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 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!

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.

Thanks to Facebook’s public mistakes and apology to those affected by Beacon , as well as a number of other ham-handed attempts to monetize the social graph, the intersection of ethics, design, and social networks is receiving overdue attention. Two talks at this year’s Information Architecture Summit in Miami will look at ethics as it applies to the daily work of creating social networks, and user experiences in general.

First is Designing for the social: Avoiding anti-social networks, by Miles Rochford, description below.

This presentation considers the role of traditional social networks and the role of IAs in addressing the challenges that arise when designing and using online social networks.

The presentation discusses philosophical approaches to sharing the self, how this relates to offline social networks and human interactions in different contexts, and provides guidance on how online social networking tools can be designed to support these relationships.

It also covers ethical issues, including privacy, and how these can conflict with business needs. A range of examples illustrate the impact of these drivers and how design decisions can lead to the creation of anti-social networks.

Related: the social networks anti-patterns list from the microformats.org wiki.

The second is The impact of social ethics on IA and interactive design – experiences from the Norwegian woods, by Karl Yohan Saeth and Ingrid Tofte, described as follows:

This presentation discusses ethics in IA from a practical point of view. Through different case studies we illustrate the impact of social ethics on IA and interactive design, and sum up our experiences on dealing with ethics in real projects.

If you’re interested in ethics and the practicalities of user experience (and who isn’t?), both sessions look good. I’ll be talking about other things at the summit this year. In the meantime, stay tuned for the second article in my UXMatters series on designing ethical experiences, due for publication very soon.

My slides from Blogtalk 2008 are available online now: I went through a lot of ideas quickly, so this is a good way to follow along at your own pace…

FYI: This version of the deck includes presenters notes – I’ll upload a (larger!) view-only version once I’m back from holiday in lovely Eire.

UXMatters just published part 1 of a two part series I’m writing on ethics and design titled, Designing Ethical Experiences: Social Media and the Conflicted Future.

Here’s an excerpt, to whet your appetites for a practical take on what’s often seen as a philosophical subject.

Questions of ethics and conflict can seem far removed from the daily work of user experience (UX) designers who are trying to develop insight into people’s needs, understand their outlooks, and design with empathy for their concerns. In fact, the converse is true: When conflicts between businesses and customers–or any groups of stakeholders–remain unresolved, UX practitioners frequently find themselves facing ethical dilemmas, searching for design compromises that satisfy competing camps. This dynamic is the essential pattern by which conflicts in goals and perspectives become ethical concerns for UX designers. Unchecked, it can lead to the creation of unethical experiences that are hostile to users–the very people most designers work hard to benefit–and damaging to the reputations and brand identities of the businesses responsible.

Stay tuned for part two, which will share a set of suggestions for how design can manage conflict and work toward the creation of ethical integrated experiences. Meanwhile, let us know what you think of the ideas here, or at the UXMatters site.

My presentation slides from the Ethics Panel at EuroIA 2007 – titled Designing Ethically – Communicating Conflict: Design For the Integrated Experiences of the Future – are available from Slideshare at http://www.slideshare.net/moJoe. Ethics was a challenging and fascinating subject to take on, and it prompted some great discussion with the audience (even at 7pm, after a full day of sessions…)

Many thanks to fellow panelists Olly Wright and Thom Froehlich, and all who planned, organized, attended, spoke, volunteered, or otherwise contributed to EuroIA 2007. As you can see from the flickr photostream, it was worth the trip to Barcelona! I’m already looking forward to next year’s event in Amsterdam.

Here’s a quick description of the presentation:

“What does the future of design hold? Greater ethical challenges. In the coming world of integrated experiences, design will face increasing ethical dilemmas born of the conflicts between broader, diverse groups of users in social media; new hybrids such as the SPIME which bridges the physical and virtual environments simultaneously, and the DIY shift that changes the role of designers from creators of elegant point solutions, to the authors of elegant systems and frameworks used by others for their own expressive and functional purposes. To better prepare designers for the increased complexity, connectedness, and awareness included in the coming future, here are some practical suggestions for easily addressing conflict during the design of integrated experiences, by using known and familiar experience design methods and techniques.”

Dan Ward has created a nifty primer on the balance between simplicity and complexity in designs that is worth a look. It seems especially useful for designers facing challenges with stabilizing the vision, features, requirements, or other design drivers for a product, service, experience, etc.

The Simplicity Cycle, is “a graphical exploration of the relationship between complexity, goodness and time. It explores the natural development of system design, and highlights both the importance and the dangers of complexity. …has practical applications for artists, teachers, engineers, architects and anyone else who creates.”

A quick read, The Simplicity Cycle is nicely illustrated (replete with potential presentationware for harried consultants…), has engaging nuggets like quotes from Charles Mingus, and is free to download.