archive.Joe Lamantia.com

UXmatters just published Playing Well with Others: Design Principles for Social Augmented Experiences, the latest installment of my column Everyware, which manages to range from Airplane II to zombies, all while continuing the recent focus on augmented reality and experience design.  ‘Playing Well With Others’ suggests AR has two paths to follow as it evolves, and proposes some design principles for creating the social augmented experiences — experiences relying on augmented social interactions as the center of gravity — that lie along one of those two paths.

Here’s an excerpt:

With the exotic, mixed realities that futurists and science-fiction writers have envisioned seemingly just around the corner, it is time to move beyond questions of technical feasibility to consider the value and impact of turning the realities of everyday social settings and experiences inside out. As with all new technologies as they move from the stage of technical probe to social probe, this AR transformation will happen case by case and context by context, involving many factors beyond the direct reach of UX design. However, as a result of the inherently social nature of augmented reality, we can be sure the value and impact of many augmented experiences depends in large part on how effectively they integrate the social dimensions of real-world settings, in real time.

The first four design principles are:

• Default to the Human
• Enhancement Not Replacement
• Build Real Bridges
• Stay Off the Critical Path

Of course, this is just a starting list, and they raise almost as many questions as they attempt to answer.

Some of those follow-up questions include: what other principles are there?

Are there ‘anti-principles’ to be aware of?

What’s the best way to make these principles part of designing augmented experiences?

2009 was a big year for aug­mented real­ity, and there are many pre­dic­tions that 2010 will be even big­ger; with accom­plish­ments com­ing in the form of new tech­nolo­gies, devices, busi­ness mod­els, and ways of hav­ing fun.  But even as we go about build­ing this emerg­ing medium, we’re still rely­ing largely on old-media style cen­tral­ized under­stand­ings of the pro­duc­tion mod­els, form, and con­tent of the aug­mented world.  What hap­pens when we grasp the new social and inter­ac­tion pos­si­bil­i­ties of aug­mented reality?

I’m part of a panel titled The Next Wave of AR: Explor­ing Social Aug­mented Expe­ri­ences that’s address­ing this ques­tion at the Where 2.0 con­fer­ence in San Jose in late March / early April.  We’ve got a good group of speak­ers that includes Tish Shute (Ugo­trade), whur­ley * (whur­leyvi­sion llc),Jeremy Hight (Mis­sion Col­lege, CA), and Thomas Wro­bel (Lost Again).  Our goal is to look ahead at how aug­mented real­ity will soon evolve to include — or be based on! — mean­ing­ful social inter­ac­tions and dynam­ics at small and large group scales.

In the spirit of co-created social aug­mented expe­ri­ences, we’re ask­ing for audi­ence con­tri­bu­tions: in the form of sim­ple sce­nar­ios that describe the future of social AR.  What will it feel like? Who will you inter­act with?  How will these expe­ri­ences change every­day life?

Panel Sum­mary (full descrip­tion on the Where 2.0 site)

This panel will dis­cuss shared aug­mented real­i­ties, con­sid­er­ing some of the essen­tial pos­si­bil­i­ties and chal­lenges inher­ent in this new class of social aug­mented expe­ri­ences. The for­mat is pre­sen­ta­tion of a small set of sce­nar­ios (defined in advance, with audi­ence input) describ­ing likely future forms of shared aug­mented real­i­ties at dif­fer­ing scales of social engage­ment for dis­cus­sion by a panel of lead­ing prac­ti­tion­ers in tech­nol­ogy, expe­ri­ence design, net­worked urban­ism, inter­face design, game design, and aug­mented reality.

Cur­rent aug­mented real­ity expe­ri­ences put who you are, where you are, what you are doing, and what is around you at cen­ter stage. But we can already look beyond the first stage of inter­ac­tions assum­ing a sin­gle user see­ing sim­ple arrows and tags indi­cat­ing POIs, and begin to explore shared (multiuser/multisource) aug­mented real­i­ties.
These social aug­mented expe­ri­ences will allow not only mashups, & mul­ti­source data flows, but dynamic over­lays (not lim­ited to 3d), cre­ated by dis­trib­uted groups of users, linked to location/place/time, and syn­di­cated to peo­ple who wish to engage with the expe­ri­ence by view­ing and co-creating ele­ments for their own goals and benefit.

Share your sce­nar­ios for the Next Wave of AR in the com­ments or else­where (tag nextwaveAR socialAR), and come to Where 2.0 and see the panel!

