Posts Tagged ‘interface design’

[Session Proposal] Social Media for the Attention Age: The Peace Media Clearinghouse

Friday, December 4th, 2009

If the media production barriers of the one-to-many model of traditional media are disintegrating with the availability of the cheap, convenient, and dispersed many-to-many network of social media, then these technologies also provide new challenges to us as individuals and organizations.

  1. As media producers we are now empowered to produce social media capable of worldwide distribution, how do we broadcast a coherent message through the background noise and engage the appropriate audience in dialogue.
  2. But since we are also consumers of social media, and consumption possibilities remain stubbornly fixed (there are only so many hours in a day), how do we prevent this information abundance from becoming an information overload?  How do we access the information that is relevant, accurate, and timely to what we are trying to achieve?

One possible solution could be to provide a centralized hub for information recommended by our peers (and thus most likely to be personalized and relevant), moderated by authorities in the field for accuracy, and updated continually by a network of facilitators.

The Center of Innovation for Media, Conflict, and Peacebuilding at the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP) is attempting to do just that with the Peace Media Clearinghouse.  This online resource provides a central site where educators, students, organizations, and the community of practitioners working in the conflict management field can access multimedia materials that support conflict analysis and prevention, conflict resolution, and post-conflict reconstruction and reconciliation.

Following a brief demonstration of this online resource, we’ll open up the discussion to explore how other individuals and organizations have addressed these same challenges.

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Jumping Through the Looking Glass [session proposal]

Tuesday, November 24th, 2009

I would like to propose a session, much like Kel’s and Ned’s that interrogates the process of creating discursive social worlds through social media (as well as the possibility of transforming old media into social media. What qualifies as social media by the way?). I’m interested in, both practically and theoretically, interrogating the ways social media can be used in cultural institutions in such a way that transforms the computer from a looking glass into a window; the ways it can facilitate the creation of a discursive space between privileged communities and those who are under-represented/underserved, as well as communities that are separated geographically.

In my own recent anthropological research, I’ve been investigating media ecologies and the way media shapes the way we experience our world. I’m particularly interested in the intersection of sounds and screens, and so what I intend to put on the table are interesting ways in which sounds and screens can be integrated into exhibits to foster communication and interaction, as opposed to allowing technology to re-enforce the “cult of the individual” (to steal a term from Durkheim). I am intrigued by PodCast tours, the new iPod tour applications, and twittr.

Like I said, I would really like this session to interrogate technology, not just glorify it, through both theoretical and practical lenses.

See you all soon!

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[Session Proposal] Call to Action: The Role of Interaction Design in Social Action

Wednesday, November 4th, 2009

Call to action is a phrase we use in interaction design to mean “the thing users need to click on to take the next step”. In an interactive system like a web site, the call to action on a page is usually typically indicative of the page’s purpose. For commerce-enabled sites, the calls to action are straightforward: Add to cart, Check out, Confirm order, etc.

Interaction designers know that there are certain design principles we must apply in order to make the call to action clear. It must be prominent so users know what to click on. It must set expectations so users can click with confidence. Poorly positioned, designed or labeled, a page’s call to action can give users pause, preventing them from completing a task.

I’d love to explore this concept related to *social* action. What must design do to facilitate and precipitate “good”? Can technologies designed to educate help people take the next step, to do something with that education?

As technologies become more pervasive, where we have identities on various social networking sites and participate in various online communities, the need for using these platforms for good increases. The design of these platforms must support behaviors for conscience. Does the design of Facebook, for example, make it easy to promote awareness and “do good”? To put it another way, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and other social sites give us a framework for interacting with others. We need to learn to use that framework to support our behaviors of conscience, but we should also identify its shortcomings. What’s missing from those sites?

During this session, I’d like to highlight some well-established design principles, provide brief critiques of existing social media platforms, and invite participants to identify new requirements. What would our ideal platform look like?

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