archive.Joe Lamantia.com

The I.A. Podcast (by Jeff Parks of I.A. Consultants and BoxesandArrows podcast fame) just published the second of two interviews discussing research on ethics, design, social media, and conflict.

Play and download the second interview here.

Subscribe to the iTunes and feedburner feeds for the I.A. Podcast here.

These podcasts are based on the Designing Ethical Experiences series I’m writing for UXMatters: watch for publication of the final article later this summer.

Thanks again, Jeff!

Understanding Juicy Rationalizations, part 3 of the Designing Ethical Experiences series, just went live at UXMatters.

Here’s the teaser:

From “The Big Chill”

Michael: “I don’t know anyone who could get through the day without two or three juicy rationalizations.”

“They’re more important than sex.”

Sam: “Ah, come on. Nothing’s more important than sex.”

Michael: “Oh yeah? Ever gone a week without a rationalization?”

Designers rationalize their choices just as much as everyone else. But we also play a unique role in shaping the human world by creating the expressive and functional tools many people use in their daily lives. Our decisions about what is and is not ethical directly impact the lives of a tremendous number of people we will never know. Better understanding of the choices we make as designers can help us create more ethical user experiences for ourselves and for everyone.

Understanding Juicy Rationalizations is the first of a pair of articles focused on the ways that individual designers make ethical choices, and how we can improve our choices. This second pair of articles is a bit of eye-opening window into how people make many of the choices in our daily lives – not just design decisions. Or, at least it was for me… Readers will see connections much broader than simply choices we explicitly think of as ‘ethical’ and / or design related.

The final installment in the Designing Ethical Experiences series is titled “Managing the Imp of the Perverse” – watch for it sometime soon.

With the publication of these next two articles, the Designing Ethical Experiences series consists of two sets of matched pairs of articles; the first article in each pair framing a problematic real-life situation designers will face, and the second suggesting some ways to resolve these challenges ethically.

The first pair of articles – Social Media and the Conflicted Future and Some Practical Suggestions for Designing Ethical Experiences – looked at broad cultural and technology trends like social media and DIY / co-creation, suggesting ways to discover and manage likely ethical conflicts within the design process.

It’s a nice symmetrical structure, if you dig that sort of thing.  (And what architect doesn’t?)

For commuters / multi-taskers / people who prefer listening to reading, Jeff Parks interviewed me on the contents of this second set of articles, which he will publish shortly as a podcast.

Thanks again to the editorial team at UXMatters for supporting my exploration of this very important topic for the future of experience design. In an age when everyone can leverage professional-grade advertising the likes of Spotunner, the ethicality of the expressive tools and frameworks designers create is a question of critical significance for us all.

I’m happy to announce I’m speaking at EuroIA 2008 in Amsterdam, September 26 – 27. My session is titled ‘Frameworks Are the Future of IA’. If the exciting title isn’t enough to sell you on attending (what’s more compelling than a case study on an open structural design framework for self-assembled user experiences and information spaces…?), here’s a description:

The Web is shifting to a DIY (Do It Yourself) model of user experience creation, where people assemble individual combinations of content and functionality gathered from many sources to meet their particular needs. The DIY model for creating user experiences offers many benefits in public and consumer settings, and also inside the enterprise. But over time, it suffers many of the same problems that historically made portals unusable and ineffective, including congested designs, poorly planned growth, and inability to accommodate changes in structure and use.

This case study demonstrates a simple design framework of standardized information architecture building blocks that is directly applicable to portals and the DIY model for creating user experiences, in two ways. First, the building blocks framework can help maintain findability, usability and user experience quality in portal and DIY settings by effectively guiding growth and change. Second, it is an example of the changing role of IA in the DIY world, where we now define the frameworks and templates other people choose from when creating their own tools and user experiences.

Using many screenshots and design documents, the case study will follow changes in the audiences, structures, and contents of a suite of enterprise portals constructed for users in different countries, operating units, and managerial levels of a major global corporation. Participants will see how the building blocks provided an effective framework for the design, expansion, and integration of nearly a dozen distinct portals assembled from a common library of functionality and content.

This case study will also explore the building blocks as an example of the design frameworks IA’s will create in the DIY future. We will discuss the goals and design principles that inspired the building blocks system, and review its evolution over time.

The conference program includes some very interesting sessions, and Adam Greenfield (of Everyware reknown) is the keynote.
Amsterdam is lovely in September, but if you need more reason to come and say hello, Picnic 08 – with a stellar lineup of speakers – is just before EuroIA.

The NYTimes reports today in Obama Opts Out of Pub­lic Financ­ing for Cam­paign that Sen­a­tor Obama ”…raised $95 mil­lion in Feb­ru­ary and March alone, most of it, as his aides noted Thurs­day, in small con­tri­bu­tions raised on the Inter­net. More than 90 per­cent of the campaign’s con­tri­bu­tions were for $100 or less, said Robert Gibbs, the com­mu­ni­ca­tions direc­tor to Mr. Obama.“

Obama’s suc­cess rais­ing money with small dona­tions is a clear indi­ca­tor that crowd­sourc­ing is a viable approach to financ­ing what is prob­a­bly the most expen­sive and demand­ing type of elec­toral con­test ever seen — a U.S. pres­i­den­tial elec­tion cam­paign.

The old ways aren’t going away just yet — wit­ness McCain’s more con­ven­tional reliance on a mixed palette of pub­lic finance and unlim­ited dona­tions to the RNC — but suc­cess­ful crowd­sourc­ing of an elec­tion effort of this scale and dura­tion proves other mod­els — net­worked, dis­trib­uted / decen­tral­ized, bottom-up, etc. — can be effec­tive in the most chal­leng­ing sit­u­a­tions.

“Instead of forc­ing us to rely on mil­lions from Wash­ing­ton lob­by­ists and spe­cial inter­est PACs, you’ve fueled this cam­paign with dona­tions of $5, $10, $20, what­ever you can afford,” he told his sup­port­ers in the video mes­sage. “And because you did, we’ve built a grass­roots move­ment of over 1.5 mil­lion Amer­i­cans.“

And that’s a good thing. The rel­a­tive elec­toral stale­mate we’ve had in the U.S. for the last decade echoes the trench war­fare phase of World War One; grind­ing bat­tles of attri­tion between nom­i­nally dis­tinct com­bat­ants that con­sume much, accom­plish lit­tle, and yield no sub­stan­tive change for the peo­ple involved.

The next step is to apply this net­worked / crowd­sourced / dis­trib­uted financ­ing model to sup­port a cam­paign by some­one out­side the (dis­tress­ingly) com­pla­cent major par­ties. We’ve man­aged to change the feed­ing mech­a­nism, now we have to change the ani­mal it feeds.

The I.A. Podcast (by Jeff Parks of I.A. Consultants and BoxesandArrows podcast fame) just published the first of two interviews we recorded recently, talking about ethics, design, social media, and conflict.

Play and download the interview here.

Subscribe to the iTunes and feedburner feeds for the I.A. Podcast here.

Stay tuned for the second interview!

Thanks Jeff!