We often experience the clash of contexts that happen on social media sites. We all have a different perception of what is funny or what is considered true. We are used to dealing separately with each of our friend groups. However, with many social media services, all of our relationships are classified within a single bucket. Personally, this has taken the fun our of my Facebook experience. I rarely post anything without thinking twice about the consequences. That said, something’s recently changed. I’ve grown to somewhat appreciate this clash. As the Flotilla event evolved, and things got politically charged, I realized that it might actually serve a constructive purpose.
This recently posted video of Israeli soldiers dancing to the beat of Ke$ha’s “tick tock” in the middle of their patrol in the West Bank is a great example of the clash of context. The video went viral extremely fast, as many Israelis re-posted and proudly emailed the link, naively thinking that “the world will finally see that our soldiers are humans who also like to have a little fun”. They could not have imagined just how offended people across the world would be from watching the video. Slogans like “It’s easy to laugh at the occupation when you’re the oppressor” were posted in response, causing lots of frustration and confusion all around.
Intentions were good, but were lost in translation.
Ethan Zuckerman has been writing about xenophilia and culture bridging for a while. He points at people’s tendency towards homophily (’birds of a feather flock together’) and sees this as a fundamental challenge, since with the web, we’re more able than ever to find people that are like us. He stresses the importance for us to seek out and understand people different from us, especially as cultures clash on global web services become more common. Ethan defines xenophilia as people in the world who are genuinely fascinated by the breadth, complexity and difference of the world; “third culture kids”, people who were raised in one country, but are “from” another. Bridge bloggers are xenophiles who have the capacity to connect both sides of a story, because they themselves are associated with both sides.
In his recent blog post, Ethan looks at data released by peace.facebook.com, boasting how many daily connections are made between pairs of battling entities. According to the site, 15,747 connections between Israelis and Palestinians have been made over the last 24 hours on Facebook. I find this piece of data incredibly hard to believe (especially since the number doesn’t seem to change over the course of the week). Even if a reciprocal relationship equals 2 connections, I can’t imagine such a high number of connections forming on a daily basis. That said, 20% of Israeli population is Arab, many with roots and family in Gaza or the West Bank. This fact could certainly explain the data.
Their notion of “connections” makes me wonder if they account for Facebook fan pages. Successful fan pages tend to be politically charged, and polarize the users according to their political agenda rather than bring those with different views together. However, if Facebook’s data is counting Israeli Arabs as Israelis (as they should!), I wouldn’t be surprised if they’d accounted for multiple connections forming via these fan pages.
I am extremely doubtful that much bridging happens through direct Facebook “friending”, nor that it is represented by direct Facebook “friendships” between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs. So where does it happen if at all?
In order to answer this question, we must discuss the notion of a “safe space”, which I consider crucial for bridging to happen. A safe space makes us feel comfortable, almost at home. Its an environment where we are supported and validated; a place where we are willing to lower our defenses.
I am a huge fan of Global Voices, but wouldn’t consider it as a safe space for Israelis. The majority of readership on the Middle East section tilts heavily towards Arab articles, comments and opinions. One might say that is totally fair since it is representative of actual world distribution of population. But the outcome is an imbalanced environment, which for an Israeli, feels unsafe; a place where they won’t be supported, nor will they be identified with. Why hang out where everyone’s picking on you when you can easily go play with fun friends elsewhere? For the most part,like the Guardian or Al-Jazeera, Global Voices is not perceived as a safe space.
However I believe that Facebook creates new opportunities for safe spaces to form, especially as they are based on people’s familiarity with each other.
Facebook received massive adoption in Israel, easily taking over any other Social network or service. Israel is a tiny place, and people are inherently social – making Facebook a perfect place to interact with the “hevre” (Hebrew for ‘gang’ – also the name of one of the earliest Social Networks that saw light in Israel). Facebook is a place where my friends from Israel feel extremely comfortable. Even when someone lands on my profile page, there are always other friends a mere click away, in the periphery. One is never alone, in any given context.
The Flotilla incident triggered something I hadn’t seen before. Friends from different contexts don’t tend to communicate with each other, even when reacting to the same post. The flotilla events changed this.
