The Society, if you’re not familiar, is run by Dan Cederholm and Ethan Marcotte, two Boston-area web designers I’ve admired for a long time. So I was extremely honored when they asked me to speak. Here are some write-ups of the event: (Ethan, Dan, Filament Group)

For my talk, I picked something I’ve never talked about before: web craftsmanship. I chose this topic because I’ve been thinking a lot more about it since going out on my own last August. I also consider both Dan and Ethan craftsmen, obsessed with doing quality work vs. gaining notoriety or getting rich. So I thought it would be a good fit for the audience as well.

Ethan started the show with an excellent talk about liquid layouts. Dan followed with an equally great talk on em-based grids. Scott Jehl then talked about progressive enhancement. Funny thing, several people I spoke with said that they learned more from these three talks about building state-of-the-art web sites than they did at SXSW…

Here is my slide deck:

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The event was hosted by the fine folks at the Filament Group, who among other things created the baby-name choosing-site Nymbler. (My wife and I used this site when we picked out our kid’s name). Anyway, the Filament Group has started a blog called The Lab), where they archive some of the interesting work they’re doing. I wish more design shops would expose their thinking in this way…it really helps to get an idea of how their designers think and shows indirectly what values they have.

The event was also sponsored in part by Adobe, who gave away two copies of CS3! This suggests to me that these meetups are not simply gatherings in which to drink beer and maybe talk a bit about design…but they are part of the fabric of the design community…since designers often work on their own there isn’t a common space to gather regularly. The Society, and our newly-formed North Shore Meetup group, in my mind, are fulfilling the needs of the Third Place in this way.

Several folks have posted pictures of the event. Here is an action shot of me by Jennifer Bergman. Thanks, Jen!

If you have any questions about the slides or any of the quotes in them, drop me a line.

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:

1. Kurt Lewin’s Equation as the central tension in social psychology
2. Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs as a precursor to the Del.icio.us Lesson
3. Peter Kollock’s 4 motivations for contributing
4. Robert Axelrod’s 3 necessary conditions to cooperate
5. 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.