and depersonalizing supervision; very much a modern panopticon envisioned by Jeremy Bentham.

Panopticon by Jeremy Bentham

While Marcuse concentrates on the domination of technology, it is not clear who is dominating whom; we are all caught up in the web of technological society. Foucault speaks of power instead of domination. Power is evident in all human activities, whether they are oppressive or benign. Power can be used to dominate, but it can also be used to transform. Technologies, social institutions and practices are all interconnected in the applications of power, and so new technologies can bring about a change in the power structure within society. Foucault’s view allows for the possibility that information technology could be used to put people in more direct communication with each other and spread the concentration of power over society. (Coyne, 1995, pp. 90-98)

How Do I Interact With Digital Technology?

The development of widespread digital technology, from laptops to iPhones, has changed many of our daily practices. Borgmann describes the evolution of writing equipment. The fountain pen encouraged us to write to someone to whom the quality of our handwriting mattered, carefully composing our thoughts on serious personal matters. The typewriter was better suited for the rapid recording of business matters or factual reports. Now, MS Word and freely available blogging software encourages us to constantly revise, so a work becomes a series of drafts, none of which is final (just like this post). And when the computer is connected to the internet the drafts can be circulated to many people for input (using co-author technologies like Google Docs or Adobe Buzzword), so that authorship becomes diffuse. I post this article, you comment, I revise – in a constant, evolutionary strange loop. So devices are not neutral, they affect the possibilities available to us, as well as ‘enframe’ our relationships with both the objects (which are now collaborative-with the ontology to organize them – which is collective) and the people’s acting upon those objects.

As the nature of writing changed from fountain pen, to typewriter, to word processor and now to blogs and Twitter, so has changed interpersonal communications from letters, to telephone, to e-mail, instant messaging, blogging with comments, to my twitter stream. So too has the nature of work changed from crafts, to factory production, to the information economy and now to the “creative/collaborative/crowdsourced/collective economy”. Our relationship to information has changed from the library model of careful selection, classification within strict taxonomies, and permanent collections to the information retrieval model of access to everything, diversification, dynamic collections and bottom-up folksonomies. All of these changes are disruptive, they foreclose old practices and provide new opportunities. Some people are always hurt by these shifts, while others find unseen chances to thrive.

The new technologies have brought new opportunities to affect social change. In the manner of Foucault‘s philosophy we have the chance to redistribute the power within society. E-mail was used by students during the Russian coup; by relaying messages through an intermediary in the U.S. the students were able to respond to changes faster than the Army and recently the most up to the minute information about the terrorist attack in India, or the plane crash in New York, was distributed through Twitter – instantly, and around the globe. Blogging and the web offer the possibility for marginalized voices to reach a wide audience – but big brands still hold control. Basic xhtml code is easy to learn and use, and web authoring tools like Dreamweaver make the process even easier. So anyone can post information to the web with a small amount of effort. Such self broadcasting was not practical with television, where larger amounts of investment and knowledge are necessary. Of course, it is up to us to avail ourselves of these opportunities. The entrenched power structures are also trying to control as much of the new media as possible to maintain their positions of power. The issue has not been decided yet, but the internet is not as free as it was just a few years ago. One place the larger, more powerful brands can’t control is social media. As explained over Twitter by Thomas Vander Wal (who coined the term “folksonomy,”) it’s the velocity of communication that brands still have difficulty managing and controlling. The ideals of futurism remain as significant components of modern culture; the emphasis on youth, speed, power and connectivity finding expression in much of modern commercial cinema and culture from mashups to Twitter to distopic visions in Minority Report.

“The cry of rebellion which we utter associates our ideals with those of the Futurist poets. These ideas were not invented by some aesthetic clique. They are an expression of a violent desire, which burns in the veins of every creative artist today. … We will fight with all our might the fanatical, senseless and snobbish religion of the past, a religion encouraged by the vicious existence of museums. We rebel against that spineless worshipping of old canvases, old statues and old bric-a-brac, against everything which is filthy and worm-ridden and corroded by time. We consider the habitual contempt for everything which is young, new and burning with life to be unjust and even criminal.”
(Marinetti, 1909)

Computer technology can assist us in pursuit of Borgmann’s focal activities, despite Borgmann’s reservations. If writing is a focal activity for us, word processors can make the job easier even though we have seen that they alter the process. Maintaining contact with friends is facilitated by e-mail, IM, SMS, etc. Even if it predisposes us to short note rather than long heartfelt letters, e-mail is useful for organizing face-to-face meetings. Cooking, Borgmann’s exemplary focal activity, can be aided by accessing new recipes online from places like epicurious.com and allrecipes.com. And all sorts of activities have online interest groups where people around the world can meet to discuss their common passions. Some activities were solitary activities, pursued by lone individuals as their individual means of artistic expression, until the internet allowed them to realize that others shared their interest — they were no longer freaks!

