I noticed again that I don’t know any person in the HCI community who doesn’t use one or more of the following email providers:

1. University email
2. gmail
3. Their own domain email
4. An organization email (like acm.org or other collective, it usually forwards to another account though)

It should be noted that some universities like IU are now turning to gmail or hotmail for student use at least.  Many people who have email at their own domain look to gmail/google apps to power their email.  I’m very hard pressed to name anyone that I’ve worked with closely that doesn’t use either university provided email and/or gmail.  Almost every person I’ve interacted with on twitter does the same.

Yet once you slip out of the technorati and the realm of students I hang with (though certainly not the student body at large) gmail is less common.  Strangely so many of the technorati are independents, or at least insist on using their own emails instead of a corporate account.  Whether this is because they’ve moved around enough that they know they don’t want to lose their email address when they change jobs, or they simply refuse to have corporate email systems foisted upon them I do not know.

Am I delusional and detecting patterns here that simply do not exist?  Perhaps they are not as widespread as I think, but there is a pattern there.

What does it mean? Well I think it may be an indication of those who care about technology and they care about how they look to others in terms of what technologies they use.  I think that often those who think that they are “in the know” as far as technology is concerned may also judge those who are not.  I know that I do sometimes.

Here’s an example: If I see a business that posts and @aol.com email addess I assume they have no idea what it means to work with technology and what they try and do with technology will be second rate.  I will try avoid that person and business if I can.

I, and I assume at least some others, are at least to some extent technofetishists and/or techno-utopians.  We love our technology, we think it will solve our problems and that one day things will be like Star Trek (the latest movie of which is coming out tomorrow, can’t wait).  So why does this matter at all?

For those who are working on design, and espeically designs that are supposed to innovate and/or create social change, this can be a dangerous thing.  We tend towards technical solutions, or emphasizing the technical in the design of systems.  “Technology will save us, it must, because what else will?” seems to be the thought there.  I must admit that this kind of thinking is part of the problem in my opinion.  This kind of thinking has the tendency to marginalize the human.  So if we are trying to practice human-centered design, should we always be looking for technology to solve a problem?  Perhaps it is the driving need to be able to scale something, make it duplicable, and homogenous/systematized that we so often look for in business and science.  If we are truly to practice something that is human-centered, something that is more than just reductionistic do we need to leave our technofetishism and utopianism at the door? Maybe, or at least we need to box it up and set it aside from time to time, or at least a lot more often.

Is this a dichotomy? No I don’t think so, but it is something to be aware of.

I got an email (and he blogged it too) from Erik Stolteman, the director of the HCI/Design Program here at IU,

I want to recommend you to look at this video from the TED conference by Pattie Maes, maybe some of you have seen this before, it is quite fun and interesting.
http://www.ted.com/talks/pattie_maes_demos_the_sixth_sense.html

When you have looked at it, you can read this highly critical review of the demonstration
http://www.andyrutledge.com/blind-leading-the-blind.php#fragment-4

The demonstration and the review together presents what in many ways can be seen as core issues of interaction design, for instance, what designs are good, what designs are needed, are there designs we should not strive for.

Look, read, and think…

My reaction is:

I find it interesting (actually I’d like to just say I wish that he would open it, but perhaps he doesn’t feel like he has the time to devote to such an endeavor) that Andy Rutledge doesn’t open his blog to comments, thereby giving him a place to critique others and not for others to be able to engage with him on that critique.

The critique that he makes seems to be rooted in the fact that he beleives that augmented reality is distracting from our own human senses and will lull us into relying on things outside of our control instead of our own senses and instincts.
This is a fairly sound argument as this is certainly how most users will end up using it.  The implicit assumption and judgement is that this is a bad thing.  While I absolutely agree that “no person is their word cloud” If one is used to interacting with people largely online, some people may actually feel more comfortable having some of those same affordances with them during face to face interaction.  I make no judgement on whether this is a good or a bad thing.

