James Boardwellsocial networks and experience design

James Boardwell 13/09/07

I’m talking about

• social networks

• experience design

• thoughts on “the museum”

For the most part I’m not going to refer to gaming.. because well, there’s not enough time but this is possibly the most interesting area for exploration. Next time!

An elite fighting unit <cough>

We are Rattle and we do Research and Development around digital media, focusing on experience design, which is a bit of a fuzzy area but basically means researching what engages people and then designing and building prototypes to test. This work ranges from information design [BBC] to developing radical content strategies for broadcasters and independents to enterprise social software to help businesses share knowledge.

We’ve only been going 6 mths and we’re based in sheffield.

social networks

aren’t you sick of them already?

We hear a lot about "social networks" in an era when social more and values in these "liquid times" [Z Bauman] seem under huge change.

Is it just a moniker, a neologism that's now a rather meaningless metaphor for a Douglas Coupland generation who are 'lost' or is it a more profound change affecting the basis of how we interact and behave?

who? what? where? when? how? why?

I’m going to look at social networks from the simple journalistic process: who, what, where, when, how and why? I like its simplicity.

who?

Tim Berners Lee

image of his initial website

In many ways Tim Berners-Lee invented social networks. Html enabled simple relationships in a distributed medium. What he didn’t offer was a semantic wrapper for defining the relationship - that took work. But usenet groups were fostered around early web technologies and they did allow semantic richness - name, group, title etc. and can be seen as the pre-cursor to what we now call “social networks”.

what are social networks?

Every web 2.0 brand seems to be a “social network”. How many can you spot? How many do you recognise?! But as the use of the term proliferates, the actual sense of what “social networks” ‘are’ gets ever vaguer. It’s a bit of an empty metaphor; everything is social.

What matters is in what way is something “social” and how does it manifest itself?

Familiar? The ability to define friends, what they see, add to groups and have different means through which to engage and communicate with people. Poke, the very physical acknowledgment of ‘knowing’ someone, of friendship is probably the best example but there are now a proliferation of others.

As Facebook grows it will be interesting to see how friends’ networks scale. How do you manage different ‘types’ of friends? How do you manage a meaningful relationship with more than say, thirty people? What would a second tier of relationships look like? We all have a second and probably a third tier but exposing stark social distinctions just wouldn’t feel comfortable. This is the very sociality of Facebook. It’s stuff we already do offline reasonably well but online exposes our social rules as clunky, awkward decisions.

MySpace, a space which has more recently been colonised by bands, organisations and brands to have an online identity [how many offline tactical / brand ads do you now see with a myspace url?].

MySpace defines your contacts as “friends”, itself a very loaded term and is public and doesn’t allow you manage your relationships in any other way that through comments, which often take the form of testimonials or “thank yous” for reciprocal linking. It’s less sophisticated than Facebook, just as “social” but socially different and that matters... And it’s this very unsophisticated sociality that has appealed to many corporations etc. They can manage their template, their visual identity, but they don’t have to work too hard at their sociality, at being social, which is just as well because they’re not that good at it. And they’re not that good at it because their a multiplicity, they’re many people and it takes work to cohere a consistent identity. Look at any brand and the work that goes into making that feel right.

You know this.

The ability to define things amongst a crowd allows you to find similar relationships around keywords and their uris / urls. Value is dependent upon our “selfish acts”, a desire to bookmark so we can find things again later. Collectively our selfishness creates wisdom. Of course some people are stupid and don’t tag [really!!] and tag in a very random manner but for the most part the system is self-organising because it’s based on a simple human trait to tag well so you can find again.

The cumulative behaviour creates interesting views e.g. popular.

This can of course be gamed if there is some vested interest in doing so. Technical solutions to gaming fail. Social one’s win out. This is important when thinking about design.

Flickr is a master of sociality and of different ‘views’. But what is often overlooked when you here people talk about flickr is the social nature of images themselves; we live in a visually driven culture.

I just like this photo. Photo’s do that don’t they? They’re emotive, potent signifiers. But they’re also highly interpretive. This could be a parody of machismo but it equally could be a mannequin and a truck. Indeed it is a mannequin and a truck.