When dealing with such a complex topic that has no clear “right” or “wrong”, I witnessed multiple “cross boundary” conversations happening on my own Facebook page, and also amongst my Israeli friends who are also living abroad. Our pages served as bridges, or safe havens, where contacts from “opposing sides” could have a conversation.
It would go something like this – (1) Facebook page owner posts link to article (2) Israeli friend/relative responds with a pro-Israeli message (3) European friend responds to that with a counter opinion (4) Another Israeli friend responds (5) another foreign friend supports #3 (6) profile owner mediates…
…you get the drift.
The interesting part here is that even if there are no direct links between those in Israel, and those with opposing perspectives wherever they were, a conversation could take place because of the personalized nature of Facebook. Because it felt safer to do it there, on a shared friend’s page. Much safer than on Global Voices, or other international news websites.
The more Facebook grows, the more I see these kinds of exchanges happening. In his post, Ethan claims that “we overestimate how many of our online contacts cross borders and underestimate how often these tools are used to reinforce local friendships”. While I agree, I’d add that we shouldn’t only look at direct cross-border connections, but rather try to understand and estimate the value that Facebook serves as a safe space for bridging to occur. I’m not sure how we quantify the amount of cultural bridging that is not represented by FB connections. We could only do this by analyzing public discussions happening on profile pages, between profiles who are not friends on Facebook.
To conclude, Obama argues that we suffer from an “empathy deficit”, as quoted from a speech to college students:
“There’s a lot of talk in this country about the federal deficit. But I think we should talk more about our empathy deficit – the ability to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes; to see the world through those who are different from us – the child who’s hungry, the laid-off steelworker, the immigrant woman cleaning your dorm room. As you go on in life, cultivating this quality of empathy will become harder, not easier.”
Placing yourself in someone else’s shoes is much easier when the store attendant is your close friend. Facebook as a platform has the potential to host these conversations; be the store. Safe space.
But we the users, have to make the conversations happen.
If you’ve never been to one of the twice-a-year shows held at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, you’re missing the weirdest, coolest, most insanely inspired geek projects around. Red Burns sez ‘ITP is about enhancing the human spirit through imagination. when we grow up we have it knocked out of us and we’re afraid to be embarrased. The minute you tell people they don’t have rules to follow the floodgates open, and they do things even they’re suprised of’. As an alumni, I can confess that Red is absolutely 100% right. Here are some of the projects I loved from the recent Spring 2010 show:
Scrollables is a stunning exploration that uses paper as an interface for digital content. Move the scroll, and control the content projected onto it:
Current is a real time data visualization of the life-cycle of internet memes, from birth to evolution and decline, in relation to the daily news cycle. By visually anthropomorphizing the capricious nature of public attention we are able to spotlight missed opportunities in news coverage, and, potentially, recover news readership that has been lost to more sensational sources. Download and run the application yourself!
Plus and Minus visualizes the progress of HIV/AIDS in the last 20 years and lets users see how changes they make can affect the future. It is based on data from 1990 through 2007 and lets one compare see possible outcomes of investment in different solutions like condoms, HIV screenings and education.
Mobile Logger is an iphone application that lets its users record location, direction, speed, altitude and sound level as they go off on a journey. This is especially designed for bikes, but can obviously be used in other “journey” situations. Check out the Gizmodo post.
Chat Roulette 1988 is a phone based system that allows you to chat with different people anytime, anywhere. Since the 80’s are back (or so claim the creators), you might as well give this a try! The project leverages the Asterisk Open Source telephony project.
SHORT++ is a pair of interactive robotic elevators shoes that are activated by an iPhone app. (There’s a new UP for that…) Check out Adi’s video:
Papel is a retail display that mixes paper art, illusions and human interaction. When a viewer is not present, the wall paper will radiate a soft glow. When the viewer stands in front of the installation, the glow fades out, and their image is back-projected onto the paper structure.
Thermogen is a cool project that converts heat from a toaster over to electricity. In essence, a cirtuit to be used where power is unavailable, but heat is plentiful. Additionally, David created not only electricity from the heat, but also yummy choc-chip cookies.