Here’s my presentation from the Italian IA Summit on Killzone.com as a leading example of the next generation of Massively Social On-line Games.
As usual, I try to share some of the best thinking on these ideas; in this case I quote liberally from Nicole Lazarro. (I hope she takes this as a compliment.) Her insights into the emotional drivers for social and game experiences and the nature of cross media are – no surprise – right on, and coming true years after first publication.
Some of the more eye-opening material I discovered while looking into the design of this game / community hybrid concerns the direct connection between game mechanics (a design question), the space of possible choices for players, the emotions these choices inspire and encourage, and the resulting experience of the game environment.
From the functional to the psychological, it seems there really is an ‘architecture of fun’ for both games and social experiences. It is just another example of how architecture of any (and all) kinds is an enormous influencing factor on peoples’ experiences.
This is the first of two parts – stay tuned for the follow-up, once we clear the disclosure question.
A slidecast will follow shortly, now that my laptop is back in working order, and I can fire up ScreenFlow.

There’s a lot of buzz about cloud computing in the technology world these days, but I think something much more interesting is the emergence of cultural clouds as the newest kind of public commons. By cultural clouds, I’m talking about the new layer of the human cultural stack we’re busy laying down as a by product of all our social and creative activities in the inofverse.
To be clear, I’m not referring to the IT infrastructure layer wherein cloud computing is defined as the “style of computing where massively scalable IT-related capabilities are provided ‘as a service’ across the Internet to multiple external customers.” [Thanks Gartner, via BusinessWeek]

These new cultural clouds appear in the ever growing collections of crowdsourced collectively or socially accumulated judgements, cultural products, knowledge, history, relationships, etc., encoded in the form of managed digital information. This quick illustration shows some of the pools of activity and judgement that that make up these cloud commons; including wikis, public media, reputation statements, reading recommendations, social networks, wish lists, music listening histories, shared photos, films and videos, citation networks, geotagging and memory maps, comments and public discourse, hashtags and tags for photos, URLs, and songs, link streams, subscription and feed lists, blogrolls, etc. These are social, cultural, and conversational resources, not mineral deposits or physical topographies.

New Cultural Clouds / Commons

The commons is an old construct that embraces natural resources – think land, air, water, the electromagnetic spectrum – and the more recent public domain of cultural materials not governed by copyright law.
Venerable institutions of custom and law, such as seasonal access to pasturage, the right of passage across borders for nomadic peoples, and common law, define and regulate the recognized forms of commons.

But socially collected, digital, reified human cultural products and judgements are a new *type* of commons. I think they’re a new type of resource, brought forth largely by the cognitive surplus we enjoy. And as profound technological permeation and ubiquitous computing bring on the age of everyware, the cloud commons will grow (and fragment / specialize / multiply?).
Who and what will govern the new cloud commons? How will we define and manage these resources?

By form and makeup, the cloud commons is ephemeral and distributed. But as digital information, it is eminently tangible and actionable. Our basic social structures and mechanisms – science, the law, economics, art, agriculture, religion, technology – will recognize the emergence of cloud commons, and respond accordingly. APML (Attention Profiling Markup Language), from the APML Working Group, is an example. The DataPortability project – “a group created to promote the idea that individuals have control over their data by determining how they can use it and who can use it. This includes access to data that is under the control of another entity.” – is another. [Advocating for the right to free movement of data is a digital analog of the ancient idea of right of way.] OpenID, OpenSocial, OAuth, OPML, and the rapidly evolving Creative Commons licensing system are other examples of responses to the appearance of cloud commons.

What does the future hold? As recognition of cloud-based commons grows, expect to see all the patterns of activity typical of new frontiers and zones of instability: wildcatting, pioneering, piracy, squatting, privateering, enclosure, slums and shanty towns (informal settlements in the parlance of architecuter and urban planning) extractive industries, sovereign claims, colonization, speculation, etc.

With history as a guide, I’m especially wary of enclosure movements, and extractive industries. Both practices can rapidly diminish the present value of a commons or commons-based resource. Worse, enclosure and extractive practices act as negative feedback mechanisms, decreasing current estimations of a commons or commons-based resource’s future value, making the tragedy of the commons a likely outcome scenario.

The U.S. radio spectrum, as enclosed by the FCC

Is this framing of recently formed clouds of information and activity data as a new kind of commons accurate? Useful?

More on the idea of cultural clouds as the new commons forthcoming.

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 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!

Common models for participation in social and contributory media invariably set ‘content creators’ – the group of people who provide original material – at the top of an implied or explicit scale of comparative value. Bradley Horowitz’s Content Production Pyramid is one example, Forrester’s Social Technographics Ladder is another. In these models, value – usually to potential marketers or advertisers external to the domain in question – is usually measured in terms of the level of involvement of the different groups present, whether consumers, synthesizers, or creators.

By the numbers, these models are accurate: the vast majority of the content in social media comes from a small slice of the population. And for businesses, content creators offer greater potential to commercialize / monetize / trade influence.

It’s time to evolve these models a bit, to better align them with the sweeping DIY cultural and technological shift happening offline in the real world, as well as online.