But there are other reasons for looking at the flickr “product page”. It’s interesting how Flickr are adapting the metadata around the object, the image. Cameras are now a key way to find content and sort data. Cameras are also highly social, this is a picture site after all. People cohere around cameras, the materiality of them matters; they’re more than tools, they are the physical embodiment of the art. What you took your photo with matters as much as the photo to many people. This is a nuanced and relatively sophisticated sociality. But it’s not just cameras of course. Groups are a fantastic way to create social value around an image or set of images. Groups offer a way for people to perform rule based behaviour [taking the photo; assigning the photo and tagging it appropriately] and also perform to a group psyche, of the values that the group embody... we could talk all day about flickr.

Lastfm. Another great medium, music [although the cover art is often just as important...]

Lastfm tries really hard to emulate the types of social interaction you see on flickr, facebook etc. However, aside from providing a neat way to see what other are listening too, they;ve struggled to cohere people in the way that other social networks have. The ambient nature of the archiving may be one issue [via scrobbler]. It’s all a bit easy. And they make mistakes [no bad thing] they implemented a feature to allow pro users to see who last viewed their page. However, it felt rather socially awkward; the inequality of view belonged to a Foucauldian Panoptican, the observer and observed.

Last also has more general social network ‘effects’. Anecdotally people I know who use it again start to perform socially. They present a “mask” of themselves [Goffman] and consciously listen to particular types of music, genres and individual bands to play out that identity. And certain group mavens drive this activity [from broadcast scale groups like Zane Lowe on Radio 1 to office peer groups]; the spectre of “cumulative advantage” is never far away source: Duncan J. Watts http://tinyurl.com/yraayd

Twitter involves a similar group dynamic to the one just mentioned on last.fm, in that it’s humble call to action “what are you doing now” becomes a performance of the banal, sometimes in the form of slang, shorthand or obscure reference. It certainly does amongst my peers anyway. It’s a “performative space” and all the more so because the rules are so simple and well defined: 140 characters, you, now. That sort of specificity leaves room for creative endeavor, indeed it kinda demands creative endeavor, in the way that lastfm [and input most “social networks here] doesn’t. The beauty is in its simplicity [even in the call for it to be used as a command line API].

Dopplr.

To be honest I don’t use dopplr a lot. I don’t travel much. It’s more aspirational for me, that and seeing where people I know go and which conferences their speaking at etc. In fact no other social network serves to position me so starkly, so uncontrollably as dopplr. The physical demand to travel [and dopplr is primarily for international travel] is itself such a major action that the frequency to make this habitual means it’s audience is niche. But niche is good. It taps in to a philosophy about the web generally which I like and ws neatly expressed by Matt Jones their Chief Design Chap [CCC] at Reboot07 this year where he said and I paraphrase [and probably get it all wrong] that “they design for a particular function rather than to create a platform for all travelers. The platform for them is the web itself”. I like that. Technically it’s not easy to achieve, making dopplr plug into the web-at-large, but it’s laudable and humble and good. To perhaps make sense of it if facebook is the coffee shop, the starbucks, then dopplr is the cafetiere.

In terms of the sociality of the service though, it’s too early for me to say. It’ll be interesting to watch emergent behaviour er... emerge.

Allows us to fulfill social roles some of which are only ever performed online some of which are reinforced offline

Social networks don’t exist in a bubble. Sociality on the web, indeed in any medium, is intrinsically entwined with all other aspects of our lives.

What’s happening now however is that we’re seeing the tail wagging the dog, we’re seeing some online behaviour take root offline.... but more of that later.

falling off the back of this is the notion of “social software”

there are 4 basic types of social

software:

IMBlogsMessageboards Wikis

IM

Blog

Mboard

Wikis

authorial voice

immediacy

declining

This slide is pretty self-explanatory. Some mediums have their own “affordance”, their own inbuilt form of communication which all sounds a bit Marshall McLuhan doesn’t it? It probably is. I don’t know what to think about that so let’s move on.

where?

enterpriseschools / insitutions

homeon the move - embodied

Where are social networks. I kinda hope that I’ve expressed this already. They’re everywhere. It’s really unhelpful to perceive of social networks as being just online. The online performance, the online ‘act’ is best perceived as a moment within a social life. That sounds rubbish. But what I mean is that the online act is a punctuation in a more complex and and offline existence. For example, the vernacular I mentioned earlier, the visual cues pulled in from other activities and narrative genres such as games, horror, comedy etc. [and you can see these in many of the avatars people choose for themselves] are a part of what I’m trying to articulate. And I think one of the reasons I’m strugling to articulate it is because it is so often invisible, the glue that holds us, narratives, references, language together can be fragile and invisible. You’ve got to look hard for it.

