The designer's influence: social media and the user experience

There's been an interesting conversation underway on IxDA about design and influence. The original post on Johnnyholland also has a few tasty comments. My own take on issue of whether or not designers should be concerned with the ethics of their ability to influence users is, simply, no. But from the perspective of social intraction design, the conversation of design and its influence on users takes an interesting turn. Here's some of what came up today. My comment is in response to Dave Malouf's comment. I thought this might be worth blogging. Is this a cheap way to put up a blog post or another example of email surfacing interesting exchanges? Yes.

For context, Dave's comment, which raises the interesting question of how influence in social media:
"Now, the real question in my mind is to discuss, theorize, etc. HOW to do influence. What about perception and cognition and emotion can we work? What cultural strategies are most effective.
i.e. in social networking design, and social collaboration design there are a ton of means of getting people to be more contributor oriented. This is designing to increase activity.
or in e-commerce models, how do we get more people to hit that final "submit"?
or in health care how do we get people to take better care of themselves, for clinicians to make less mistakes, etc.?" -- Dave Malouf

My response
Why are contributors contributing? Perhaps because they have a sense of the common good, and as motivates many wikipedians, they want to maintain accuracy and breadth of open-sourced knowledge. Or perhaps they're "contributing" to twitter because they've got an enormous ego and no sense of self restraint.

Clearly the term "contribute" loses its meaning very quickly when we get into social media, as nearly everything said or submitted is a contribution: social bookmarking, retweeting, blogging, commenting...

How does one "design" the social -- that's what interests me, and in particular, what kinds of social interactions, individual, interpersonal, social, and public, can be codified? What concepts do we need if we're to go from explaining a single user interaction on social media to the social dynamics of two or more users? Clearly the interactions are users with users, not users with software -- but we cant just use real world social interactions as our models. Mediation strips away face, body, and affect; it removes synchrony of time. Etc etc.. There's plenty more...

So the question of influence is a very good one. It's probably not an ethical one, because "we" don't control the user, his/her perceptions, interests, choices, motives, or his/her experience. Personally i think "framing" may be a viable way to approach the issue of designing the social, as it shifts emphasis from "design" to "perspective", and in social interaction design it's mostly about shaping these nuanced social meanings and negotiations, not functions (as with so much product design or interface design -- and that's not to denigrate style, etc).

The matter does seem v interesting if the question is explored not in terms of our responsibilities as designers but in terms of the user experience: what kinds of users choose to retweet an influencer? What kinds of social incentives work with non-competitive users? Are there ways to reduce the bias or distortion that leader boards often produce? Would there be a way to grow a service like twitter without it turning into a popularity contest for so many users? What social incentives do experts respond to, and could a system be designed to appeal to experts without attracting promoters?

As the motivation is often the other person, the matter of influencing the user does get interesting... Are there ethics involved if a dating site is designed to keep users hopeful, voyeuristically engaged, addicted to checking for new flirts and message, and highly unlikely to get a real date? Dunno, that's the business of dating sites, none of which would survive if they did what the claim to do.

We need to bear in mind that most social media, and perhaps a great deal of software in general, operate in failure mode much of the time. Twitter is not conversational. Followers are not friends. Facebook is not social. Many modern social systems are but a disaster waiting to happen. So how do we talk about influence and incentives if in fact much user activity fails to communicate,is ambiguous in its intent,is redundant with contributions elsewhere, goes un-responded to, is out of context...

If so much of social media interaction is actually handling of failure, responding to breakdown, bridging misunderstanding, and otherwise social "error handling," then perhaps we ought to learn more about what "functional social media" means before worrying that we have too much influence... And i'll say right now that these errors and failures may in fact be the motor of participation on social media: we're into breakdowns, ambiguities, ambivalence, conflict, and drama.

--Adrian

A conversation with Thomas Vander Wal

The following is a raw and unedited email exchange between myself and Thomas Vander Wal (@vanderwal), fellow social interaction designer and social software architect par excellance. Thomas and I have complementary perspectives on social media design and on the methods that best support emergent and managed social practices on social media. Our interest in the design challenge presented by social software and our inclination to new paradigms and concepts is shared. We take different perspectives on how to articulate social interaction models, and this short exchange sheds some unfiltered light on those differences. We thought it would be a pity to lose this email exchange to the dustbin of backchannel history.

