My great friend, neighbor and brilliant ex-co-phd-colleague/trusted-conference-travel-companion Mads Bødker is defending his phd thesis at the IT-University, Auditorium 1 on Thursday, November 1. at 10.00 AM.
If you generally interested in the new breed of HCI research and issues relating to Risk and Reflective design you should stop by on Thursday for the talk.

“Trust Within Technology: Risk, Existential Trust, and Reflective Designs in Human Computer Interaction”

check out the abstract here:
http://www1.itu.dk/graphics/ITU-library/Internet/Forskning/Phd/PhD_Defences/2007/abstract_mads_b%F8dker.pdf
or go get the full monty here (worth a read, trust me):
http://www1.itu.dk/graphics/ITU-library/Internet/Forskning/Phd/PhD_Defences/2007/Thesis_Mads_Boedker.pdf
The assessment committee is:
John McCarthy, University of Cork, Ireland (who also was in my committee, a very nice fella!)
Hildur Kalman, University of Umeå, Sweden
Kjeld Schmidt, IT-University of Copenhagen, Denmark

The defence will take approximately 3-4 hours followed by the traditional ITU-treat snacks and vino!

Haven’t been all the way through the text, but I do find Adrian Chans attempt to write up A Social Interaction Design (SxD) Guide on Social Media, Social Practices, Social Content, very interesting. Read it here..

We can no longer make sense of social software and related applications from a user-centric model�at least not the model that has come out of cognitive science. That model has insisted on a rational user, a goal-oriented user interested in achieving his or her objectives. An application would either satisfy or confound the user, and designers could set about improving UX and UI until users were all happy.

But social technologies are different:

• We often end up engaging in something that wasn’t on our minds when we started.

• Transactions are not discrete, they’re ongoing and episodic.

• More often than not we’re communicating with others, and communication clearly exceeds rational actor models of analysis (it’s psychological, it’s meaning-based, it involves self, other, performance, and so on).

• Interaction with others is mediated and so therefore we need new practices and new etiquettes, or codes of conduct and behavior (even when these are tacit, as most of them are).

• These technologies seem to have a relationship of observation and supplementation to real cultural phenomena and practices. Online dating does not replace dating. Online discussions do not replace real conversation. And the topics found in many of these services relate to real world news as if they are commentary on it.

• These tools enable direct interaction with others but often in a kind of public context.

• The activity on these applications is captured and then used by them, making social media dynamic (updated as they’re used): in short, a production medium that records as it produces.

• Much of the social dynamic here, because it’s rooted in social action, involves attention: paying attention, sharing attention, getting attention. Attention is the scarcity of these economies, not goods and materials.

• Where user interaction with non-communicating and non-social media is discrete, social interaction is ongoing. User actions don’t end with a function or operation’s conclusion; they solicit response from others. It is other users that pick up and continue a user’s action (that action being a communicative one: blog posting, video posting, commenting, etc.)

• These media are distribution media as well as content media, and their distribution is handled in part by web protocols, in part by communication (email, sharing, etc.), making them quick to create or to lose audiences.

• Any medium of experience structures experience according to its intervention in reality. Some part of our interaction is with the medium itself. For this reason we can’t ignore such simple things as pictures, text, links, etc., anymore than architects would ignore differences between surface materials like concrete, stone, glass, and wood. (Not to mention 50’s era carpeting.)

• It’s possible that social media operate in a kind of tolerable and sustained failure mode, by which I mean that people often get engaged because they can’t tell what’s happened to their participation (dates don’t happen; jobs aren’t obtained; friends don’t communicate; blogs aren’t commented on). But the possibility of missing an opportunity, combined with the fact that there’s no way to know what’s going on online besides going online to check, creates traffic in and of itself!

I could make more distinctions here but the point should be clear now: architecture, design, and implementation of these things puts them in a category of their own, an admixture of social and technical practices best approached from a socio-technical orientation.

(via Klastrup)

Jeg har lige lynskrevet et blurp til vores kommende kursus pÃ¥ IT Universitetet “Social Software – Design og implementering”
Men er det for tacky? Ville du deltage? Comments?

