"My question is to what extent we really can design social interactions? I think we design spaces and places, just like we throw a good or bad party."
Adrian has actually stated his position about this fairly successfully meaning that we can't design the social interactions themselves, but we can design the framework For interactions that, based on how much or little we design the system for conversations/interaction - the more or less friction there is between people/actors/nodes in any social network. You can't design how people interact or what people say to each other - but you can make it easy/hard for them to do so. Have you ever tried to have an extended, threaded conversation on Facebook? It's possible - and also the most unintuitive/kludgy thing you can do - why? Facebook was not designed for social interaction in the meanful sence - namely Conversation. It was designed for connection, a completely different modality. LinkedIn (as I have stated on Twitter) Could be/might have been built for conversations under their Questions/Answers section - but it seems that because of the label, and IxD - you really don't have vibrant career/professional networking happing there - but the platform is certainly there, it's just that the IxD for person-person, people-people conversations is not considered important, and therefore not surfaced as something people should be doing. Twitter started as just a place for people to tweet their current status, because b/c of platform decisions, simple interaction model, and mobile, it could not help but make it really easy for people to connect, connect to their friends connections, and engage in conversation. To the extent that people can't tag those conversations, organize them, store them, remember them, search them, and arrange them in a semantically meaningful way (in context) means that Twitter is still half-baked. The fact that you can't visualize your connections as a hyperbolic graph is less important now, although it would be nice, and perhaps some smart person on this list will go back to our roots, read Ben Schneiderman's recent work ( http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/nvss/) and implement a graph that allows us to do that in a meanful and actionable way. On Fri, Oct 31, 2008 at 5:25 AM, Andy Polaine <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I thought I'd start a new thread on designing social interactions based on > Adrian's reply about understanding social connections, interactions and > media, because we were getting quite off the topic of visual/interaction > design skills. But it's an interesting area. > > There's an awful lot still to be learned and understood though, I suspect. > One of the things that complicates it all is that social interactions affect > future social interactions and so does the software. We've just had that > thread about Twitter here and how it's changed the way people interact with > each other when they then meet face-to-face. So we end up with this highly > interdependent and ever-changing ecosystem of social 'media' (someone come > up with a better term please!) and people that are constantly changing each > other. Understanding social interactions is complicated and designing them > is equally so. That's what makes it so interesting of course. > > My question is to what extent we really can design social interactions? I > think we design spaces and places, just like we throw a good or bad party. > I've worked on a lot of online collaborative projects with my work with The > Omnium Research Project in Australia - http://www.omnium.net.au - and > we've learned a lot about what makes an online collaboration tick and what > not and how to steer it. It really is like throwing a party, but there seems > to be a lot of magic in the mix. Any thoughts? > > Incidentally, there's an interesting Op Ed piece from David Brooks about > behavioural economists and the financial crisis in the NY Times: > http://tinyurl.com/5jku2h - I could imagine a lot of this stuff crossing > over. Does anyone know how the social lending service, Zopa, is faring in > all of this? http://www.zopa.com > > Best, > > Andy > > :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: > Andy Polaine > > Research | Writing | Strategy > Interaction Concept Design > Education Futures > > Twitter: apolaine > Skype: apolaine > > http://playpen.polaine.com > http://www.designersreviewofbooks.com > http://www.omnium.net.au > http://www.antirom.com > ________________________________________________________________ > Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! > To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe > List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines > List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help > -- ~ will "Where you innovate, how you innovate, and what you innovate are design problems" --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Will Evans | User Experience Architect tel: +1.617.281.1281 | [EMAIL PROTECTED] aim: semanticwill gtalk: semanticwill twitter: semanticwill skype: semanticwill --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