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On Jul 21, 2009, at 8:59 AM, Thomas Vander Wal wrote:

The conversations models & how they map to the difference faces & steps in the communication progression from personal, collective, community/group, and collaborative have interest to me. Each are different design problems with very different interaction & communication needs, hence leading to different conversation models.

Personal: Focussed on holding on to objects (including people & relationships) and annotating for refinding and aggregating as needed.

Collective: Open sharing/stating around objects (with various possibilities around level of sociality) with some conversation directly with them in comments, but also indirect conversations (friendfeed, microsharing, etc.)

Community/Group: Fully aware of others with interests around the object and interacting with the others in a manner that is open to others in the community/group.

Collaborative: Goal is getting down to one view and one product. This requires the means to identify and work through conflicting concepts and understanding. Requires working together and identifying, addressing, and working through conflict to come to one resolutions (there can not be more then one personal day policy in an organization).

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On Jul 21, 2009, at 12:25 PM, adrian chan wrote:

these are cats used by ross, clay and others that i'm not totally aligned with. primarily because I dont think they reflect anthropological or sociological distinctions in interaction systems or situations. (e.g. paired interactions, triangulated interactions, group membership, inter-group interaction, alliance, family, tribe, community, or now the social media-specific formations which seem to be "invisible audiences," "publics" or "audiences" depending on who you talk to.)

for example i dont think "collective" is a natural social phenomenon but if it occurs is a byproduct or outcome of carefully structured interactions in which personal social dimensions are minimized to reduce the bias of status, rank, hierarchy and other attention-getting behaviors. Which is why Hunch.com has shirky written all over it, or why we all use wikipedia as our reference standard for collective action!

in other words,
a structuralist would tell us that these categories dont exist.

a sociologist would say that forms of communication and social practices transcend these categories and may be found in the reproduction in any of these categories, so cant be the causal explanation for how these categories of content production are realized.

a psychologist would say that user motives are not a reflection of a kind of social arrangement, that for example interpersonal stuff, attractions and flirting, lurking etc can all occur in social groups of different sizes and structure

a social media theorist might say that it matters more how people see others, see themselves, and think they see how they are seen by othres, and that the constraints on action in and results out are what govern behavior -- but that users wont have "collective" or "collaboration" etc in mind when they're acting -- that user centric view will prevail over an architectural one

i think where shirky has a blindspot is in motives -- he's a good pattern recognizer but patterns can be effects without being causes, or without being the goal or the motive of a certain user's activity.

where shirky sees structure as a way of possibly eliminating social distortions, i still think it's essential to know how the user sees himself in the social field to know where bias may be introduced.

and in today's highly conversational mediaverse, these structures are hard to map to aggregation, disaggregation, and other twitter/status feed phenomena. twitter and its kin are so fluid, so ephemeral and time-based, that it's hard to grasp the causes of social outcomes without using communication theory and interaction dynamics (which i sloppily call "conversation models"). challenge being that one has to capture what interests a user -- could be their own status, could be their reputation, their commitment to a higher goal, their need for attention, etc, all of which come out in conversation but none of which are governed by structural arrangements (like collab, collective, or community)....

in short the question you raise is: does the social order account for user behavior? Is the social order the user's orientation. I dont think it is, but that would be my bone to pick with ross or shirky (some day....)

what do you think? am i making sense?

a

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On Jul 21, 2009, at 9:52 AM, Thomas Vander Wal wrote:

Your approach makes sense and fits wonderfully within social comfort. One of the things I have found working with organizations on the inside is the assumptions from the outside (open web tools) are broken. Adoption of the same patterns outside don't happen inside organizations, as the measures are vastly different (outside pure numbers (100k to millions of users) and inside is percentage of employees/customers). Our assumed understanding for tools and models from web 2.0 don't really work well when dealing with closed populations. What we realize is these tools are less than optimal on the web too. This was my huge problem in writing my book (Understanding Folksonomy) for O'Reilly, I could not explain value that was derived nor could I explain things that were broken.

Conversation models fit nicely in social comfort, which I currently have set within the elements of social software and build order. Unless the prior elements are met, there is no communication/conversation. The realm of social is far more complex and runs on many different planes and models at once. There is no pure model, but a mixture of models and understandings.

The elements of social software and social comfort are important in all of the faces of perception (where personal, collective, community, collaboration, newbie, system owner, and external developer) come into play as task roles. But, seen from the perspective of a cube or other polygon, we can see many sides at once and are participants in the various tasks and faces.