The DIY shift manifests in many ways:

• Web 2.0 culture of contribution, self-publishing
• Commoditized / outsourced / on-demand design, development & manufacturing
• Shadow IT
• Open Source & public data sets
• APIs, Web Services, SOA (public and private)
• Mashup infrastructure: Yahoo Pipes, Google Gadgets
• Physical goods: fabbers, and fab-labs ReadyMade, Make

The essential feature of the DIY shift is co-creation: the presence of many more people in *all aspects* of creation and production, whether of software, goods, ideas, etc. Co-creation encompasses more than straightforward on-line content creation – such as sharing a photo, or writing a blog post – acknowledged by the architecture of participation, user-generated content (and ugly term…), crowd-sourcing, and collective and contributory media models.

Co-creation includes active shaping of structure, pattern, rules, and mechanisms, that support simple content creation. This requires activity and involvement from roles we often label editor, builder, designer, or architect, depending on the context. The pyramid and ladder models either implicitly collapse these perspectives into the general category of ‘creator’, which obscures very important distinctions between them, or leaves them out entirely (I’m not sure which). It is possible to plot these more nuanced creative roles on the general continuum of ‘level of involvement’, and I often do this when I talk about the future of design in the DIY world.

A better model for this world is the ecology of co-creation, which recognizes that the key difference between industrial production models and the DIY future is that the walls separating traditional creators from consumers have fallen, and all parties interconnect. Judgements of value in ecologies take on very different meanings: Consider the differing but all vitally important roles of producers, consumers, and decomposers in a living ecosystem.

What will an ecology of co-creation look like in practical / operational form? In The Bottom Is Not Enough, Kevin Kelly offers, “…now that crowd-sourcing and social webs are all the rage, it’s worth repeating: the bottom is not enough. You need a bit of top-down as well.”

An ecology of co-creation that combines top-down architecture and design with bottom-up contribution and participation will take the form of a deliberate hybrid.

I’ll quote Kelly again (at some length):

Here’s how I sum it up:  The bottom-up hive mind will always take us much further than even seems possible. It keeps surprising us in this regard. Given enough time, dumb things can be smarter than we think.

At that same time, the bottom-up hive mind will never take us to our end goal. We are too impatient. So we add design and top down control to get where we want to go.

The systems we keep will be hybrid creations. They will have a strong rootstock of peer-to-peer generation, grafted below highly refined strains of controlling functions.  Sturdy, robust foundations of user-made content and crowd-sourced innovation will feed very small slivers of leadership agility. Pure plays of 100% smart mobs or 100% smart elites will be rare.

The real art of business and organizations in the network economy will not be in harnessing the crowd of “everybody” (simple!) but in finding the appropriate hybrid mix of bottom and top for each niche, at the right time. The mix of control/no-control will shift as a system grows and matures.

[Side note: Metaphors for achieving the appropriate mix of control/no-control for a system will likely include choreographing, cultivating, tuning, conducting, and shepherding, in contrast to our current directive framings such as driving, directing, or managing.]

Knowledge at Wharton echoes Kelly, in their recent article The Experts vs. the Amateurs: A Tug of War over the Future of Media
A tug of war over the future of media may be brewing between so-called user-generated content — including amateurs who produce blogs, video and audio for public consumption — and professional journalists, movie makers and record labels, along with the deep-pocketed companies that back them. The likely outcome: a hybrid approach built around entirely new business models, say experts at Wharton.

No one has quite figured out what these new business models will look like, though experimentation is under way with many new ventures from startups and existing organizations.

The BBC is putting hybridization and tuning into effect now, albeit in limited ways that do not reflect a dramatic shift of business model.

In Value of citizen journalism Peter Horrocks writes:

Where the BBC is hosting debate we will want the information generated to be editorially valuable. Simply having sufficient resource to be able to moderate the volume of debate we now receive is an issue in itself.

And the fact that we are having to apply significant resource to a facility that is contributed regularly by only a small percentage of our audiences is something we have to bear in mind. Although of course a higher proportion read forums or benefit indirectly from how it feeds into our journalism. So we may have to loosen our grip and be less worried about the range of views expressed, with very clear labeling about the BBC’s editorial non-endorsement of such content. But there are obvious risks.

We need to be able to extract real editorial value from such contributions more easily. We are exploring as many technological solutions as we can for filtering the content, looking for intelligent software that can help journalists find the nuggets and ways in which the audience itself can help us to cope with the volume and sift it.

What does all this mean for design(ers)? Stay tuned for part two…

Video of my BlogTalk presentation ‘What happens when everyone designs social media? Practical suggestions for handling new ethical dilemmas’ is available from Ustream.tv. The resolution is low (it was shot with a webcam) but the audio is good: follow along with the slides on your own for the full experience.

More videos of BlogTalk sessions here.