February 18th, 2008
Social Design Strategy at SXSW
by Joshua Porter | 
10 Comments | shortlink: http://bokardo.com/p/747
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!
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Comments
1. Alex 1:18pm, Mon 18th, 2008
Congrats, Josh, I look forward to this panel, I’ll be sure to attend.
2. Amy Jo Kim 7:06pm, Mon 18th, 2008
Wow, sounds like a fabulous, high-value approach to this topic. Wish I was going to SXSW. Maybe someone will live-blog it.
3. Evan Meagher 10:05pm, Mon 18th, 2008
Sounds awesome. I wish conferences like this were more reasonably priced and accessible for college students. I’d love to go to as many of them as I can.
4. Bruce P. Henry 12:58pm, Tue 19th, 2008
The original description looked a little hit-or-miss. Now that I’ve read your update I’ll definitely be attending!
At LiquidPlanner we’ve been approaching project management as a social activity, so this panel is particularly interesting to me. I’m glad to hear that “gaming” a social system will be discussed (I know we talk about it quite a bit in our office).
As social software elements bleed over into the enterprise software arena thinking through the implications of social design is becoming big(ger) business.
See you there!
5. Jay Meattle 2:06pm, Tue 19th, 2008
Josh, see you at sxsw!
6. Ian Wilker 1:28pm, Wed 27th, 2008
Curses!! Seeing this is about the 15th time today that I’ve been bummed out that I won’t be at this year’s SXSW. (In the run-up, it seems like all of Twitter, for example, is devoted to talk about all the cool stuff that’ll be going on in Austin.)
All I can say is that with you and the ideacodes folks (don’t know Daniel Burka’s writing; thanks for pointer), this ought to be a really good panel. I’ll be paying close attention to the live bloggers (someone please, please, please do a really good job) and fervently hoping that SXSW videotapes it.
Have fun down there, Josh. Lord know it takes a real effort not to…
7. Aaron Peters 4:58am, Fri 29th, 2008
Great panel, wish I could go to SXSW. Maybe next year. Have a good time!
8. Josh 6:58am, Sun 2nd, 2008
Thanks for the kind words, Ian! We’re going to try and make it a good one.
9. Groningen 8:22am, Tue 11th, 2008
In my opinion privacy is a very important element witch deserves to be handled with respect. I’ve already seen some educational sites not handling this issue very well (logging chat data tot even intentionally publishing it trough search)
10. Richard Rutter 10:35am, Sun 16th, 2008
Damn shame I couldn’t be there as I was next door doing the Wireframing thing. Great to meet you afterwards though.