Check out our recently installed piece, the ‘Future of the Book’, at the Berkeley Center for New Media window (next to the free speech cafe). It is a mixed media electronic sculpture, built in collaboration with Judith Donath and Martin Wattenberg. Initially commissioned for the Boston Book Festival in 2009, we reconstructed the piece for BCNM, where it will be in display until August. The piece includes three unique visualizations that display content related to books and reading:
Three glowing screen are set amidst arching piles of ghostly pale books. One continuously reconfigures Twitter posts about reading, on another bouncing letters randomly settle into place, revealing pointed quotes about reading drawn from well-known books, while the third uses the viewer’s image to trace out a series of related passages.
Like many friends, I have been horrified to see Facebook take aggressive measures to make as much of its content publically available. Since its shift in privacy defaults last December, Facebook has been working diligently to take away our privacy in an attempt to ‘colonize’ the web’s social graph (as Kara Swisher suggests). It is now ridiculously easy for any website to embed Facebook functionality, and thus personalize its experience per visiting user. Truth is, I am torn; torn between hating Facebook as a user and excited for the opportunity as a web entrepreneur; mostly excited at the prospect of creating compelling, contextualized socially-rich user experiences. And as much as I despise Facebook, I will not delete my account.
I am sure I’m not the only one who feels this way, since ceasing to exist on Facebook so will drastically reduce my ability to communicate with many friends. And this gets to the crux of the challenge: are we so addicted to Facebook that we can’t tell whats good for us anymore? Is Facebook an Evil? Are they trying to Monopolize the social web? All of the above??
Last December, Facebook broke the social “contract” that we all signed up for by changing its privacy defaults. It switched the context right under our noses, prompting some 65% of users to go public without even knowing it. Many users still have no clue how visible their profile information and photos are (we all know how unintuitive FB privacy controls are). While this is totally unacceptable behavior and places some users in potentially risky situations, I can’t help but also look at the flip side. Facebook is on its way to becoming the first truly global social network platform that has potential to fundamentally change the way we experience the web. By placing social information in context and not in a single, aggregated feed, Facebook might actually succeed at creating some fantastically useful socially-aware and personalized browsing experiences. All that simply traded for our privacy!
Well, not so simple.
Some think that it is possible to bring the demise of Facebook by creating applications that will scare users; creepy apps that know way too much about you. While this might make headlines, it is unlikely that such an approach will prove to be successful in the long term. As a society, we’ve become so hooked on Facebook, that we are willing to take potential future risks in return for current socializing. And realistically, unless I were a hormone-fluctuating, socially uncomfortable teen, what content could your app possibly surface that is so detrimental to my life?
Raul Pacheco hits the spot when he writes that Facebook’s actions are ‘not enough for us to care’:
There has been a lot of debate online about how Facebook keeps making it more difficult for users to keep their privacy. My question to everyone is — if Facebook is that “evil,” why are we all still using it? Why not be completely democratic and demonstrate (with our vote, e.g. with our not having a Facebook account) that this loss of privacy is unacceptable?
The answer is — because not enough of us care. If the millions of users of Facebook really cared that much about their privacy, they would make the Big Brother/Sister accountable. But in a society that is valuing privacy less and less, accountability has become an afterthought and not mainstream. Sadly, that also means that we have lost the power of protecting our privacy to commercial interests.
I wouldn’t say that Facebook users don’t care about privacy. I just think that many don’t care enough to be obsessing and worrying about potential future risks. Even if one recognizes a slightly riskee photo or comment, it is tempting to just leave online, as the fun of social interaction trumps the thought about potential future uncomfort. While these types of actions most likely don’t affect users in the near term, there are two things that we should be aware of: (1) the consequences of our actions onto others, and (2) the long term implications of sharing our data.
This is where User Experience Design can play a significant role, as we are facing an extremely difficult design challenge. We need to create a visual language that helps users understand these potential risks taken by making content visible. Not unlike the automobile association in West London who set the first warning signs on roads in 1908, or the cigarette manufacturers who were mandated to highlight the medical issues correlated with smoking, we need to figure out best practices to display potential risks without scaring users away. We need to design digital warning signs that keep attracting people’s attention and not fade into the background. We should be aware of our privacy controls at all times – perhaps by placing icons of just how many people can see an item before it is submitted.
