Archive for the 'Research' Category

Google hits the streets

Here are a couple of adjacent images from Google’s new ‘Street View’ in GoogleMaps.

Light at the End of the Tunnel

Light at the End of the Tunnel

As of this writing, you can walk the streets of New York City, San Francisco, Palo Alto, Las Vegas, Denver and Miami–maybe more. The automated stitching of panoramas from different days and times makes for some high-tech surrealist photography. Continuing the twisted translation of reality into the Googleverse…. Just wait until these are fed by realtime surveillance/web cameras and the most-recent geotagged Flickr photos.

The Machine is Us/ing Us

From Professor Mike Wesch at Kansas State University: a four-and-a-half minute video that brilliantly and succinctly summarizes the evolution of the Web to date and points the direction for its further growth.

The Machine is Us/ing Us

To echo Roy Pea, who sent me the link, this is perhaps the best example of using a YouTube video to educate that I’ve ever seen. The video is a work-in-progress and you can give your feedback directly to the creators at their blog.

Information architecture = social architecture

Designing an online community is a far more delicate affair than most realize.

When an architect designs a physical community space, she considers how the architecture will shape social interactions. A long hallway of offices creates an utterly different dynamic than desks with arranged in an open space. One might foster individuality, privacy, propriety; the other: collaboration, distraction, communalism.

Still, physical spaces can be flexibly repurposed and worked around if the inhabitants desire a social dynamic not instantly afforded by the space. Office doors can be left open to invite easier interaction. Partitions can be raised between adjacent desks to limit distraction and increase privacy.

That’s physical architecture. The information architectures of online communities are far more deterministic and far less flexible. They literally define the social architecture by pre-specifying in immutable computer code what information you have access to, who you can talk to, where you can go. In the online world, information architecture = social architecture.

In one sense, I’m echoing Marshall McLuhan: the form and constraints of a medium shape the thoughts and behaviors of those who use them. Every user interface and information architecture is a different medium that has a fundamental influence on its users’ thoughts.

This is true at a gross scale: how is the social architecture of Flickr different from that of Shutterfly? For one, Flickr invites the world into the community to share photos with each other. Shutterfly only lets its users share with specific friends and family members. The first is a commons. The second is the suburbs.

It’s also true at the level of the finest details, which bears on an online community design project I’m engaged in now with Howard Rheingold and a group of professional and student journalists. Our goal is to design the next-generation platform for digital journalism. As an example of how the finest of details can profoundly alter the social architecture of a community: do we show the photograph of a news story’s author in their by-line? Doing so would create a more personal connection to the writer. It would also invite reader bias based on race, gender or good looks. It’s a small detail with large implications.

I think this is an issue which can and should influence our design process. If we build a platform piecemeal, by sticking together “features” which, in isolation, seem useful, we’re not aware of the larger social architecture being created. The features may be contradictory in the social dynamics they engender.

Better would be to start at the broadest level — not the details — by designing the social architecture we’d like to create and find the pieces that will work harmoniously to manifest it.