August 20th, 2007
Psychology of Social Design Talk
by Joshua Porter | 
18 Comments
Last wednesday I gave a 45 minute talk at UXWeek 2007 (photos) called The Psychology of Social Design. Here are the slides:
Download PDF of The Psychology of Social Design
I’ve also created a set of resources and links for the talk at Del.icio.us:
http://del.icio.us/bokardo/uxweek/
My focus in the talk was to expose several psychological frameworks that can be applied to social design. The first one is Kurt Lewin’s famous equation: B=ƒ(P,E) which articulates the primary tension in social psychology: that both an individual’s personality (P) and their environment (E) affect their behavior (B)…btw: that was the only equation I’ve ever shown in a talk and will probably be the last.
Here’s an high-level outline:
- Kurt Lewin’s Equation as the central tension in social psychology
- Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs as a precursor to the Del.icio.us Lesson
- Peter Kollock’s 4 motivations for contributing
- Robert Axelrod’s 3 necessary conditions to cooperate
- Duncan Watts’ study on social influence in interfaces
On the Web, of course, our environment is largely the interface we’re using in addition to the social actions that are occurring elsewhere. In many cases the interface is the only evidence we have that anything is happening at all.
The talk went well, I think. I got some really positive feedback about it from attendees, and some great questions afterward that took the discussion further.
I know that it’s not easy to follow a talk by just looking at the slide-deck, but if you have any feedback or comments, I would love to hear them.
ABOUT
Bokardo is the blog of Joshua Porter, a web designer/developer, researcher, and writer. I live in Newburyport, MA, USA.
Designing for the Social Web
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Greatest Hits
- Five Principles to Design By
- The Del.icio.us Lesson
- Designing for the Social Web: The Usage Lifecycle
- Facebook's Brilliant but Evil Design
- Digg's Design Dilemma (Part II)
- 7 Reasons Why Web Apps Fail
- 7 More Reasons Why Web Apps Fail
- Which Movie to Watch? An Overview of Recommendation Systems
- Ugliness, Social Design, and the MySpace Lesson
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LATEST POSTS
- Co-evolving
- Bill Gates upset with Windows Usability
- Social Design Patterns for Reputation Systems: An Interview with Yahoo’s Bryce Glass (Part II)
- Social Design Patterns for Reputation Systems: An Interview with Yahoo’s Bryce Glass (Part I)
- 5 ways to improve reputation systems
- Why You Shouldn’t be Afraid of Customer Reviews
- Learning 2.0: The Threat (and promise) of Social Interaction
- Free Books: Smashing Magazine Books Giveaway
- Speaking at 2008 d.Construct
- The growing importance of Design
Comments ( 18 Responses so far )
1. Ian Wilker on August 20th, 2007 (Comment) #
Josh - thanks for posting this! It’s true, I wish (as always) that slideshare presentations included audio, but it’s a pretty clear deck nonetheless. You can’t know how timely it is for me, as a thought-starter for a team I’m working with.
2. Bud Caddell on August 20th, 2007 (Comment) #
Fantastic presentation — thanks for sharing.
Over at my blog, I’m trying to start a conversation about measuring particpation inequalities in social networks — you know, the ol’ 90-9-1 problem. I’d value your feedback!
3. rashmi on August 21st, 2007 (Comment) #
Ian, SLideshare presentations can include audio now. Check out Slidecasting.
Josh - nice slides. Waiting for talk!
4. subwoofer on August 21st, 2007 (Comment) #
a`┴УZ╡+н}! that is it?
5. Kirty Jonson on August 21st, 2007 (Comment) #
Nice presentation with many conclusions. But why is it so short. There are many other Psychologist whose works can be used in social design
6. Josh on August 21st, 2007 (Comment) #
You’re right, Kirty. There are many more psychologists I could have included. However, my talk was only 45 minutes long, so I had to choose only a few and talk about them for 10 minutes or so.
7. Todd on August 21st, 2007 (Comment) #
Kirty, Josh did an excellent job of covering what he could during the 45 minute allotment of time. His presentation was a nicely paced overview. While some is lost by not having the audio, you can put most of it together between the slides and the del.icio.us bookmarks.
Thanks for putting the slides up, Josh. I’ll be happy to have them to complement my notes and jog my memory.
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8. Stephen Collins on August 22nd, 2007 (Comment) #
I really enjoyed this, Joshua. Would love to hear your audio.
Based on this, you’ll probably want to read and talk to a couple of colleagues of mine, Matthew Hodgson and Andrew Boyd.
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9. matt gregg on August 22nd, 2007 (Comment) #
Really enjoyed the presentation at UX week Josh and the ongoing blog. One thought that popped into my mind in regards to Watt’s experiment was the potential to manipulate results or outcomes in an early popularity race. Do you know if anyone has tried to reliably been able to create their own desired outcomes? Seems like this could be used very improperly if so.
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10. Gustavo Gawry on August 23rd, 2007 (Comment) #
Great presentation!
Just an observation:
I know that Kurt Lewin is often recognized as the “founder of social psychology”, I don’t know if you are familiar with Wilhelm Wundt. He is generally acknowledged as a founder of experimental psychology and cognitive psychology, he is less commonly recognized as a founding figure of social psychology, but he started to talk about social psychology in 1900. As you can see it was before Kurt but very close, probably the zeitgeist was propitious to the concept of social psychology.
ps: Sorry for my bad english.
11. Josh on August 27th, 2007 (Comment) #
Thanks, Gustavo, for pointing me to Wundt. I had heard of him, but will take a closer look now.
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12. Emil on October 20th, 2007 (Comment) #
Really impressive presentation. Hoping for audio to go along with it to get all the details of the talk! Is there a chance to get a podcast or slidecast of this Joshua?
13. Lucy on November 16th, 2007 (Comment) #
Thanks for the slideshow, gonna give that another look before I comment on that.
In the mean time could I put a strange request - that you list the links you put on delicious direct onto your post. Access to their servers usually times out, when it does work it presents badly. Its a shame, from being biggest evangelist I’ve given up using it.