I shouldn’t have to dive into complicated settings that give the fiction of privacy control but don’t — since they’re so hard to understand that they’re ignored. I shouldn’t need a flowchart to understand what friends of friends of friends can share with others. Things should be naturally clear and easy for me . . .
Would you like to see your dad, teacher and ex-girlfriend’s icons next to an item before submitting it? Probably not.
Is there a system that can helps us visualize the audience to which we are writing? That’s something users don’t want to see, and thus a challenging design problem.
There is a growing need for applications that help us understand our personal online brand: how we are portrayed online, and what potential risks we face. What’s the equivalent of an anti-virus application, that instead of protecting our computer, protects our online persona? We need something that can warn us when a risky action was taken online (either by us or our within our social network).
Facebook’s new APIs makes is super easy for web developers to build on top of its social graph. Almost too easy. By embedding widgets in the form of like buttons and status update boxes, websites can easily personalize their views according to you. For a growing number of services, this is done without even requiring users to login. For example, on likebutton.me you will see your Facebook friend’s activities from a variety of websites, as long as have previously logged into Facebook. A central listing of what my friends recommend, separated by topics. Creepy, but potentially useful.
The same type of connection happens with both yelp and pandora. At first feels creepy, yet as an experience, potentially something we may get used to, or even like.
Here are two examples where things can get out of hand:
(1) There are Facebook “community pages” that automatically add any status updates that include the page keyword. From CIA and FBI to Terrorism, they’ve got it all, with your name and thoughts right there, thanks to your inability to understand their privacy defaults! As a user, without even knowing it, your name is automatically associated with a community that algorithmically formed around a used keyword.
(2) It is dead simple to create Evil “Like” Buttons – by hacking the button to point to another page. Again, adding the risk that our usernames would be associated with something we are not aware of.
As a User Experience designer my task is to think about users first, place them in the center of my design, protect them, respect their needs, and help them accomplish whatever they come to do in the best possibly way. However, Informing users of privacy hazards is a difficult design challenge, one that Facebook obviously doesn’t want to handle. As web entrepreneurs, should we be leveraging this powerful yet scary technology that Facebook has enabled?
If so, how do we warn our users without scaring them away? How do we show users what they don’t really want to see or deal with? How can we warn of risks that only affect the far future?
We should also ask ourselves if regulation is needed. And if so, what would it look like and how it might further complicate the matter?
I was fortunate to be invited this year as one of the contributing artists at TEDActive. This is the simulcast event that happens in Palm Springs at the same time that the main TED event takes place in Long Beach. The organizers frame it not as “TED jr.” but rather a more intimate version of TED; in essence, what it used to be like before it became a 1500 person event.
Ironically enough, Bing sponsored a really cool lounge which included a number of interactive art pieces. This is were Dan Goods and I installed a variation the Aerogel installation. For TEDActive, we slightly altered its interactivity and the projected material:
Aerogel is a solid made up of 99.8% air and 0.2% of a smoky form of silicon, hence its other name: ’solid smoke’. While it is easily breakable, the material is super light and a fantastic heat insulator. Throughout the week, Dan would let people hold a piece of Aerogel on their hand while directing a blow-torch at it. When projected upon, it captures light in a stunning way:
NASA uses aerogel to capture dust particles in space. These particles vaporize on impact with solids and pass through gases, however can be trapped within the aerogel. Our installation dealt with this notion of capturing that which difficult to hold or grasp. As the conference progressed, the ideas that were raised and discussed during the talks were captured and projected on the aerogel pieces. At different times, a variety of topic would be projected within the aerogel pieces. When left by itself, the projections morphed between movement and colors. But as a person would move their hands in front of the installation, some of the most recent messages posted on Twitter about TED or TEDActive would explode within the projected space.
Here’s a video demonstrating the material’s amazing capability to capture light:
Here’s another video showing Dan interacting with the piece:
#CheeringForTheYankeesIsLike is a hashtag created by @mattsly the morning of October 26th. He submitted the following snarky message – ‘Go Phillies. #CheeringForTheYankeesIsLike hoping investment bankers get really huge bonuses of at least 8 figures‘ – hoping to entertain his friends, and possibly get others to participate. Matt had 182 followers at the time, not sizeable by any means on Twitter. Little did he expect that some 9 hours later, 271 different users, most of whom have no connection to him whatsoever, would participate, posting around 500 messages in total.