I agree and disagree with "but that users wont have "collective" or "collaboration" etc in mind when they're acting" as I see the mindset of whom am I sharing with (how broadly) and goals (stated or inferred) with the task type, when users are interacting with others on internal social tools. But, it is not the user's perspective that is at the forefront as much as it is having the proper tools with the proper elements to achieve each type of task. Most organizations do not think of the progression of tasks and ensure their tools embrace the needs at the various stages. Often true collaboration elements are missing as well as desperately needed tools for personal tasks.

Re-framing the problem: SxD

This post is about social interaction design. I've been gestating around the concept of "frames" for the past couple weeks. Frames of meaning, frames of experience, and frames as a concept for a user-centric description of social interactions.

I like frames because they can accommodate our need for a visual metaphor, a temporal metaphor, and a metaphor for meaning. Metaphors are generally a bad idea in theory, in that they communicate (descriptively) but do not explain. But structural and visual metaphors, spatial metaphors, and value/utility metaphors don't work for me (or for social interactions, IMHO).

Concepts based on containers can lead us to think in and with boxes -- good for presentation but inadequate to the actions that occur around them

Concepts based on place, space, and location can lead us to think in terms of structure and stability -- good for a sense of design control but inadequate to the durations, episodes, and temporal experience of social interactions

Concepts based on structure, which can include containers as well as spaces, lead us to think architecturally -- good for building and designing, but inadequate to the system dynamics of social media

Concepts based on value and utility can lead us to anticipate user needs and objectives -- good for designing for success and usability but inadequate to the psychological dimensions of interactions, communication, and human relationships

Concepts based on writing, posting, and messaging can lead us to think in terms of communication -- good for the medium's shift from information to communication, but inadequate to the speech, performance, and social interaction dynamics of social media

Concepts based on conversation can lead us to think about the emerging flow- and talk-based trend away from pages and publishing to talk and relationships -- but inadequate to the fragmentation and disaggregation of the "conversation" space

I'm borrowing from Erving Goffman's Frame Analysis, a remarkable study of social encounters, and a work rich in concepts of social interactionism. Notably "keying" and "footing," both of which cover the nuanced means by which we can reference social convention and indicate personal disposition and meaning to coordinate interactions.

Of course Goffman was a master of face to face interactions, and his observations and explanations hold for social media only to limited and clipped degree.

The challenge for social interaction design today, and my interest in the use of frames, is that it seems as if the conversational trend in social media may be running away from us. Namely, that both forms of online talk, and the proliferation of system messages and activity updates increasingly interconnected (think Facebook connect), have resulted two significantly (unintended) consequences.

1. The interconnectedness of separate social media sites, services, desinations, and applications increases the number of arbitrary connections. Arbitrariness is increased when two separate nodes are coupled, when a connection is established, a message distributed, fed, published (etc) to a new context. What was contextually relevant in its original context (eg favoriting a video on Youtube) is more arbitrary when it appears on Friendfeed. Connectedness may serve the Friendfeed account holder, or his/her Friendfeed followers also. But the message itself is more arbitrary, or its meaning as an action is more arbitrary in distributed contexts than it is in its original context (where favoriting videos serves to rank videos).
2. The proliferation of talk in social media, or shift from the page to flow, stream, and conversation, increases the ambiguity of communicative intent. Again, interconnectedness means that messages are viewed, fed, delivered, or otherwise included in a greater number of contexts. Facebook status updates in Seesmic, with the ability to comment from outside of Facebook. Aggregation of updates in Friendfeed, widget distribution of tweets, disaggregated listening on last.fm et al to blogs, Facebook, etc. The interconnectedness of communication platforms raises the degree of ambiguity in message and action intent: in what's being said, why, to whom, and even about what.
   

• The arbitrariness of connection can create discovery and serendipity, but also confuse and destabilize the very practice of communication itself. Where does one comment back? Where else will a comment appear? What value is captured by which other site or service if I share, rate, digg, forward, retweet etc an action, a system message, or a user's message?
• The ambiguity of intent can lead to a greater number of possible responses and reactions to an action, but increases the likelihood of misunderstanding, misinterpretation, our failure (from the perspective of communication).
  