On a more general level though, social networks are in very physical spaces, organisational cultures etc which each have their own rules: schools [in which we’ve done some work... elaborate]; offices [Taylorist principles of time/motion and accountability vs. new service economy] and the home itself... social networks play out differently in all these spaces because we ourselves play out differently their too: context matters.

Example of trying to bring social media to drive engagement with travel. I like this and when I tried it it felt like I did actually get back the text from some scruffy kid at the back of the bus; it was banal yet aggressive...

What is this showing? It’s showing that social networks are now distributed across time and space and are often quite transient and ephemeral. They don’t have to be permanent. The act can be akin to mumbling under your breath as you commute to work. And that act has its own driver and dynamic and the shape of that social network, this social network of this bus company, will have its own shape because of that.

when?

social dynamics dictate use...

Facebook is built into our workflow. Email updates harangue us [most of us] into reactive readership. You can see why Facebook seems to be popular throughout the day. And why companies are banning it.

Flickr is slightly different. It isn’t nominally built into our workflow in the same way. It’s less reactive as an environment. It’s often highly pro-active; to find; to upload; to ‘wilf’ or browse...

how?

1% rule?

Biggest issue affecting use is not technical - it is social1% rule can be misleading.... Facebook and Twitter get far more involvement because they are asking for a different type of performance - not essentially “public”, but “semi-private”, banal stuff mostly amongst people you already know. They’re a different type of performance from say, publishing a blog post or writing in a messageboard thread. A host of factors affect the sociality here and hence the type of publishing you get which I’ll mention in a minute. But first look at the drivers....

why?

vanitythe desire to perform

communicatebelong

manage identityand sometimes for base human needs of relating to others

Essentially to see out our everyday needs and desires and explore new ones...

And social networks provide another space for those needs to play out.

I like this image because it’s one of the those everyday images that says a lot about how the off and online worlds are colliding. It’s a small act but quite a profound one.

Why should we care?

Crowds

Aggregating content

Filtering content

Engagement

and...

wisdom of the crowds - james surewecki’s story of a submarine that went missing and experts were unable to place it accurately and yet bu opening up the details of last positions and currents etc. to the wider world the submarine’s location was accurately mapped and subsequently found. It’s a powerful story.

But just as the crowd found the answer here there is another prevailing theory that the crowd is dumb and that individuals but *lots* of individuals acting out of their own self-interest is the more powerful model. This is termed wikinomics. There’s a tale told by Dan Tapscott in his book wikinomics all about a Gold Mining company that was broke that basically started to use the crowd as it’s scientific arm and those with solutions were paid for their answers, handsomely; the company’s value has gone from $100m to $9bn as it’s drilling success rate has risen.

And then there’s recommending and filtering in the long tail more generally. But you know about that.

The Blimp!

Products! or blogjects or.. whatever...

Things, products, balloons are increasingly wired to the web-brain. The internet is really all around us and that’s set to change the way we interact with things and with each other.

The nabaztag is probably the most obvious and commercial sign of this to date.

But RFID and Qcodes are doing something ina far less productised way by enabling companies to identify artefacts [bits of information- parcel, letters etc.] and associate it with other things [time; driver; address etc.]. This ability to make relationships between things and to know the relationships between things and change them wherever you are sounds so fucking uninspiring but is I think as profound a change to our everyday lives as we will witness outside the realm of bio-technology. I’m excited by it.

• secret

• group

• publishing

• performative

• participatory

• watching

Conceiving of sociality: 6 spaces

source: matt locke test.org.uk

So having said that “social networks” need to be explained socially to be understood we need to find ways to do that that we can make sense of. And you know, for all the buzz around “social networks” there really isn’t a lot of thinking going on about *how* we do that. There are numerous ways to characterise our use of the internet yet there are relatively few really useful typologies.