How did this happen and what prompted this message to spread?
#CheeringForTheYankeesIsLike
About an hour after Matt sent out his first message, one of his followers, @lizzieohreally, wrote the following message ‘@jaketapper? @abcdude? …Hoping someone w/ more Twitter than I can help popularize #CheeringForTheYankeesIsLike (via @mattsly)‘. Lizzie clearly understood that in order to get many others to play, she would have to get someone with a large set of followers to participate. Lizzie had only around 500 followers at the time, so posted this message in an attempt to seek @jaketapper or @abcdude’s attention.
Sure thing, some twenty minutes later, @abcdude see’s the message and adds his own variation to the meme: ‘#cheeringfortheyankeesislike pulling for Regina George in “Mean Girls.”‘ He enjoys it so much that he promptly posts another message and attaches the hashtag. @abcdude is a new york based correspondent for ABC news. He dubs himself a RedSox fan and a cosmic power broker. Not as cosmic as Lizzie had hoped, but still, he has some 7,000 followers, which could certainly help give the meme some traction. We see a small spike after @abcdude’s participation, and by now, some 3 hours after Matt sent the original message, there have been 34 different messages posted with this unique hashtag.
But it wasn’t until @jaketapper joined in that the conversation really took off. The hashtag came to Jake’s attention after @DetourJazz, whom he follows, participated. Jake reacted by posting: ’RT @DetourJazz: #cheeringfortheyankeesislike rooting for “Craterface” in Grease to beat Danny (via @Laura_Martin)’. He then added a new message that he posted to his followers. Jake is a senior White House correspondent for ABC news with over 30,000 followers. Before he took part in this meme, new posts appeared at a frequency of one every 5 minutes. Immediately after he joined, we see a sharp rise in participation, with multiple messages from a variety of users every minute.
Seeing it Spread
1. Graphing the Network – Every user who participated in the meme is represented by a gray circle (Matt, whom first started the meme, is shown in yellow). Edges represents the person who most likely influenced the other to first participate.
2. Seeing the Flow – in this applet, a user is represented by their twitter icon. As the timeline moves forward, each profile lights up when they post a new message with the hashtag. Tthe moment that @jaketapper chose to participate is evident – there’s a clear, sudden spike in participation after his profile picture lights up.
3. Seeing the distance – the following applet highlights the total social distance that this hashtag traveled between users. Each user is represented by a circle, the more influence a user has, the larger their circle is drawn. Edges in this example represent the social ties – when there’s a follower/friend relationship between two users, a line is placed between their representation on the screen. The first column includes only Matt who first used the hashtag. The second row consists of only those people he directly influenced to participate (his followers). While there are a total of 9 columns, it is crystal clear that the most important phase happened in the second and third column, when a core cluster of users chose to participate, and a mini tipping point was reached.
Parsing the Data
#CheeringForTheYankeesIsLike lasted for a total of 9 hours that day, activated 271 different users and included around 500 messages in total. From looking at this meme, it is clear that on Twitter, there’s great advantage to having many followers if one intends to spread a message. It is also clear that having the right followers is key. If it were not for @lizzieohreally who knew to actively pass the message onwards to heavy Twitter users, the meme would never have spread out the way it did. In order to come to these conclusions it was necessary for me to look at social ties in addition to the semantics of the messages posted.
I used the Twitter API to discover the follower/friend relationships between all users who participated in this meme. This is extremely important data, especially when modeling the flow of participation and influence within this hashtag. For example, lets look at a simple case where user B follows user A. If user A first participates and is followed by user B participating, user A is rewarded some number of influence points – this is assuming user B saw the hashtag posted by user A, and decided to participate. Additionally, if a user is retweeted or ‘@’ messaged they are rewarded some number of influence points. Real life situations can easily become complicated, as user B might also be following user C, who participated in the meme as well. Now how do we know if user B was influenced by user A or user C? Hard to tell, but we can build an influence model that takes these situations into account, which is exactly what I did.