Social media are social systems. Conceptually and theoretically, social systems have structure but also have actions and communication: thus a better model than architectures, places, utilities, and communication alone. Social media are reproduced constantly out of the information and communication they produce, and which they made available. In addition to making information visible and available, they permit actions that in turn create more communication and enable more actions. Some of these are system messages (user has done X, Y, or Z); some are human communication (status updates, tweets, comments, posts... ). Systems in other words report on their own use as well as facilitate use: and so they continue, ever producing and reproducing information and communication in the form of news that's meaningful within the social system, actions which select information, and views of those actions which filter, sort, rank, and otherwise apply social evaluations.

As systems interconnect, sharing system messages and distributing user communications among one another, noise levels increase, connections increase, actions (possible and required) increase, and so on.

If social media become too interconnected and if they produce more activity and communication than each can filter/sort and allow users to manage, might they implode or collapse in on their own excess of activity and communication? This is strictly a system question -- not a personal concern (yet).

And here's where frames re-enter the picture. User centric design ought to be oriented to the framing of experience, and in social media particularly, common and shared frames of experience. Also common frames of reference, frames of communication, recognizable frames of action (games, rituals, pastimes etc), and temporal frames (routines and episodes).

Are we losing our frames? In terms of the user experience, is his or her experience running away from us? Can we no longer anticipate the user's experience, due in part to the level of interconnectedness among social media? Can we no longer assess the user's experience, due in part to the increased ambiguity surrounding his or her use of (our) applications and services? Can we no longer manage the user experience, insofar as there is now a high level of arbitrariness in the information selected, actions acted, communications created and sent, among users of social media?

If the user experience escapes us, if it is not possible to anticipate uses, to design and forward use cases, to define and order user interests, goals, and use benefits -- what can we know of how social media will be used? Not knowing how they will be used, how can we anticipate consequences well enough to design for them?

This is where I am at the moment on this. Frames are still, I think, offer a strong conceptual "framework" for social interaction design. But it is possible that, as personas do more for the designer than they do incapturingtruths aboutthe user, frames will offer more to the designer than they will capture truths of social interactions.

There is one possible solution, but I can only suggest it for the moment. If workable, it strikes me it may change the design paradigm (conceptually at least). It's a double accounting system. Akin and reminiscent of the double-entry book-keeping that revolutionized finance hundreds of years ago. I sense, and I've not yet worked this out, I sense that our action system is unilateral. One-sided. As communication is doubly contingent (two subjects, not one, thus two interpretations of meaning to be coordinated through inter-action), the correct framework for social interaction design probably needs to be a double accounting model. Action intended by user : action perceived and interpreted by user. One might then proceed with all design framing by accounting for user actions (by self) as well as views of user actions(by others). Each "side" has actions and an action system (grammar, language, etc). Or if one prefers, action : response.

I have to consider this further. System complexity may simply overwhelm the possibility of a durable design theoretical framework for social media. Or I may simply be lazy.

As always folks, your comments and pass around are sincerely welcome.

Behavior: hard-wired or soft-aware?

Josh Porter has a nice post out this week on the importance of taking user behaviors into account in social experience design. In Behavior First, Design Second, he makes use of an example I often use myself: what if twitter removed the follower count from user profiles?

But I differ with Josh's reasoning, specifically that some social behavior is hardwired. It may be the case that certain human qualities are enduring attributes of human nature (ack, don't like that term...). It may be that from the Ten commandments through to the Seven deadly sins, qualities like vanity, jealousy, greed and some number of others are simply human. But if they are, I'm inclined to consider them impulses, inclinations, tendencies -- effects but not causes. I like to think that these social qualities are most often reactive, are responses to situations, social context, and social relationships or dynamics.

Josh cites the accumulation of followers on twitter as an example of a tendency to collect. It might be that all humans are inclined to collect; I'm more inclined to think that collecting is a social phenomenon. Be that as it may, collecting is related in my mind to ownership and possession. It's related also, but in a different way, to numbers and magnitudes. A collection is a number of things and a pile of things. It might be that I like the pile, or that I like the number. It might be that I can show off the collection, or talk about how many... Owning and telling are different in my book.

Collecting, then, isn't to me the behavioral explanation that Josh puts forward, but is a behavior behind which may be different psychological motives:

• Some twitter users may collect followers and be happy in their hearts for the number they can count
  
• Some may think about being seen having a large number of followers
  
• Some may think about their own status in terms of their follower count
  
• Some may think about the attention they're getting from their followers
  

In other words, counting followers is a design-related behavior in which other motivational and psychological (and psychosocial) factors are implicated:

• status is derived from number of followers
  
• attention is attributed to number of followers
  
• status is projected onto number of followers
  
• status is associated with some important followers (not all followers collected are the same!)
  
