Erin Malone and I introduced some of the fruit of our effort to carve out a pattern language for social user experience design. At the Information Architecture Summit in Memphis this past week we taught our pattern library workshop and then delivered this tandem presentation:
I’m going to name the robots Foo and Bar. We still haven’t announced the musical act that will be performing on this stage tonight.
So far I’ve heard Cody Simms and Neal Sample (Cody and Neal, hmmm….) give a great overview of YOS (with great visuals by Micah Laaker), and am now listening to Allen Rabinovich explain how to hack with Flash and Flex.
At 2pm I’ll be talking about patterns and stencils and how they can help coders build better interfaces.
My Ignite talk, Grasping Social Patterns
Originally uploaded by duncandavidson.
Here are my slides.
UPDATE: and here’s some YouTube video shot from the audience (the very beginning of my talk is cut off):
At the IA Summit a week ago in Miami, I co-taught two full-day workshops (on patterns with Erin Malone and Lucas Pettinati, and social design with Christina Wodtke and Joshua Porter), moderated a panel (on presence and other aspects of social web architecture with Gene Smith, Wodtke, Andrew Hinton, and Andrew Crow), and gave a presentation with Austin Govella from Comcast on designing with patterns. (Phew.)
I finally got my slides posted to slideshare today from the panel and the presentation. (Eventually, if and when audio becomes available, I’ll sync them up.) You’ll notice if you look at my recent talks that I am remixing a lot of the same points. I am trying to learn to be more shameless about this, since the material is usually fresh for each new audience until it’s fully distributed.
In that same vein, if you’re in SF you can find me at Ignite SF tonight doing a five minute talk (yes, covering some of the same ground as my BayCHI talk in this case) on the topic “Grasping Social Patterns.” I’m nervous as hell, not least because the lineup of other speakers is so incredible. So even if I bomb, you’ll get some pretty inspiration stuff from the likes of Kathy Sierra, Annalee Newitz, Lane Becker, and others.
For now, here are my summit talks:
and
Here are my slides from my talk at Xerox Parc (the BayCHI monthly program meeting) on April 8th:
When I get the audio, I plan to put together a slidecast to synch the slides to the talk, which should be more valuable.
Oh, and consider viewing the slides in full-screen mode. They should be a lot more legible that way. I did my best to optimize the source files.
At South by Southwest, Ted Nadeau and I led a “core conversation” on the topic of reputation, identity, and presence. Ted is great at questioning basic assumptions and had this idea of handing out placards an audience of participants could use to signal their reactions to what was being said to them.
We imagine double-sided signs on sticks to hold up, sort of like the Roadrunner does, but we settled for handing out cut paper. We’re still working on the mechanics of this, *and the whole thing is Creative Commons licensed, derivs-allowed, attrib-required, I think (it’s in the fine print), but even now at version 1.0 of this Reaction Deck, I think Ted’s really onto something:
Michael Wesch, who created the virally popular internet video called Web 2.0: The Machine is Us/ing Us (its success drew on a sort of meta-application of the very concepts it discussed), was the keynote speaker at IDEA 2007 last week. As part of his keynote, he previewed two videos he has now released to the web.
The first, Information R/evolution, examines the challenges we all face in this age of information glut and shortening attention spans:
The second, made collaboratively by one of his classes (Wesch is a professor of anthropology at Kansas State University, where he is launching a Digital Ethnography working group to “examine the impacts of digital technology on human interaction”), looks carefully at how we are teaching today and how out of sync it has become with the lives of contemporary students:
In some ways, for me, the highlight of the conference was Wesch’s story about how he frightened himself one night in the communal sleeping quarters in New Guineau when he thought his own arm, which had fallen asleep, was a snake lying across his body. This story became the kernel of Wesch’s reputation with the people he was studying and living among, and helped him realize that telling stories is a big part of how we gain identities and fit ourselves (and others) into society.
Just noticed there’s a conference coming up in a few weeks here in the valley that seems extremely narrowcast to me: Graphing Social Patterns: The Business & Technology of Facebook.
A lot of the usual suspects of social network bloviating are speaking (I count two women out of 20 named speakers), including representatives from Facebook, LinkedIn, O’Reilly (Tim himself), Forrester Research, TechCrunch, and of course Scoble, and others.
The conference describes itself as
for developers and marketers on how to build and distribute apps for the Facebook Platform. This event is for both business executives & technical developers who want to learn more about the Facebook environment, and how to reach online communities using social networking platforms and applications.The conference will be held in San Jose, CA from October 7th-9th. Main conference sessions are Monday 10/8 and Tuesday 10/9; an optional pre-conference workshop is Sunday, 10/7.
If you’re interested, you can register at EventBrite.
They’ve certainly populated the conference title well with buzzwords. The term social graph, popularized by facebookistas (and annoying to those who consider it an obscure jargon synonym for social network - oh, and don’t get jonas luster started on how social network software is not the same thing as a social network) seems to be everywhere these days, and of course people love to talk about recognizing and capturing (or detecting, heh) patterns.