Matt Locke [test.org.uk] has recently proposed a set of spaces for thinking through “social media / networks” which start to make sense of the behaviours of users and the nature of the mediums that I alluded to in talking about Facebook and Flickr etc. He proposes 6 spaces:

secret: - IM / sms - often using private ref and slang or code - absolute privacy and control - smsgroup: - peer ID, competition, shared ref points [e.g. band] - e.g. facebookpublishing: showcasing outside of a group - public; control the context of creative work - feedback - measures [flickr; youtube; livejournal / blogs?]performing - playing a role within game structure where teamwork needed to achieve a goalMMORPGs; some flickr groupsParticipation spaces: co-ordinating lots of individual acts to achieve joint goalmysociety; upcoming groups; charity efforts etc.watching spaces: TV; cinema; theatre etc. linear viewing - as a spectacle

I include this here because I think it really helps us to think through social networks not as objects and phenomenon but as living effects.

Issues

• Privacy - Data use

• Rights management

• Making the web work as a platform: Open ID

Did you see the facebook terms of use? It’s worth a look.

Creative commons - helping with rights but as google know with youtube it’s messy - you have to give in the hope you receive. It’s a new business model for many and the rules are still murky.

Experience DesignSo having talked a little about the “social” in “social networks”, how do we think about actually designing “social” things that work, that really engage people?

There’s a broad field called “experience design”; I don’t really see it as a discipline.. we kinda all do it from organising weddings and parties to curating exhibitions at museums ;-)

What’s interesting now is how we can create experiences that cross time and space amongst different audiences using digital and distributed media...

adaptive design is a good thing

The Tower of Babel is an instructive fable. “Build it and they will come” is still with us!

Latour [1991] argued that “technology is just the social made durable”. Technology is basically a machine of social associations, values, assumptions and agreements. I like that view and it serves as a pointer in terms of design. Build things socially and the technology will come, focus on the experience first and NOT the technology.

Here are some experiences that I like:

nike run london - image

Nike’s Run London campaign and service. It works. Why?

1. It fits with their brand mantra “just do it” 2. It’s embodied - you do it!3. You inscribe yourself on a social space - map - which is distributed and editable; it’s a summation of your embodiment and everyone else who’s participated. Your blood, sweat and blisters are etched here.4. Others do the same - cumulative benefit

This is an exampleof what has been called a “product-service-system”.

product service propositions

+

The iPod experience is of course all the tangible and visceral things people say the IPod is but fundamentally it’s the promise of a service connection, a plug to music that made the concept so attractive to many.

Product / Service proposition. One of the best.

ipod image source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dantaylor/58703002/

key fob fit for purpose

A humble yet very thoughtful piece of product design which fits with the brand “every little helps”.

So, how do you do it?

There is no template really...

Like i said this is not a science or a discipline. [Some] Marketing people tend to be good at it. They understand that you do whatever it takes to engage people.

I find five “filters” help to design services and

experiences

1. BrandBrand. A brand should be a distillation of the relationship the business has with it’s market. It sets the parameters for the experience. Does it “fit” with what we want to do, with who “we” are and what our proposition “is”?

E.g.

2. Human “Norms”

Things that are hard wired, psychologically programmed e.g. Matt Webb’s book “Mind Hacks” is a great help here.

And things that are learnt behavioural norms, etiquette, such as queuing etc. and other behaviours that are far more contextual and negotiated such as kissing, shaking hands, etc.These are psychological and physical factors, some are global [animalistic] whilst some are culturally distinct [more local].

this is where design patterns come in...this is why websites have left navs and

why the ipod thumb-wheel works

Nokia know this: user experience

is their key USP

Nokia know this: user experience is their key USP

3. ServiceHow you deliver the product, how it’s wrapped and managed as a form of engagement, from amazon affiliate shops [fantastically well managed] to Moo.com and their position as interlocutors between brands and people, offline and online.