Where I do have an issue with this though is for the non-social uses of the technology.  It seems that the mantra of “bringing the answers to where the questions are” makes a fair amount of sense.  I absolutely agree with Andy when he says that you probably have already done your research on what brands to buy and if you haven’t then you probably don’t really care that much, but there are other issues to be considered.  So often our choices are based on old information, or simply habit.  What if new values have come into our lives?  Sustainability was already mentioned and it’s a good topic.  10 years ago as a working professional I had a very different set of priorities in terms of affordability as well as awareness of what goes into many of our products today.  I had only the vaguest sense of buying natural cleaning products  or environmentally friendly products, for example I avoided things that contained CFCs.  Today the constraints are different as are my sensibilities, and I may not have thought about those choices as I approach the mega aisle in my local giant-mart.  If it strikes me that perhaps I may want to rethink my choice there, then I have a hard time saying that would be a bad thing should I want to do so.

The bottom line is always the same though.  When a designer makes a choice they embed values.  So often these values are hidden, and not obvious.  On the other hand our designs, as soon as we let them out of our hands, are no longer ours and will be changed and co-opted by others, and in doing so they will tend to align with the values and interests of those who are doing so.  What I encourage all of us to do is to be thoughtful and intentional with our choices.

As for this particular case, I agree with Routledge for the most part, we need not get so wrapped up in techno-fetishism that we neglect the human and trust the five senses and incredible power of our own minds.

This is part of an ongoing series, see part 1

Twitter is a newish medium, and it is still growing and changing very rapidly.  I could go on and on about how in the last year alone twitter has grown by 10 times, how the simple convention of “@ replies” and hashtags (a word preceded with a #) were developed independently by users and now @ replies are part of the official twitter interface and program.  As such many, many surprising things are happening on twitter.  One of the twitter founders even gave a TED talk about it. So yes there is a lot happening there, but that doesn’t mean anything goes.

Just today I had someone follow me on twitter.  They were very good about customizing their twitter page, added a bio, a real name, even a location.  They didn’t choose to show their face, but rather an image they felt conveyed the image they were trying to project, that is OK, but still not what I wold recommend.  They even customized the background image of the page and the colors of the fonts etc.  It actually looks quite good.  They made a few mistakes though:

1. They followed over ONE THOUSAND people in a short period of time
2. They haven’t updated their status AT ALL.
3. They crammed too much in and used all caps.

Let’s run it down by the numbers.  You can’t possibly interact with that many people that quickly in any meaningful way.  IF you hoped to just drive a few hits to your website and you don’t really plan on participating on twitter you are essentially a spammer.  You are not welcome, go away, no one wants that. This is like inviting 1000 people you don’t know to a party, but it’s at a public park and all you have there is a sign telling people to go somewhere else. The party metaphor is a powerful one, I recommend reading this if you are interested.  In what twitter calls a “one line bio” they tried to add way too much information, and then half of it is in all capital letters.  This is akin to shouting, and most people think shouting is rude. So essentially if you are being genuine in your efforts and are not a spammer you’ve sent way too many people to no where, been rude to them, and add no value at all to their lives.

Next up we’ll talk about what to twitter.

Unlike what is claimed above twitter  isn’t exactly that, and there are lots of good reasons to join twitter, but more importantly how do you get started?  There have been some attempts by others that explain how to twitter, including some by twitter themselves.  You can certainly google it, and you’ll find some decent things, but a lot of that is about the why.

First go to twitter.com and sign up. It looks just like the image above, click get started–Join.  Your username will be important, so choose one you like, most people use some variation of their name or nickname, I recommend something like mine (houssian) or my good friend Kevin Makice (kmakice).  Once you have signed up, in order for anyone to take you seriously you need to add some information to your profile, I’ll talk more about why in a later part. To do this:

1. Click on settings (this is near your name/picture on your twitter home page)
2. Fill in a location, city and state is what most people use, I recommend this, or just the state.
3. Fill in a one line bio, something short and to the point.
4. Click save
5. Click on picture
6. click browse and select a picture of yourself from your computer (I recommend something that shows your face or if you’re shy, some image that is clear and works in a small format.
7. Click save
8. From your twitter homepage put in your first update, if you don’t know what to say, try a variation of: trying out twitter for the first time.  Or something funny like: I am a future twitter-holic, you may need to plan an intervention now.