For a counter view of the importance of Facebook’s social graph as a platform for application development, check out the truth about facebook apps: most people ignore them:
Once installed, most widgets are ignored.
Slide’s “Top Friends” boasts the most active users: 2.7 million people, or 20% of its user base, use it every day. The app with the highest engagement percentage: “WarBook,” a medieval fantasy game, is played by 18,000 people a day, or 42% of its install base. The “iLike” app, oft-cited as a Facebook success story, may be less popular than we thought: 646,000 people, or 9% of its install base, use it daily.
(via cwodtke’s tweets, who recently noted that she and I seem to be on some sort of convergence path)
Two years after the first BarCamp (an ad hoc unconference formed initially in response to O’Reilly’s Foo Camp, I’m finally planning to make it to one, this weekend’s BarCampBlock, headquartered at SocialText’s offices in Palo Alto.
According to what I just jotted on the Sessions page on the wiki, I’ve just volunteered to lead or participate in discussions about portable social networks, identity, design patterns, particularly social-media related design patterns, and the gift economy.
I don’t know if I’m qualified to talk about all of those things but when has that ever stopped me before?
Since the moment that Liz Henry and Tara Hunt tipped me off to this event, I’ve had the feeling that this was an important one not to miss. So soon after my wedding and honeymoon and with a rapidly filling-up fall conference schedule, I could have been tempted to let this one slide by, but I have a strong intuition that many of the people I consider friends, heroes, and inspirations will be there and that I’d be kicking myself if I let another Bay Area BarCamp go by without joining in on the fun.
I’ll blog from there if I can find the time between no-spectatorin’ and schmoozin’ and gettin’ things done.
Here are my slides from my presentation, Mobile Information Architecture: Designing Experiences for the Mobile Web:
(I may update them with a 2.0 version based on some new learnings from subsequent conversations, and a different idea of how to pace the imagery.)
And here are my slides from the panel I moderated, Lessons From Failure: Or How IAs Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bombs:
In March I’ll be moderating a panel at South by Southwest Interactive in Austin, Texas, called “Every Breath You Take: Identity, Attention, Presence, and Reputation Online.”
Confirmed panelists include George Kelly, Kaliya Hamlin, Ted Nadeau, and Mary Hodder.
I’m anticipating a lively dialogue tackling how we project and define our identities online, what it means to be present when you are physically remote, and how reputations are earned and maintained in an attention economy.
Come on down and join the conversation.
As promised, here are some shots of last week’s merry-making, courtesy of Elton:
I might wan to attend some of this year’s UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism Winter New Media Lecture Series:
Sunday, December 10, 2006 - Wednesday, December 13, 2006 North Gate Hall Library, Hearst at Euclid Avenue, Berkeley Featured speakers are Howard Rheingold, “Smart Mobs” author; Travis Fox, Washington Post; Robert Hood, msnbc.com; Al Bonner, Lawrence.com; Seth Gittner, Roanoke Times; Seth Familian, UC Berkeley Haas School of Business; Joe Howry, Bruce McLean, Colleen Casem and Tom Kiska, Ventura County Star. This event is free and open to the public, and no RSVP is needed.
(Directions to the Journalism School)
I meant to post this a week or so ago, but Peter Merholz has put up the audio from presentations at this year’s inaugural IDEA conference in Seattle on the conference blog, saying
If you have only 30 minutes, then listen to Bruce Sterling’s closing keynote. Honestly, though, there’s lots of great stuff here. Interaction designers will be keen on Dave Cronin, Jake Barton, Stamen, Fernanda Viegas, and Robert Kalin. Brought to you by the IA Institute!
One of the two panels I proposed for SXSW next spring garnered sufficient votes to make the cut. It’s the one on identity, presence, attention, trust, privacy and so on, called “Every Breath You Take.” I’m excited about moderating this panel and I’m in the process of pulling together the other panelists, which I’ll announce as soon as everything’s settled.
Meanwhile, the deadline for proposals for the IA Summit (also next March) just passed and I managed to get in one for a presentation on Mobile IA and another for a panel on Lessons from Failure. Additionally, I’ve signed on as a panelist for two other cool ideas proposed by other people that I’ll discuss here if and when they are approved. As a director I’ll be involved in the annual public meeting of the board of the IA Institute at the Summit as well.
Looks like March will once again be a busy conference / travel season for me, with SXSW in Austin as always and the Summit scheduled for Las Vegas later in the month.
We’re back… now, with less context!
…and, we’re outtie.
The first round of panels proposed for SXSW Interactive 2007 were those proposed by past speakers (I had two proposals in that round). Voting for the first round is now closed.
2007 SXSW Interactive Panel Proposal Picker (Round Two) starts today, featuring panel proposals that were submitted in the last few months.
Go check out all the creative ideas and vote.