Often the overwhelming experience when dealing with computer technology is one of frustration. Computer interfaces are often confusing and arbitrary. Simple, routine tasks take great effort to do. Programs crash causing the loss of laboriously produced work. Incompatible versions will not read old data. And rapidly advancing technology leaves our equipment outdated in a short time, leading to feelings of inadequacy as the manufacturers try to convince us we need the latest models. Any benefits to our practices can be lost through frustration over difficulty using the technology to accomplish the tasks. The computer becomes the focus of our attention rather than the focal practice we my be trying to pursue through it.

Design Can Soften the Disruptive Force of Technology

The creators of computer technology can lessen the disruptive force of the technology by embracing good design. Well designed systems and devices should be useful, usable, easily learned, and perform functions that let people do the things they want to do (Gould, 1988). Good design can lessen the frustration users feel when they use computers. The sum of all the small frustrations with everyday life add up to the feelings of powerlessness and despair felt by many in the modern world. Alleviating those frustrations leads to an improved quality of life. By making the system easier to use and more reliable, designers help users get on with the tasks they wish to accomplish rather than worrying about the computer. When systems help users realize their goals and intentions they promote the human value of autonomy.

User Experience Honeycomb

Things that are easy to learn reduce the disruption caused by new technologies. Technological society may force new methods and practices upon us, but if they are easier to learn, then at least the people adept at the old practices can learn to operate in the new manner. While the philosophical issues remain, the impact of new technology on individuals can be softened by design. Technology can be made easier to learn by making the choices of acts you can perform obvious and by providing appropriate mental maps of the operation to the user. Computer technology, by virtue of its interface being flexible, could be made very easy to learn. But, alas, most systems are not designed to realize this possibility (Norman, 1990).

Good designs make possible the benefits of computing technology. Use of a computer as an instrument in pursuit of a focal practice is only possible if the computer does not crowd one’s focus of attention. The computer interface should fade into the background so that we may concentrate on our human-affirming activities – and example being the LG Internet Refrigerator appliance.

LG Internet Refridgerator

If the difficulties experienced mount, then any benefit is canceled out by the trouble with the instrument. In such a case it would be better to do without the new technology. In order for technology to fade from our focus while we use it to perform a task, it should operate reliably and consistently so that after a brief learning period we can form habits of use and then use the technology without thought. Computers, once again by virtue of their flexible structure, could be designed to operate consistently and appropriately, more so than material technology which must obey mechanical constraints, but, once again, it often is not so designed. (Norman, 1990)

So we see the importance of good interface design, and we know from experience that technology often fails to meet standards of good design. But what constitutes good design? Donald Norman examined the qualities of good and bad design of common technologies in his book “The Design of Everyday Things” (Norman, 1990). His advice boils down to: make sure the user can figure out what to do, and that the user can can tell what is going on. Good design should use the natural properties of people and the world to produce systems whose operation is obvious. Different features offer different affordances, or operations that they suggest to the user. For example, buttons are made for pushing, and knobs are made for turning; we naturally know what to do, unless they are built to work in some other way which will be hard to use. If everything in the design has its proper place and obvious function, then only a short amount of instruction is necessary to begin use. If the design is made such that common activities have a simple and intuitive action to perform, then users will quickly become habituated and can perform the tasks rapidly and comfortably. If the instructions are so complicated or non-intuitive to prompt the user to wonder “How am I going to remember that?” or if simple actions can lead to catastrophic failures then the design has failed and should be re-worked.

