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 of their vision boarding sessions! For me, mine became a reminder of what social interaction design is — what factors influence social dynamics in a community, and what kinds of questions you have to ask when studying or designing for a community. What appears to be a crack or crevice in the middle of the conversation (in the middle of the board) is supposed to represent this design opportunity. But there is no “one size fits all.” The quote beneath reminds us of that: “I don’t really know what ‘community’ means.” Is that like Facebook? Question mark?
That’s exactly the point. What works in Community A might not work in Community B. (As an example: Until recently, you haven’t been able to reply to Facebook messages via email, although this didn’t stop people from logging into Facebook.com and continuing their experience there. This fluid cross-platform interaction hasn’t worked for LinkedIn, however. Receiving a email notification from a LinkedIn group feels more like RSS than social interaction, and when I receive a message, I haven’t been motivated to log onto the site and reply or interact with people.)
And so, as social interaction designers, we have to carefully consider the social dynamics we want to enable and how to go about doing that. Consider this:
One Trackback
[...] in another system in quite the same way. Things like context, culture, and personalities (among other sxd considerations) change the way a given feature will be used and adopted by the [...]