Leeanne Lowe pushes back hard on my claim that “design is not art”, one of the five principles I design by. She says:

“I have often thought that people who say ‘design is not art’ have no real idea what design is. If a designer were to say it to me I would seriously have to say that this person is not a designer at all, simply someone who is concerned with production and sees what they do as a job.”

Well, I don’t…

Continue Reading: Design is Not Art, Redux

That’s the question being asked (and answered) at DesignCanChange.org, a pro-bono site built by smashLAB, a Vancouver-based design firm. (via gong szeto)

There’s a lot to like at this site. Not only do they provide excellent visuals that explain the concepts of climate change, but they also candidly address the impact that design has on the world. They also gives tips on how to take action.

Beautiful, inspired work.

Continue Reading: Can Design Change the World?

Was reading Kevin Marks’ thoughts on the Cult of the Amateur Pundit and found this gem from Hitchiker’s Guide author Douglas Adams in How to Stop Worrying and Love the Internet

“Because the Internet is so new we still don’t really understand what it is. We mistake it for a type of publishing or broadcasting, because that’s what we’re used to. So people complain that there’s a lot of rubbish online, or that it’s dominated by Americans, or that you can’t necessarily trust what you read on the web. Imagine trying to apply any of those criticisms to what you hear on the telephone. Of course you can’t ‘trust’ what people tell you on the web anymore than you can ‘trust’ what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do. For some batty reason we turn off this natural scepticism when we see things in any medium which require a lot of work or resources to work in, or in which we can’t easily answer back – like newspapers, television or granite. Hence ‘carved in stone.’ What should concern us is not that we can’t take what we read on the internet on trust – of course you can’t, it’s just people talking – but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV – a mistake that no one who has met an actual journalist would ever make. One of the most important things you learn from the internet is that there is no ‘them’ out there. It’s just an awful lot of ‘us’.”

Continue Reading: It’s Just People Talking

Lee Lefever over at Common Craft has posted two nice videos about how and why to use new technology. Lee, who is also using the term “social design”, is obviously aware that not everybody is on the social media bandwagon yet. These videos are a great primer for folks who want an explanation of what RSS and Wikis actually are. They’re fun, too.

RSS in Plain English

Continue Reading: Two Great Videos in Plain English

This is part I of a series on Common Pitfalls of Building Social Web Applications.

In the last several years we’ve seen the rise and fall of many social web applications. While most of our attention gets paid to the hugely successful ones like YouTube and Facebook, we can also learn a lot from those that have failed. Here are some of the common pitfalls that lead to failure when building social web applications.

1) Underestimating The Cold Start Problem

If you build and release your social web site and nobody uses it, you have the cold start problem. This problem affects most social sites, and directly results from designing for the network. The effect of the network is that nodes on the network (web sites) have attention momentum. We pay attention to certain nodes (sites) already, and so if you’re trying to add one to the network then you have to build your own attention momentum over time. This is not easy.

Too often, though, this hurdle is underestimated. The first step is to admit there’s a problem. Say “This is not working. Our early users are not using the site how we want them to”. You would be surprised at how often this doesn’t happen. Instead, what often happens is that more money is pushed into features or marketing, which is precisely the wrong move…

Continue Reading: Common Pitfalls of Building Social Web Applications and How to Avoid Them

When are we going to acknowledge that millions of people writing poorly (while slowly improving) is better than millions of people doing the alternative…not writing at all?

You hear the argument all the time: bloggers are poor writers who produce mountains of useless prose and very little quality work. The most recent case is Neil Henry’s The Decline of News, in which he makes the following insult to bloggers:

“Meantime, I can’t help but fear a future, increasingly barren of skilled journalists, in which Google “news” searches turn up not news, but the latest snarky rants from basement bloggers…”

Continue Reading: Cult of the Pundit

Several folks pushed back on my circles of relationships post last week. Most people thought Schneiderman’s diagram just wasn’t complex enough in describing social networks, arguing that most relationships are too dynamic to be represented in this way.

Bokardoan Alex Mather wrote a thoughtful post suggesting an altered version of the diagram, adding some interesting twists. The most notable twist is that he has included a “people like us” ring that we ascribe nearly as much weight to as friends, and that these two groups are in a “protected” area, more important than the other groups.

Continue Reading: Extending the Circles of Relationships

David Kirkpatrick’s has written a great piece on the new direction Facebook is going. His lead in says it all:

“Imagine that when you shopped online for a digital camera, you could see whether anyone you knew already owned it and ask them what they thought. Imagine that when you searched for a concert ticket you could learn if friends were headed to the same show. Or that you knew which sites – or what news stories – people you trust found useful and which they disliked. Or maybe you could find out where all your friends and relatives are, right now (at least those who want to be found).”

Notice how each one of the examples relates the person with what they’re trying to find out by way of Trust. In other words, information is important to people not just because of what it is, but because of what it means to the person and their future. Knowing what concerts are playing is nice…but knowing which one your friends are going to is what’s important.

Schneiderman’s Circles of Relationships

Ben Schneiderman came up with a nice graphic to illustrate this. He calls it the circles of relationships. It shows several concentric ovals (centering on the self) that illustrate how Trust dissipates outward. As we move away from people near to us, we trust them less.

Continue Reading: Facebook and Circles of Relationships

Continue Reading: Comic: Is it Useful?

How designers can help spread the good word about a product or service.

The holy grail of design is to make something so wonderful and remarkable that people can’t imagine life without it. People are so happy with it that it sells itself. This idea was expounded on beautifully by Seth Godin in The Purple Cow, a new rendering of the age-old business ideas of differentiation and competitive advantage.

The big benefit of word-of-mouth is that your marketing budget goes toward zero, as your users become your marketers. If they’re so passionate about your design they’ll tell their friends about your service, and you won’t have to. And, most likely, what they say is more influential than what you can say anyway. Focusing on this value, and designing to enable it, is a big part of social design.

Word-of-mouth is complicated from a design standpoint because it’s not a monolithic activity. It’s several smaller steps that happen in order. On one hand this makes it harder to design for because there are many little problems to solve. On the other hand, it gives designers a clearer picture of what to focus and spend time on.

You can help enable word-of-mouth by designing your application to support it by giving your users tools to share their passion about your app or service. To actually make it work, however, you have to nail most of the following steps…

Continue Reading: How to Design for Word-of-Mouth