Social Design Strategy at SXSW

I’m honored to be speaking on the Social Design Strategies panel this year at SXSW Interactive in Austin, Texas on Sunday, March 9.

My co-panelists are awesome designers: Emily Chang and Max Keisler of Ideacodes, and Daniel Burka, creative director at Digg. Thank you Emily for organizing the panel!

This is the official description of the panel:

“Now that social networks are pervasive and quickly becoming a regular feature set, designers need to understand the dynamics of creating experiences that encourage social behavior and public expression, while giving individuals a sense of privacy, personal gain, and ownership. This session will take an in-depth look at the principles and practices of social design. How do you create a symbiotic relationship between people and data that maximizes discovery, game-play, connections, and communication? We’ll examine a breadth of examples and explore their pros and cons. Then, we’ll take a look into the future of what’s possible. You’ll hear firsthand from a group of designers who do this every day.”

Since we had to write out that description a while ago, it’s not totally accurate. So here’s what we’re actually doing:

Each of us is going to tackle a really hard problem in social design. We’ll talk about the problem and some strategies for solving it, pointing to real-world screen flows and interfaces. These are not challenges you’ve never heard of. They are challenges that affect everyone building social sites. Examples of challenges might be: How to add an element of fun to your social web app, How to prevent gaming [Daniel can take that one :)], How to roll out features that straddle the privacy line, and How to measure your success.

We’re really trying to focus on providing a solid set of practical techniques to overcoming widespread, hard problems. My experience with SXSW in the past has been that talks are all over the place in terms of being useful…if there is one thing we’re trying to do it’s describe useful, practical techniques to overcome these problems.

The social design strategy panel is Sunday morning at 10am.

Hope to see you there!