Video of My BlogTalk Presentation

Video of my BlogTalk presentation 'What happens when everyone designs social media? Practical suggestions for handling new ethical dilemmas' is available from Ustream.tv. The resolution is low (it was shot with a webcam) but the audio is good: follow along with the slides on your own for the full experience.

More videos of BlogTalk sessions here.

local tags: cocreation, conferences, design, diy, ethics, integrated_experiences, methods, social_media, social_networks, spime

IA Summit Talks on Ethics, Experience Design, Social Networks

Thanks to Facebook's public mistakes and apology to those affected by Beacon , as well as a number of other ham-handed attempts to monetize the social graph, the intersection of ethics, design, and social networks is receiving overdue attention. Two talks at this year's Information Architecture Summit in Miami will look at ethics as it applies to the daily work of creating social networks, and user experiences in general.

First is Designing for the social: Avoiding anti-social networks, by Miles Rochford, description below.

This presentation considers the role of traditional social networks and the role of IAs in addressing the challenges that arise when designing and using online social networks.

The presentation discusses philosophical approaches to sharing the self, how this relates to offline social networks and human interactions in different contexts, and provides guidance on how online social networking tools can be designed to support these relationships.

It also covers ethical issues, including privacy, and how these can conflict with business needs. A range of examples illustrate the impact of these drivers and how design decisions can lead to the creation of anti-social networks.

Related: the social networks anti-patterns list from the microformats.org wiki.

The second is The impact of social ethics on IA and interactive design - experiences from the Norwegian woods, by Karl Yohan Saeth and Ingrid Tofte, described as follows:

This presentation discusses ethics in IA from a practical point of view. Through different case studies we illustrate the impact of social ethics on IA and interactive design, and sum up our experiences on dealing with ethics in real projects.

If you're interested in ethics and the practicalities of user experience (and who isn't?), both sessions look good. I'll be talking about other things at the summit this year. In the meantime, stay tuned for the second article in my UXMatters series on designing ethical experiences, due for publication very soon.

local tags: design, ethics, social_networks, user_experience

Blogtalk 2008 slides available

My slides from Blogtalk 2008 are available online now: I went through a lot of ideas quickly, so this is a good way to follow along at your own pace...

FYI: This version of the deck includes presenters notes - I'll upload a (larger!) view-only version once I'm back from holiday in lovely Eire.

| View | Upload your own

local tags: cocreation, computer, conflict, design, diy, ethics, future, ia, innovation, method, methods, permeation, social_media, social_networks, spime, technology, transmedia, trend, ubicomp, ui, ux, webdesign

The DIY Future: What Happens When Everyone Is A Designer?

I'm posting the abstract for my closing talk at the Italian IA Summit, as well as the slides, below.

Hope you enjoy!

Abstract:
Broad cultural, technological, and economic shifts are rapidly erasing the distinctions between those who create and those who use, consume, or participate. This is true in digital experiences and information environments of all types, as well as in the physical and conceptual realms. In all of these contexts, substantial expertise, costly tools, specialized materials, and large-scale channels for distribution are no longer required to execute design.

The erosion of traditional barriers to creation marks the onset of the DIY Future, when everyone is a potential designer (or architect, or engineer, or author) of integrated experiences - the hybrid constructs that combine products, services, concepts, networks, and information in support of evolving functional and emotional pursuits.

The cultural and technological shifts that comprise the oncoming DIY Future promise substantial changes to the environments and audiences that design professionals create for, as well as the role of designers, and the ways that professionals and amateurs alike will design. One inevitable aspect consequence will be greater complexity for all involved in the design of integrated experiences. The potential rise of new economic and production models is another.

The time is right to begin exploring aspects of the DIY Future, especially its profound implications for information architecture and user experience design. Using the designer's powerful fusion of analytical perspective and creative vision, we can balance speculative futurism with an understanding of concrete problems - such as growing ethical challenges and how to resolve them - from the present day.

Here's the slides, available from SlideShare:

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local tags: design_thinking, DIY, events, networks, spime, ubicomp

The Value of the Network: Links As Social Capital

This is a small site with modest traffic. But it is still the case that a substantial set of inbound links lead people from diverse origins - search engines, blogs, content aggregators, feed readers, directories, etc. - to many destinations within the site every day. Some of these connections are visible in the del.icio.us tag clouds that appear with individual postings, my contribution to the Web's ongoing collective experiment with tagging and social bookmarking.

French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu named this set of connections and the social relationships associated with them in the early 1970s, coining the term social capital, and thereby inspiring legions of civic and international organizations to create development, investment, and management strategies for this new valuable kind of resource.

But what is the value of the network?

Fast forward a bit, and we can see that no matter how you choose to calculate that value, Google has built a business relying the new resource of cumulative social capital, using it via mechanisms such as latent semantic indexing.

And we can see that in giving form and focus to the idea of social capital, Bourdieu set the conceptual stage for the recent explosion of social media and networking applications. Simultaneously destinations - albeit of unknown lifespan - and business ventures, the social networks are recent exemplars of longtime cultural movements of reification, virtualization, and visualization of fields - another key concept identified by Bourdieu.

Behind the scenes, the information architecture that solidifies the limited social capital of this site in physical / digital form is a motley collection of disparately named HTML files, tag destination pages, cgi-powered content streams, RSS feeds, local search results sets, etc. The prospect of getting another publishing platform to mimic this miscellany was - like tuning an instrument to play songs composed with notes from another music system - not something I could do as quickly and cheaply.

And so in combination with the perpetual urgency of the DIY mindset, the imperative of preserving the value of the existing store of social capital made the decision to upgrade along an existing path to MT4 simple.

Architecturally, this is the equivalent of sticking with the brand name you know well.

local tags: blogging, metcalfes_law, networks, social_bookmarking, social_capital, tagging