• vanity is reflected in a number of followers
  

In other words:

• Collecting can have a social function: expressing or standing for status or position
  
• Collecting can have a communicative function: a representation of status to others
  
• Collecting can have a personal function: making one feel that there's an audience that pays attention
  

and so on...

Collecting is probably not the original or primary cause or motivation behind the follower behaviors seen on twitter. We may count things, but I don't think that's grounds to assume that we count people in the same way. Yes, we count the number of people, but that's not quite the same. The number can represent and signify to others; our motives for signifying are not our motives for collecting.

I think it is probably more likely that the follower phenomenon on twitter can also be explained by means of interaction design. Twitter is a communication tool. Communication, as a system of action or interaction is contingent on the participation of another person. I can tweet, but I cannot do anything to make somebody else respond. This may be the single-most common reason that new users stop using twitter -- they simply don't get anything back. The only type of interaction that does work, independent of any other user's attention, recognition, response (etc) is following.

I would claim that following provides success. It's an action that works, an action that can be completed without involving interpersonal or social contingency. It's an action that to many users may also serve as a friendly gesture (I'm following you!); which may also involve an expectation (follow me back!), and these have little to do with collecting and a lot to do with exploring the sociality of a tool using competencies developed over a lifetime.

In fact one could argue, though it's a bit of a stretch, that the expectation for reciprocal following (which is the habit of new users) is a social workaround to the asymmetry of relations designed into twitter. That symmetry is preferred, socially speaking, to asymmetry: and an etiquette of reciprocity is the hack that overcomes the design flaw...

I just wanted to comment on this because it is endlessly fascinating. And because I think the motives in social interaction are multiple, escape attribution to a single behavior or practice (eg collecting), and should be understood and unpacked with an eye to the social dynamics of the site or service in question. Social media interactions are a result of social dynamics, and escape explanation by means of the behaviors of individuals only.

We should be talking about this stuff -- and I'm glad to see it covered -- because the social practices that emerge around mediated communication and interaction are a complex of personal, social, community, and public uses and utilities, values, and actions.

I hope this is taken in the right way. I want to move this kind of thinking along; my disagreements or distinctions are always with respect and, I hope, a shared interest in learning.


From Joshua Porter's blog:

We don't just collect attention, of course. We collect lots of things. Most video games are built entirely around the premise of collecting things. The more you collect the higher your score. The more coins that Mario and Luigi collect, the better they do. It's a causal relationship. We understand when playing these games that collection is the way to achieve success.

As designers we must remember that behavior comes first. Always. The quirky, the obscure, the vain, the annoying, the wonderful. We need to observe human behavior if we are to support it in design. If people collect things, how can we support that? If people are vain...how does that affect the design? Will it kill some interesting behavior...or will it help drive adoption of the service?

So, back to behavior. Some behaviors that drive us nuts are core to the human experience:

We want attention.
We collect things.
We want status.
We are vain.
We make judgments accordingly.

Users: which is which, and who is who?

Who knows?
On the phone yesterday with friend and colleague John Cass (SNCR), he happened upon an interesting topic. One for social media professionals of all kinds: designers, builders, funders, pundits. The question came up: doesn't our expertise, built over years of spending time online, qualify us to see what's really going on with social media? How it works and doesnt?

Or, on the contrary, does one have to be in the target market, amidst the majority of users, to know best what's going on?

Who knows best -- the person with the most experience in the technology, or the person most like the mainstream user? One is old, one is young. The older person may not know what's most hip, hot, cool, or in. But the young person may not have yet learned things, call them technology's symptoms or side effects, that the older person has.

I was reminded of a debate that plays out among anthropologists and other cultural academics (those who study human "sciences"). Take a culture, a new, foreign culture. It's texts, rituals, pastimes. We want to study it, to understand what's going on, and what these practices mean. But we have a problem: as outsiders we cannot know that our interpretations of the practices are accurate. We are not on the inside; and therefore we don't know the validity of our observations and interpretations.

It's called the "hermeneutic circle." Inside the circle, one knows by right of membership and practice what's going on. Being on the outside, one can only observe as an outsider.

So cultural anthropologists turned to comparative techniques, and by comparing and contrasting practices across cultures, drafted a set of structural principles and descriptions. The method is simple enough: look not at the content of a ceremony, but its structure. Look not at what's on the mask, but on which member of the tribe wears it. Look not at the dowry, but at the obligations and debts that flow back to the family that has paid it.