4. AssociationsI’ve been grappling with this one a little bit... i don’t like it but i can’t find a better way to express it. it’s basically understanding both the environment and the issues that we’re faced with when designing experiences, how we’re connected and to what. Ordinarily, this may be called “context” but I don’t find the word context useful, too much is assumed and too much escapes; we create contexts constantly.

e.g. CPA: continual partial attention

“Continuous partial attention” the scourge of our internet always-on society and ads everywhere [something like 1500 ads a day!!]. Continuously being distracted from tasks, our attention shifting. Some research has suggested teens are far better at multitasking because of their digital media use - gaming whilst watching TV etc; we’re learning as a species to adapt to being “always on”.

e.g. “risk society”e.g. paradox of choice

Risk society - sense that we’re now taking on more risks that were once the responsibility of the state or of extended family [care, pensions, health, jobs etc.]. This is producing what some commentators call an “anxiety society” full of moral panics around ASBOs / crime, environmental disaster etc. and of course a rise in stress and depression related illnesses. The Paradox of Choice is that we feel out of control in many situations where we have unlimited [or seemingly unlimited, we can only manage to hold a limited number of things in our head at any one time] choice.

We need to take these issues and issues like these on board when we’re thinking about experiences, to understand all sorts of associations and provide services, products or content that helps to manage such issues e.g. in the case of choice, curating content [editorialising] or providing suitable recommendations around content.

5. Product or ArtefactI want to talk a little bit about the product or artefact now. This is an interesting area especially as materials are now increasingly connected, as we saw earlier. Matt Webb talks about products in the age of the internet as well as anyone.

Souvenir

Empathy.

This is a souvenir. Research we have done recently has shown how the artefact, the material stands in for experiences, serves to communicate memories, love, loss, fun etc... but in a highly personal way. It has empathy.

It’s not dissimilar from the way in which iPods come with the same inbuilt sense of values, expectations, both from how other people communicate their use of the product, how it is communicated through advertising and marketing. Scarcity can be important in maintaining these values, oversupply devalues the experience in terms of product [but can serve to increase value where “critical mass” is important e.g. in Facebook which is a proxy for a address book].

affordance

vs.

Affordance.

What are the properties of the “thing” itself? Donald Norman is useful here... “the design of everyday things” in which he talks of “affordances”, the way materials and products have a certain “will”... [bus shelter windows being broken and replaced with “writeable” plywood etc.]. And this links strongly with the writing of those in “social study of science and technology” or STS [see http://tinyurl.com/28e5s5]

Industrial designers understand affordance. In designing experiences we too need to think of the relationship that people have with materials and their design as they do engender certain behaviour which is hard-wired. The classic example here is the push-pull door handles. Ignore the wording, the very design dictates use yet how many times have your seen doors that get this wrong, where the door is confused?

Adaptation.

Artefacts are created for certain tasks and experiences. When these tasks or the artefact becomes redundant you need to adapt. Producers are becoming increasingly good at building in obsolescence into their designs [e.g. computer hardware, fashion where we’re almost on a weekly cycle of trends now, gaming and narrative progression]. What is interesting in an age of Peak Oil and environmental crises and is how the obsolete materials get “recycled” and “re-used”. Developing nations are better at this than us. Jan Chipchase has documented the South Asian market in fixing, mending and recycling products to extend their life. For them it’s a functional necessity as these goods are hugely expensive. In the developed world we have adaptation and recycling as more craft based, as a “hardware hacking” movement [see image].

Narrative.

We can learn a lot from comics and narrative structures, about “pace”, “structure”, “timing” etc. This image is culled from Scott McCloud’s book “Understanding Comics” one of the most insightful books I’ve read on interaction design. This particular point he’s making rings true for a lot of experience design for me... engaging people isn’t about swamping people with actions, tasks, and flashing lights!

Getting Lost

Helping people to get lost enables the use of all their senses. Perhaps this is the same as Scott McCloud’s comic panels?

What would these spaces look like? how would you create experiences for getting lost? could you??

“Not to find one’s way in a city may be uninteresting and banal. It requires

ignorance - nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city - as one loses oneself in a

forest - that calls for quite a different schooling” walter benjamin

From the book “A field guide to getting lost” by Rebecca Solnit. I think of the notion of “getting lost” is an interesting one especially in relation to the Museum and artefacts that have essentially been found and where the signifier [subject] and signified [object] are clearly signposted, actually helping people to lose themselves and pull up the semiotic anchors is perhaps a fruitful one.

