SxDSalon: A group blog on social interaction design

Summit interview with Kent State’s Tom Froehlich

When I was in Phoenix for the IA Summit this year, I had the privilege of sitting down with Tom Froehlich of Kent State University’s information department (with Valerie Kelly behind the camera) for a chat about IA, design patterns, social design, and more: They also spoke with Donna Spencer, Andrea Resmini, Andrew Hinton, Luke Wroblewski, Kevin Cheng, and Eric Reiss, and I look forward to watching their videos too.

Designing for Play slides from WebVisions 2010

Wow, WebVisions was amazing, as was Portland, and the hospitality of my friends there and the organizers of the conference. Thanks to everyone who made it possible! (I mean, Ukepalooza – say no more.) Here are the slides from my talk, Designing for Play:

Social design preso from Beyond Findability workshop presented by the IA Institute at the IA Summit

Erin posted the latest version of our “5/5/5″ talk, as given in Phoenix last week, to Slideshare: Designing Social Interfaces (presentation and gameplay), part of the IA Institute’s “Beyond Findability” workshop at IA Summit 2010 Also, Erin has also posted a blog entry on our poster shown at the Summit, on our evolving efforts to map and visualize the social design space. You can download a PDF of the poster there if you like. Note, my presentation at BayCHI last n...

Talking patterns, openness, and community with the Tummelvision crew

Oh, cool! Heather posted the Tummelvision episode I appeared on a couple of weeks ago. document.getElementById("post-4763-blankimage").onload();

Designing for play at Ignite Bay Area

Just got sent a link to all the videos from Ignite Bay Area last month. Here’s my “Designing for Play” talk, a topic I’ll be exploring in greater depth at Web Visions, the Web 2.0 Expo, and Web Directions @media later this year: There’ll be another Ignite in May coinciding with the Web 2.0 Expo, so get your submission in now. document.getElementById("post-4727-blankimage").onload();

Tags as collecting behavior

When I first started curating the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library, I put “tags” near the top of my list of user interaction patterns to investigate. By that time, Yahoo! had already acquired several pioneers in the tagging realm, Flickr and Delicious, and there were some subtle distinctions in how they implemented the experience. We got down in the weeds on these and did a lot of research, ultimately settled on offering high-level guidance, and finished the patterns in the course of wr...

Norm(s)!

Over the years as I’ve made a study of online communities and other forms of sociality, I’ve discovered (of course) a lot of other people doing important research work in the field. When we started writing our book I reached out to one such friend, Gary Burnett, a professor of communication and information who’s been doing excellent work in precisely this area. In fact, not two years ago we appeared together on a panel at a Grateful Dead conference at U. Mass where we spoke abo...

Are we doing any good?

One of my favorite essays published in our book is Matte Scheinker’s, called Are we building a better Internet?. I asked Matte to write about ethics because it was a burning topic for the book and one that he and I used to kick around a bit as an oft-neglected issue in web design and development. There are tradeoffs in customer acquisition, in growing a network, in handling privacy concerns and the related disclosures, some of which we are seeing at play right now in the controversial lau...

Putting the social in the mobile

My continuing series of blog posts linking to essays published in our book, well, continues now with Billie Mandel’s Designing Social Interfaces for Mobile, in which she writes: Contextually speaking, mobile phones are by definition social networking devices. Breaking out of the classic phone/phone book mental model and transforming that experience to include 21st century-style social networking, though – that’s where the fun challenge is for designers. Asking ourselves some mobile-s...

Talking social patterns with thriving UX communities in London and Berlin

A week or so ago I undertook a whirlwind visit to the UK and the Continent, giving two presentations about design patterns and social design, one in London on Tuesday, and another in Berlin on Thursday, each event sponsored by YDN (and the one in Germany co-sponsored by the local IxDA group). The London event was in a wonderful gallery/cafe venue called Wallacespace filled with a standing-room only crowd. I was pleased to see a couple of friends from the international UX community there and the ...