Rules of the game, not the game play itself.

This distinction occurs again in communication theory (especially in pragmatics). Language is not speech. Language is the system in which meanings can be preserved and through which they can be reproduced. Speech is the performance of communication, and uses language as its means of expression.

We are, it is said, unique among creatures in our ability to separate the meaning of statement from the performance of a statement.

What am I getting at? Designers ought to recognize where I'm going. As a designer of social interactions, John and I had to ask, who knows better: the teen who uses Facebook or the old guy who knows social media? The user or the observer? The performer or the structuralist?

Which is more meaningful: how social media is being used, right here and now, by these people. Or how it works, across different applications, regardless of who is using it?

Who knows best? The insider or outsider?

I do not have an answer. Both, I suppose. The user may know this application, or use case, best -- but know little of why. (So it goes anyways in cultural anthropology: the member of the group knows what's happening but doesn't have a reason -- it takes being an outsider to think in terms of reasons). The observer can see the structure, function, and process, but may not be able to play the game.

As many folks know, I come and go with social media for the reason that I have to be in it to be a user -- but out of it to reflect more freely on it. As it happens, coming and going is also good protection against burnout.

I recently took time out of twitter to catch up with some sites and services that i hadn't used in a long time. Built a small dbase to capture notes on screens -- in the hopes of writing about the grammar of social interactions.

I had to write this piece to get the question out of my head as well as to raise it among professionals and practitioners. We know that our own experience(s) on social media are neither universal nor common. Most of us have been doing this for a while -- and are no longer captivated by novelty of technique, result, or effect. Many of us are (variously) strategic in our uses of social media. We may have reputations to keep, peers to respect, tongues to bite.

So how do we know that we know better or best? Knowing the technology isn't enough --it all comes down to user experiences in the end. "Technology" is a thing, and social media are not "things" but are actions, interactions, communication, and distribution. One might describe qualities of a thing, features and functions of a thing and entirely miss what it can mean, and how it might help make meaning.

My own personal take on this is that one must first admit to multiple users and kinds of users. Multiple uses and use cases. This might seem to be stating the obvious. But I have heard time and again, from those who should know better, that "social media is ____". That what it is, is based on that person's experience.

That said, we have to make observations. Simply knowing the user experience is (if it were possible to know many) still not enough. Knowing what it's like to drive doesn't make one an auto maker. Process, function, design, architecture -- those things that will ultimately facilitate and help produce an experience for (many) users -- these are structural forms and rules necessary to build by. Structures still empty of users are still structures. Structures inhabited lead to habits, in time.

At the end of the day, because there is no one right, global, or universal experience or perspective possible, the professional's I think comes down to flexibility. An ability to shift perspective, to take perspectives, and to contextualize an application or user audience as clients (etc) demand. It then becomes a matter of changing one's own mind.

I think the designer's approach is as much his or her own mental awareness of the problem space and opportunities, of familiar and common forms and actual uses and practices, as it is anything else. This ability to be in, or out; to know how it goes, but also what makes it that way.

The Inmates Have Requested Asylum

I spent much of yesterday afternoon listening to podcasts from a conference I wish I had attended: the IA Summit. The podcasts are up on Boxes and Arrows (thank you Chris Baum!) and are well worth a listen. I also found that they looked good in iTunes with the visualizer turned on.

I don't know that I'm an information architect. I was a web developer for seven years but eschewed acronymic attributions on principle and felt that most of us were making it up as we were going along. The design agencies that billed for process and methodology took the designations most seriously, it seemed, and had the design talent that gave them the right to do so. After the dotcom crash many of those methodologies were shelved, as budgets for web work drew the line item for process out of the picture. The industry was commodifying, rates tumbled, and there were few compelling development projects available to small agencies. For a while many of us developers were working like architects being asked only to paint the exterior of a house. The real building contracts were fewer and farther between.

Then the social web began taking shape, and things got interesting again. I removed my entire web portfolio from my site and hunkered down to think about social software. Fascinated as i have always been with social interaction and communication -- in theory and practice -- it seemed to me that new opportunities would emerge for what I started to call "social interaction design" (SxD). I was not so allergic to labels after all -- as long as they were my own. And i pretty much kept to myself, doing startup work and thinking about a conceptual framework for mediated social interactions.