Translating the semantics and social ties from the dataset into a visual language that made sense was key to helping me understand this hashtag experiment. I am a big fan of visualization as a means to parse large datasets, however dealing with social, implicit data is tricky, and extremely challenging to represent visually. But when done right, these representations can shine a whole new light and hopefully help us better understand some of the dynamics at play.
New Twitter visualization of the MTV video music awards by Stamen design. I enjoy using the well-designed interface for “re-experiencing” the series of events as they evolved that evening. I like the simplicity of the timeline at the bottom, and just how easy it is to navigate between times. What I also really like is the sparkline-esque graph showing the person’s popularity throughout the evening.
What I’d like to see is a comparison of multiple people at the same time. I’d also like to minimize the timeline so that i can see the whole evening at a time, rather than have to scroll horizontally. I don’t like the aesthetic of circular profiles over a black background. The circular border has too much contrast – some alpha blurring would’ve done the trick nicely. Whats definitely missing most is the multiple channel view, especially now that people aren’t talking as much about the event. In any case, nice to see MTV investing in a Twitter viz. (click below to try it out)
I’m very excited about the new Speaker Series that MSR New England has kicked off today, featuring David Kord Murray, author of Borrowing Brilliance: The Six Steps to Business Innovation by building on the ideas of others. David gave a solid talk, emphasizing the importance of two aspects in the process of being “creative”: Borrowing other ideas, and knowing how to Judge ideas.
In his book’s second chapter (on borrowing) he quotes Einstein: “The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources”. What he lays out later in the chapter, describes “smart” ways of borrowing – basically don’t borrow ideas from your direct competitor, but possibly someone else in a related field, or yet better, someone in a completely unrelated field, who is trying to solve a similar problem. Bill Gates borrowed solutions from the existing software industry, while Charles Darwin borrowed his creative solutions from places not usually associated with biology (Galapagos). Borrow from within your industry and you’re considered a thief or lowly pirate. While if you borrow from another industry, you are considered a creative genius.
Another interesting quote from that chapter: “If you steal from one author, it’s plagiarism; if you steal from many, it’s research.” He continues to write about how Bill Gates stole the mouse+click GUI idea that Macintosh developed first. Apparently Steve Jobs spotted that technology at XEROX parc, hired the reseracher who worked on the mouse, and put him to work on the Mac. Gates immediately recognized the potential of the idea, and blatantly copied it. After years of legal battles, Microsoft won the suit, on the claim that the original idea didn’t originate from Apple, but from Xerox. Dan Bricklin, a prominent software engineer who developed the first spreadsheet, said about the suit, “This is a sad day for the software industry in America.” He added, “Writing software is not the same as writing a book. Software builds on what was there before.” Bricklin is right. Software builds on what was there before, but so does every commercial product, engineered machine, scientific theory, and creative thought… also books!
In the Q&A session I asked the author what his thoughts of DRM & technology/web copyright. He didn’t have a stong opinion other than – he understands why its necessary for profitability, but also sees how it inhibits the creative process.
My notes from his talk:
Borrowing Brilliance is about taking ideas and restructuring them. New ideas are always built out of existing ideas. The key becomes where you go to look for ideas. Main questions:
1. can you teach someone to be creative? Definitely.
2. is there a defined process? Maybe.
defined six steps: the origin of a creative idea:
step 1) defining – define the problem that you’re trying to solve
step 2) borrowing – borrow ideas from places with a similar problem
step 3) combining – connect and combine these borrowed ideas (this is the essence of creativity) the evolution of a creative idea:
step 4) incubating – allow the combinations to incubate into a solution
step 5) judging – identify the strength and weakness of the solution
step 6) enhancing – eliminate the weak points while enhancing the strong ones
DEFINING
We’re not necessarily good at the formation of a problem. The problem is the foundation of a creative idea. Its important to define, understand and describe the problem. Its important to describe the problem from different perspective, define it differently.
BORROWING
The problem with define where to look for the solution. John Nash had an economics problem: how do members of the economy act, he sensed that they were acting with incomplete information. He recognized that as the same problems he had playing poker. He took the same solutions to the problems from poker into create a decision-making model as a solution for his economics problem.
how do you solve a navigation problem? First look at other software companies. Then step away outside that industry and look at search&rescue teams, truck drivers… etc, and see how they solve their navigation problems.