• image of supermarket

So we’ve seen that products have certain emotional connections, affordances, flows. How do these things come together?

We can see how products invoke certain emotional responses and drivers in the classic work of Danny Miller [Shopping]. He describes how the ordinary supermarket shop becomes an act of love for the Wife, Mother, or Partner. The products themselves are an association to the role of the mother and her love in choosing and paying for the items, or the time invested in thinking about what is required.

Supermarkets know this. They’re spaces of seduction. And they have clever means to manage that seduction:

• lighting to control blink rate and visual awareness• pacing of products to produce either lots of space • flow: changing gondola positions, width of aisles etc. all create a perception of space and change the pace of use accordingly• memory: through changing aisles and products to make us ‘lose ourselves’ and forget our routines.

ID Magasin are the business that specialise in creating these retail spaces.

• brand

• behavioral norms

• services

• association

• product / artifact

so to re-cap.

Practically....

Having talked about filters for making the complexity of the world simpler and help think through appropriate experience design, what are the tools that help to actually design experiences?

Identify user needs and contexts

ethnography; participatory design and participatory observation

I guess this is more familiar territory.

You need insight into the filters described and this is where research is essential. Your experiences, your ideas and your values are not those of your audience. I’d argue that “material research” is the most fruitful approach for designing new services and experiences, but that’s not always so. The walkman came out of a belief and nothing more.

You can also use task analysis, focus groups and interviews depending on the brief and the budget, but nothing beats actually engaging with the people you are designing for and observing critically how they interact with the world around them. Jane Fulton Suri’s book “Thoughtless Acts” is a good guide here and Flickr is a fantastic resource.

Then you produce schematics which represent the experience and how needs / tasks are met

Designing experiences needs documentation in order to make the concepts transferable and durable. Persona’s can help. User journeys’ can also be helpful although they tend to be functionally driven and it’s important to bring in some of the issues around affordance, emotion, space and narrative...

Thoughts on implications for new museum experiences

modernity

Finding, giving meaning to - taxonomical structures, hoarding and closing down.

We still all do this - think of the child’s toy box or a diary where items are put etc. think of the favourites track on your iPod. The desire to limit and close down is still all powerful.

post-modernity

Now we are in an era that concerns itself with deconstructing, dis-locating and opening out. The museum is ill suited to this task for no other reason than it goes against its role of defining and conserving and re-presenting.

Perhaps there is still a role, an increased role, for this purpose in our anxiety ridden world where people want some definition [cf. Wikipedia] and certainty. But the delivery of the service must still recognise the filters described above to produce appropriate experiences.

As informal learning blends with entertainment where are the boundaries?

imagine this is a

corporate office

with a science exhibit in reception

The distributed museum

How could we engage with audiences? What can the web teach us about being distributed? What could a distributed museum look like?

what is the role of the artifact now it is a

multiplicity?

How would we track it, trace it, and see its provenance?

image of thinglink

Thinglink looks to tackle this issue. It provides a means through which to have a social RDF. For subject-relationship-object to be defined but to be defined temporally so it can change over time. This captures provenance, the history of the things around us and our relationship with them. Conceptually its cool. But the human overhead is too great to make is work en mass. We need some form of ambient [cf. machine tag based] recording and documentation. What a cool thing that would be for museums to do; to record our relationships with the things around us.

The life of artifacts: a distributed museum?

Image Credits

all image authors own unless otherwise stated

ipod image http://www.flickr.com/photos/dantaylor/58703002/

supermarket http://www.flickr.com/photos/simon_shek/313608149/

web2.0 http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=183161451&size=l

bag o’ stuff http://www.flickr.com/photos/diavoli/249821618/

nokia http://www.flickr.com/photos/fluzo/51502429/

nabaztag http://www.flickr.com/photos/missty/357311147/

pull handle http://www.flickr.com/photos/75215723@N00/33829609/

rollercoaster http://www.flickr.com/photos/racoles/205385081/

supermarket http://www.flickr.com/photos/simon_shek/313608149/

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