Listening to IA pods yesterday got me thinking about where we now stand. IA, IxD, UX, separately or together is not so important -- the institutional taxonomy and territorial distinctions being beside the point. For I have yet to see an IA drive a social media design or experience. Yet to see an interaction designer lead the team. Yet to see a user experience lead define what a social media application will do or how it will work. From my limited experience in Web 2.0, engineering drives features, marketing drives branding, bizdev drives platform interoperability and open-ness, and web design drives UI, navigation, information architecture. A coffee house, co-working space, or apartment serves as the shop or studio. And process is determined as much by whatever everyone else is doing and launching as it is by internal startup dynamics.

There is no high-level design methodology for social interaction or social media development. IA, IxD, and UX are regarded as a luxury, considered an unnecessary use of funds, and are largely irrelevant and out of the picture. How is it that the very field that should be in front of social media trails it so badly? Why is it that we are still trying to define a tidy set of concepts, for identity, presence, privacy, messaging or what have you, while "web 2.0" startups are out there making this stuff up as they go? Why, failing the means by which to understand social interactions well enough to anticipate them ahead of time, are we cooking up dishes to throw them at the wall in order to see what sticks? Is agile a design process, or another way of saying "we don't know what will happen?" Do we not know what will happen because that's how social media works, or because we don't know how to look at it?

I don't have answers for these questions, but I have suspicions. I do think that design organizes and shapes the user experience. i do think that user experiences, together, produce social practices. I do think those social practices are consistent -- with the designs that facilitate them as well as with the social themes and activities by which we all "know what we're doing" and "what's going on," socially. Something has been built, that something is constrains and enables, and decisions have been made. But our field, the design of social media, is lacking the language and framework by which to conceptually grasp and reasonably anticipate (if not predict) design outcomes. In their absence, it is funders, technologists, marketers (all due respect, but they have their interests and competencies and they are often not user-centric in nature) and visual designers who are making the decisions that shape what a product is, how it (is supposed to) works, by whom it is enjoyed, and what their enjoyment will leave behind. And in the absence of clear thinking and an understanding of mediated social practices, our next best option is to rely on best practices -- which, we know, do not travel well and are frequently lost in translation. (All social media do not need twitter.)

it's nigh on the hour that we begin to furnish the industry, and ourselves, with a solid set of concepts for the "design" of social interactions. They can be obtained and drawn from insightful and principled works in sociology, psychology, linguistics, communication theory, and symbolic interaction. For the inmates have requested asylum. They're not in the asylum. We've misunderstood the very word "asylum." it's not a place that "they" are, but something they want. Design of social media is not containers and spaces, is not identities, mug shots, and IDs. Presence is not roll call and privacy is not just control. People are the content, they're not the contents. I get the sense that in our predilection for design and our visual-mindedness, we have become too comfortable with spatial architectures and confining spaces. That in our emphasis on the user we have forgotten her experience. We treat users as objects, put them in little boxes, and watch them from the panopticon that has been at the center of any post-industrial prison since the idea of control regimes was first thought up.

Design of social media is not a visual problem, as design should not be a method of control. Design should refer to how we think about social media and social interactions -- not something we do in order to design the user's experience. Design should, in this case, be our discipline and conceptual practices. Design should be what we create in order to anticipate individual and social experiences and interactions -- with all of their contingent, dependent, and temporal dynamics intact.

Joshua Porter mentioned, in one of the podcasts, the case of corporate plazas. This oft-cited tale tells of how corporations failed to realize that in their aesthetic self-aggrandizement, they had built plazas and lobbies for themselves that looked good but were barren and bereft of life. William H Whyte, a must-read for anyone doing social, was one of the pioneering researchers to reclaim public spaces for public use and consumption. He proved that we like, and in fact want to be in the midst of, streams of social activity and noise. But he also demonstrated that it was not design, but humans, who negotiate and determine the flow of activity. Subway users in Tokyo, he discovered, could get through a revolving door and to a train in numbers and rates of flow exceeding the theoretical design limits of the door itself.

I worry that unless we catch up quickly, social media will continue down self-reinforcing, and thus increasingly un-imaginitive, cycles of best practices. That we will be left to design corporate plazas. And that we will do so with a taste for the neat and tidy that is our preference as practitioners, but which will only result in lifeless and unsatisfying boxes, and, well, arrows. Imprisoned in the structured containers of thought of our own making. While the inmates, having long left the building, scratch their heads in the yard.


There is so much to learn by thinking outside the box.