COMBINING
this is the essence of creativity.
Walt disney created disneyland by using a movie metaphor while constructing the park. Used a move metaphor while breaking out the different experiences that people should have in different parts of the park. Facebook’s original metaphor was an online yearbook. Creative thinkers use metaphors. Isaac Newton was thinking in terms of metaphors – making the connection between the apple and the moon – the apple falls down, but moon moves around. combined celestial and earth-based physics.
INCUBATING
Input to the subsounscious is important => incubate => output from the subconscious (usually happens in the shower! -> the one time of the day where we’re not consciously thinking). Before going to bed, important to glance over some things we’re thinking about, then put it away… It’ll come back.
JUDGING
This is used to drive/improve the idea. Put on your positive and negative hats. So in the next phase, you can bring up an idea that doesn’t have the negative bits and mostly the good bits. This helps develop your intuition, identifying good ideas fast. Example: steve jobs visits XEROX PARC 20 years ago. Goes wild over a demo of mouse+click GUI. Identifying that as a brilliant idea vs. others that had the same demo…
ENHANCING
Trial and error as the passage to the creative solution.
[tags]creativity,book,review, David Kord Murray [/tags]
“The stream is winding its way throughout the Web and organizing it by nowness.”
This real-time stream has been building for a while. It began with RSS, but is now so much stronger and swifter, encompassing not just periodic news and musings but constant communication, status updates, instantly shared thoughts, photos and videos.
The author presents a coherent stream metaphor: “A real time, flowing, dynamic stream of information – that we as users and participants can dip in and out of and whether we participate in them or simply observe we are a part of this flow.” He claims that the stream does not replace Web pages or search, for that matter, but it has the potential to completely transform them:
“Traffic occurs in bursts, depending on what people are paying attention to at that second across a variety of services. Someone might notice an obscure blog post on Twitter, where it starts spreading, then it moves to FriendFeed and Facebook and desktop stream readers such as Tweetdeck or Seesmic desktop and before you know it, a hundred thousand people are reading that article. The stream creates a different form of syndication which cannot be licensed and cannot be controlled.”
“The problem, more than ever before, becomes one of information overload. How do you keep from drowning in the deluge? Borthwick suggests letting go of the notion that you can ever master the stream, even just your own personal data stream of friend’s Tweets, updates, blog posts, Flickr photos, YouTube video finds and so on:
This isn’t an inbox we have to empty, or a page we have to get to the bottom of — its a flow of data that we can dip into at will but we can’t attempt to gain an all encompassing view of it.”
This is where I have to somewhat disagree. Yes, the average user must deal with information overload more than ever. Our emphasis must not be focused towards this notion of “giving up” or realizing that we can ‘never master the stream’. We need to build smart filtering mechanisms that help us navigate this overload and data-heavy information ether. We need to build systems that help us know when and where we *should* hop into the stream. We need to be able to set and identify levels of immediacy – I am not willing to miss out on any content from my closest friends, but will easily let other content slide by. Why can I not easily set preferences across the board and am constantly prompted to setup less-than ideal preferences within walled gardens?
“So jump into the stream and let it carry you away. Or you can stand timidly on the banks until everyone else around you has already taken the plunge.”
The information overload “problem” is that of smart filtering, and in a way, the article’s last sentence portrays one of the most promising filtering mechanisms – social & collaborative. By letting people you trust around you do some of the work, it becomes much easier for users to take the plunge and step into the stream.
So start classifying y’all. I want to be able to finally deal with all my feeds!
If you’re in New York today, and love the combination of art, interaction design and technology, you’d be foolish not to visit the ITP Spring Show (5-9pm @ 4th floor, 721 b/way). The calibre of projects in this show was simply spectacular – powerful concepts and really great designs. I am so glad I made it down to New York for this. Came back excited, inspired, and really wanting to make and build things! Browse below for a list of my favorites (see my flickr feed for more):
Tom Gerhardt’s Mud Tub (http://dirtycomputing.com/) – an experimental organic interface that allows people to control a computer while playing in the mud.