Now you are credible to others, you have joined a community and by doing those things described you have shown you have a minimum level of fitting in.  I’ll write more about the theories behind why this is true, but for the moment trust me that all this is a vital part of it all.
So you joined, now add people you know on twitter (follow them).
To do that you can either go to their twitter page (twitter.com/username) and then click the follow button up top below their name and pic, or type into the update box “follow username” without the quotes of course.

Once you start following people you can visit your twitter page and see what they are saying and doing.  If something interesting is happening you can respond to it. You do that by starting your message with @username of the person you are responding to.  The web is a good way to start with twitter, but almost all twitter users download and use a program to access twitter.  There are lots of them, I personally would recommend twitterific to Mac users, and for PC users I would recommend thwirl.  A client program is easier to use unless you like going back to the twitter web page regularly.  The nice part about many programs is that new tweets (that’s what messages are called) appear and then fade away.

So now you need to find people you know already on twitter.  There are a number of tools to help you do that, the most effective of which is the email finder, you give up your login info for a webmail account and it searches for your contacts, or you can upload a contact list.  Alternately you can search for things that interest you at search.twitter.com.  I work in the intersection of several fields so I search for those terms and then add the people who are talking about those things (so I search for HCI usability user experience etc). Alternately there are people who twitter about hobbies and religioun and everything else in between, if you blog about something regularly, search for people already talking about those things.
Once you have started following people, you can click on their profile page and see who they are following, you may find even more people to follow that are interesting.

You can respond to something someone says or just send a public message to someone by starting your message with @username, so for me you would write @houssian why did you bother writing a how-to? I need help.
Wade in, see what’s happening, and try updating a few times over the next few days.

Now one of the reasons I’m writing this is my mom-in-law saw that Fox News had a twitter feed where you could ask questions.  To do that, you need to direct a question to them with one of the at replies I mentioned before.  So when they are on the air and say twitter us your questions, then type in @Foxnewsusername (I don’t know what it is and I don’t watch Fox) then your question.

I will continue this series with what to do after your first few days, how you can get twitter and Facebook to play nice, and some of the why of twitter, as well as some of the theories behind why I told you to do those things and why I think people use twitter.

EDIT March 13th: Chris Brogan has an interesting piece I just read. I’ll get there I think.

Here’s part 2.

So I’ve started musing about social media design lately.  I place social media design as a subset of communication design.  I’m making these terms up as I go, but I think it shold make a fair amount of sense.  Commnication design is the process by which you design your communication strategy & infrasrtucture.  Social Media obivously is much the same but focused on social media.  Social media if you wanting a definition is are technologies that connect people.  They usually involve a profile, and the ability to connect with people in some way, prototypical examples of the day are twitter, facebook, myspace, & linkedin.  You can design communications for an organization as well as an individual.

What I’m proposing is that just like any other design situation what you do should be intentional, and should serve the real human needs of those involved.  What I mean by intentional is that it is not haphazard or something that simply grew up over time.  I’m all for organic growth of systems, as long as there was some intentional starting point, and preiodic review of those systems to make sure they are still serving the needs of those using them.

So many organizations today are saying both internally and externally: we want to blog, we want to get out there and get into this whole social media thing.  I say, for the most part, that is probably a good thing, but you shouldn’t do it just because it sounds cool, you should do it to serve some purpose, whether that be to further the bottom line, open the lines of communication with your customers, enahnce your brand, or some combination of the three plus many of the other possibilities.  Blogging for blogging’s sake is silly and may be counter productive.

Here are my initial recommendations to organizations that want to get involved in social media. You need to:

1. Identify what you want to accomplish with social media
2. Identify people within your organization that already feel comfortable with social media
3. Get an understanding of what your stakeholders/clients would want via social media
4. Find some way to measure your efforts, i.e. we’ll be successful when:____
5. Make sure 1&4 align.

I’m going to write about this more, but this is a first shot.

My next step is to look at how traditional design process fit into this model.