SxDSalon: A group blog on social interaction design

SxD: Primary and Secondary Frames

I wrote several times last year about frames and re-framing the approaches to social media design. The concept of frames is borrowed from Erving Goffman's analysis of face-to-face social interactions. In brief, frames are how we know What's going on, and consequently, How to proceed. In Goffman's analysis, frames permit a vast number of opportunities to change and shift What's going on by means of what he calls keyings, reframings, cues and more. It's by means of the concept of frames that a com...

How boundaries are formed in a more transparent world

Last night at the Social Business Tweetup in San Francisco, I had a conversation with Stowe Boyd about new ways boundaries will be constructed in a world of increased transparency. In the personal world and the business world, more is transparent, boundaries are more porous; boundaries continue to exist, and are created in some different ways. Signal to noise. When constant streams of talk and data are available, the biggest need is for tools and affordances to manage attention and improve s...

Your users are mental

In writing Designing Social, Erin and I wanted to include as many voices as possible and represent a wide variety of perspectives. We did this by stealing coopting curating many patterns and tropes already unearthed and documented by smart web people over the past decade and we also invited a large roster of brilliant web folk to contribute essays. Bit by bit we are making sure all the essays are available online, either hosted on their authors’ blogs or personal websites or in some cases ...

Vision board

Last week I made a vision board for 2010, which I have to recommend as an exercise to others! I already had a “themeword” for the year (see my previous post), but I wanted something in addition as a reminder of my goals, hopes, or dreams. When I set out to actually create the vision board, I wasn’t quite sure how it would turn out — and I engaged the Overlap SF group to do it together as an activity for our January meetup. I really hope other Overlappers will share the output ...

Social design in the physical world – touch screen table exhibits

With new interface technologies, social interaction design can come into play when people are in the same room. When I was in the Boston area on vacation, I ran into Henry Kaufman, one of the principals of Tactable a design and development shop that makes interactive touchscreen exhibits and technologies for museum and commercial installations. Kaufman gave me a tour of their studio, in a carriage house in a residential neighborhood near Harvard Square. The installations have iPhone like touc...

“Social” can’t be solved by an algorithm

I was contacted by a dutch journalist who’s writing an article on the merits of social interaction versus search engines. She read a paper of mine and emailed me with two questions. I thought it’d be useful to post my reply publicly: First, do you think search engines making use of social networks will improve search results and thus make our daily life a bit easier? Yes! A lot of fact finding and information discovery already comes from friends, colleagues, and even acquaintance...

Social Technology Use and the Lifestage Fallacy

A number of years ago, research studies were published showing that teens were heavy users of instant messaging, and more likely to use IM and less likely to use email than adults. A very brief search shows that teens’ preferences for IM were observed in studies from 2005 and 2001 These results are often cited as showing that there are generational differences in social technology use – youth preferred synchronous communication, and email was going to inevitably decline. This past ...

Broken social (online) scenes

I've just gotten off a skype call with friend and colleague, and fellow sxdsalon member Thomas Vander Wal. Thomas and I pick up the virtual phone about every month or six weeks to tie up loose conversational threads. We usually manage to get into a two hour tangle, after which we have new threads to tie up, half of which are actually knots.I enjoy talking to Thomas in part because there simply aren't that many social media theory and concept geeks out there. Thomas' experience and history in the...

2010: The start of a new decade

Really, this post is a reflection on 2009 and a look forward to 2010. 2009 was a strange year for me—it was like the growing pains of your teenage years. I started the year as Ph.D. student at UC San Diego. That sounds benign, but in fact, I was facing a department that set me up to fail, with what felt like mile-high walls that I had to climb over. I was placed on academic probation by my advisor who, instead of writing an email or telling me to my face that he didn’t like the direction...