Extending our senses

Urban Atmospheres
Elizabeth Goodman (UC Berkeley)
Designing Alternate Location Systems
Alternate ways of making tracking systems visible.

Example:
RFID, FastTrak, LoJack, Runners, Disney Phone

Wireless beacons

Precision and reliability in data gathering.
Privacy

Alternate constraints can create exciting new design territory.
Compact representation of complex data.

Mobile User Experience team
Paul Adams, Google –
Social Map –

SMS used to avoid awkward conversations

Need to think about broad conversation

How, when and where people choose different communications tools.
Context? Or the people communicating with.
How big are people’s social networks and how did they evolve?

Stop Self- referential design

Most of the time –
You are not designing for you, your friends or people like you

Making Social Maps:
Layer One - People and Groups
People tell you all the people in their social life and let the user group them together on a large piece of paper.

Layer Two - Them across (in a different color post-it) show how they communicate with that person or group of people.

Layer 4 Sharing -

Layer 5 - Mapping actual behavior
have them bring the phone and find out who last 5 SMS and 5 Voicemails were from

Layer 6 Sticky dots - (blue dot who is on Facebook, MySpace, etc...) very rare for any one group to have all the same networks.

Close contacts
Loose contacts
Ambient contacts
Indirect contacts

Posted by aynne at 05:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This is pretty cool..
a company called imagini has personality profiles. The quiz process is great.

Posted by aynne at 01:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

People search engines have breeched any sense of personal privacy.
I think the worst part of it is the limited ability of the person who's information is being shared to the public at large.

Spock ( www.spock.com)

Wink ( www.wink.com)

Zoominfo ( www.zoominfo.com)

Posted by aynne at 05:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This is an interesting article on how kids from more affluent areas use Facebook while kids from working class schools are using MySpace
Class War: MySpace vs. Facebook

Posted by aynne at 06:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I am on:
Facebook
Flickr
and
My Space
I love me some social networking and not just because it is my job to do so.

Posted by aynne at 07:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The project I worked on this Summer at Domus Academy in Milan has been posted on the Domus Project website.
This is the Domus Academy Project site: http://projects.domusacademy.net/

The course was tangible electronic tools and the course project brief was all around mobility and social networking. The aspect I chose to explore was Media Expression. How one expresses oneself in blogs or to others.

I think our project got slightly tangential however (which is okay) and instead of doing a deep dive on mobility concerning blogging, our project took a slight detour into phatic communications.

The concept we came up with was called Momento. It is a small device that enables one to find others based on their profile information - it will find people who match you and point them out like a compass.

If you like a person you can appoint them your "north" on the compass.

I was pleased with Momento overall - but I think I would like to explore another project around physical community and technology rather than virtual communities.

I plan to start working on a concept that expands around the display unit featured in Momento.
In fact, I think it might be a good project to propose for Octavia Green.

Posted by aynne at 01:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

What makes a community thrive and what dooms it to failure?

In my career to help in designing communities and sorting out what things people would like.

I spend a great deal of time on these social networking sites, researching them and considering what makes them successful or "ghost ships".

I think there are two keys to successful community.

1. One is what I call the Beach Ball theory.

In a crowded concert or anywhere there is a mass of people who are likely to get bored and disengage.
The challenge of building thriving online communities and social networks is to find the "beach ball" that will engage potential users.

Giving them something to do, to rally around while they bide time waiting to connect with others. Points of conversation work effectively in the social network sites I audited. For example starting conversational strings for users to provide short, quippy answers. Allowing users to monitor activity on their profile.

more later....

2. The Other is the ultimate goal of true human interaction.
Most online communities at one point or another lcoalize to the point where the users wish to "meet-up" face to face in smaller, more specialized groups.

Posted by aynne at 05:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)