Methods and Metaphors

In order to design good computer systems that support people in their endeavors, designers must observe how real people use their computers and design accordingly. Too many programmers are trained in the logic of computer languages, but not in the needs of computer users. While in some computer projects the user interface is the last part of the program to be designed, it should be the first. For most users the interface is what they see as the computer. Some designers of computer interfaces have come to realize this. John Gould wrote an important paper “How to Design Usable Systems” to explain simple but important design principles to other programmers. He sought to have programmers focus on the needs of users from the very start of the project. He offers four simple principles to be followed:

an early and continuous focus on users,
early and continual testing,
iterative design revising for the results of testing, and
integrated design where all the elements develop constantly and in coordination

Gould suggests that these principles are easy to implement, even by those not trained in psychological or human factors studies, it just takes a commitment on the part of the programmers and managers to create a good, useful product.

Gould’s attitude towards design finds philosophical support in pragmatism. Pragmatism recognizes that everyone is socially situated. Dewey taught that scientific theories or methods of logic are tools used in a certain social practice. Attention to the practices surrounding an object are important to understanding it. Since he viewed knowledge as participatory he argued that learning must come about by doing. Coyne argues that Dewey’s attitudes resonates with the methods of computer system designers such as Gould (Coyne, 1995, pp. 36-51). Dewey’s pragmatism provides a better philosophical basis for computer science education than the rationalism that underlies most training. The rationalist attitudes are responsible for a concentration on logic and theory in the education of programmers rather than attention to the needs of computer users. However, projects to produce user centered design, like Gould’s, reflect the same concern for practice that is the bases of Dewey’s philosophy. Gould even suggests programmers learn through doing by actually spending time at the job sites where the programs will be used, following exactly Dewey’s prescriptions for education (Gould, 1988). This, of course, was well before the ‘golden-age’ of user-centered design, activity centered design and all the myriad bastard children that seems to have sprung up recently.

More recently, over the past five or six years, metaphor has become an important concept in website, web application and system design as well as in language. Metaphor is more than just a literary device used for poetic effect, it is an integral part of our language and thought. Lakoff and Johnson showed in their book “Metaphors We Live By” the ubiquity of metaphor in our language, often being used without our even noticing (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). Metaphors provide us a way of understanding the world, by associating one thing with another. Powerful metaphors are like magic, and inform how we think of the objects described, revealing hidden aspects of the thing described. New metaphors for the forces in our lives will suggest new ways of living. Metaphors interact with technology in several ways: technology serves as a source of metaphors, new technologies are understood metaphorically, and our metaphors in life pose problems to be solved technologically (See Dan Saffer’s presentation, “The role of Metaphor in Interaction Design“).

For devices that work in an abstract language like computers, metaphors provide a way for the user to understand the operation of the machine. The Apple Mac desktop metaphor is famous. It provides a way of understanding the file structure of the machine in terms of a physical space that most people understand. By developing new metaphors, interface designers can suggest new ways of working with computers. If these metaphors are carefully chosen then they will provide a natural model which makes operation of the machine easy.

“In that Empire, the Art of cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Disproportionated Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds built a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided accurately with it.”
Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Del rigor en la ciencia’, 1960

Just as metaphors can help us understand computers, computers can provide new metaphors for life. Postmodern theories of psychology suggest that there is no single unified “ego”, but that each of us is made up of a multiplicity of parts, while Minsky discusses the “agencies of mind” in his book “The Society of Mind.” Philip Bromberg claims that a healthy personality is one in which different aspects of the self can come to know one another and reflect upon each other. This fluid multiplicity of personality is what gives us our flexibility and resilience. With the rise of MySpace, Facebook, personal blogs, IM and Twitter, a popular activity on the internet is participation in these consensual hallicinations of community in social networks. In these social networks, we create a persona within a distrbuted ecosystem. We interact with ‘the other,’ — folks through their online persona initially their projects of self which, over time, tend towards some mean around a distrubution of ‘self-hood’. People are not restricted by their biological gender, or in the case of World of Warcraft, even their race or species. Social networks allow participants to explore different aspects of their personality, to manufacture and evolve aspects of their personality depending on context and mood. Many regulars sometimes play several characters in different social networks at the same time, cycling through their online personalities. While some observers might see this activity as evidence of Heidegger’s disaggregation of the subject by technology, it can also be seen as a model for Bromberg’s self as being one while being many. This is just one way in which computer technology, the internet, and connected social networks can show us a new way of understanding ourselves.

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