There is a lot of talk these days regarding social media business models. Let me propose one that's truly social — give content away freely. That is to say, share what you've learned from others with others who have a need to learn it, and do so without a financial transaction being involved.

To mark the 40th anniversary of the Internet, DARPA has announced the DARPA Network Challenge, a competition that will explore the role the Internet and social networking plays in the timely communication, wide area team-building and urgent mobilization required to solve broad scope, time-critical problems.

METADESIGN -Humberto Maturana. Human beings versus machines, or machines as instruments of human designs?

the mortadella rug. Perfect christmas gift.

great stuff

This animated film is about "who I am and what I want". It's NOT about who YOU are and what YOU want. You always think everything I make is about you but it's not. It's all about me… A bitterly u…

shrigley film

Make It So explores how science fiction and interface design relate to each other. The authors have developed a model that traces lines of influence between the two, and use this as a scaffold to investigate how the depiction of technologies evolve over time, how fictional interfaces influence those in the real world, and what lessons interface designers can learn through this process. This investigation of science fiction television shows and movies has yielded practical lessons that apply to online, social, mobile, and other media interfaces.

Design thinking, as a concept, has been slowly evolving and coalescing over the past decade. One popular definition is that design thinking means thinking as a designer would, which is about as circular as a definition can be.

Service design is a new discipline which focuses on understanding what customers want, then designing services which meet their needs. Sound familiar? Web designers have focused on user-centred design for years to create websites and applications that are user friendly.

Why usability evaluation is unreliable. Usability evaluations are good for a lot of things, but determining what a teams priorities should be is not one of them. Fortunately, there is an explanation for these counterintuitive outcomes that can help us choose a more appropriate evaluation course.

The Designing Social Interfaces patterns wiki is a companion site to the book that Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone are currently writing for O'Reilly Media.

We decided to share the patterns as we write the patterns and the book to get community feedback. We think that hearing a variety of opinions about these topics will make the material stronger and more representative of what's happening in social interfaces. As we complete sections of the book, we will be adding the patterns.

Principles, Patterns, and Practices for Improving the User Experience by Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone
This book presents a family of social web design principles and interaction patterns that we have observed and codified, thus capturing user-experience best practices and emerging social web customs for web 2.0 practitioners.

The digital world evolves continually, but we need to manage this by making sure we dont leave the people who use our applications and websites in the dust. This article explore creating a timeless user experience.

Does added security make things more difficult to use? Will people always resent the extra steps? The answer to both questions is the same: not necessarily. Consider the physical world of doors and locks. Locks on houses, cars, and private records get in the way of easy access, but we tolerate them because they seem necessary and the amount of effort they demand usually seems reasonable.

What do we mean by authenticity, and why is it so important to us now? Calling something authentic may connote original, traditional, indigenous, old, rare, the real thing, or in some crucial way a better example of its category. We use the term today as a messy amalgam of its twin roots: the art historians validation of an object and the philosophers valuing of the true self. While the concept of authenticity is employed in vague and subjective ways, we want to believe that an items authenticity is an absolutely determinable quality, an expectation that (as youll see) is not wholly realistic.

Abstract. Normans start with three contradictory views: First, that a science of design is already here; Second, that a science of design is possible, but not yet here; Third, that a science of design is neither possible nor appropriate. How can all three views be true? Because each speaks to a different aspect of the complex set of activities we lump together as design.

Co-creation is not just the next new thing in marketing. It is an alternative way of seeing and being in the world. Existing and thriving in the emerging co-creative landscapes will require the creation and application of new tools, methods and methodologies for connecting, innovating, making, telling and sharing

There is a lot of hype surrounding the real-time web, and much of the feeding frenzy reminds me of the RSS space four years ago though there is a lot of potential, there is also a lot of noise. How do you navigate through it all and which developments should you be paying attention to?