MySpace.com, Flickr.com, Del.icio.us, Plazes.com, Last.fm, digg.com, Wikipedia.org, Youtube.com, Facebook.com, Second life, Beta, blogging, tagging, metadata, moblogging, AJAX, RSS, podcasting, mashups, folksonomier etc. etc. I løbet af de seneste Ã¥r har vi pÃ¥ internettet set en udvikling set en relativ stor vækst af “succesfulde” brugerdrevne og sociale applikationer – populært (og problematisk) kaldet web 2.0 – mere overordnet, sammen med udbredelsen af personlige mobile medie teknologier, det vi kan kalde fremkomsten af “social software”.

Disse sociale teknologier er kendetegnet ved ikke kun at kunne bruges til at “mediere” sociale aktiviter. Men at brugerne ogsÃ¥, ofte for en mindre part, er deltagere og medskabere af indhold, og at teknologien sÃ¥ledes ofte basere udvikling pÃ¥ brugernes udvikling. Det interessante ved social software er den mÃ¥de teknologien potentielt set kan igangsætte og fastholde (bÃ¥de store og smÃ¥) sociale netværk i kollaborative fællesskab, og at dette bliver en helt central “motor” for den mÃ¥de informationer og data udvælges, deles og forædles.

Udgangspunktet i virksomme sociale netværk, opstÃ¥r der ogsÃ¥ muligheder for at skabe “anderledes” kontekstuelle og situationsbestemte information og handlinger. Social software kan sÃ¥ledes ses som en genindlejring af hverdagslivet i forhold til teknologien. Social sofware kan altsÃ¥ ses som teknologier der kan hjælpe til produktionen af en “mere” meningsfuld kontekst hos os, der hvor vi er. Denne kontekstuelle add on bruges i mange centrale social software applikatione til at producere viden og dele oplevelser sammen med andre, og til at “handle” uden om traditionelle heirakiske forretnings- og magtstrukturer.

Modsat den tidligere dominerende idé om cyberspace som et kropsligt og tidsligt forsvindingspunkt – handler social software om os lige her – og ikke det os i det virtuelle, med fremkomsten af det sociale som central infrastruktur, har vi fÃ¥et en række nye udfordringer og muligheder som digital designere. Vi skal skabe meningsfulde tjenester og opleveser, som bÃ¥de er brugbare og meningsfulde for den enkelte og de mange.

PÃ¥ kurset vil vi forsøge at forstÃ¥ og analysere en række fænomer omkring social software nærmere. Hvad er det særlige ved socialt software, f.eks. fra andre typer af software? Hvordan og hvorfor er det sociale opstÃ¥et? Hvordan kan man design social software? Kurset præsenterer cases, teorier og analyser og forsøge at komme nærmere de fænomener der har skabt og i øjeblikket præger omrÃ¥det “social software”. Vi vil, ved at forholde os kritisk, afprøvende og undersøgende til fænomenet, forsøge at konceptualisere løsninger til a. Kurset vil blive tilrettelagt med et praktisk sigte og de studerende skal arbejde med udvikling af koncepter til løsninger med udgangspunkt i ideer og teorier om social software.

This is probably nothing in the large context of things going around at the moment. To me however, this is pretty solid news. I’m happy to declare that my PhD thesis, has been approved by the assesment commitee meaning that I’m due to defend the bloody thing on the 29th of September, at the IT University of copenhagen, starting 14.00. M i Aud. 4 4. floor. You are hereby invited.

Holy smoke this one got under my radar. As of august 29, 2006 Dr. Eric Schmidt, chief executive officer of Google, was elected to Apple’s board of directors. This is hugh. Not only does two of the largest, and at this time must cutting edge companies mix blood – in itself rather signifcant. And it is rare that two possible contennders are greating each other, simply because they adore each other.

But more importantly, at least symbolically, the two companies joins forces to battle Microsoft, no doubt. Apple has no specific strategic gain in this, as much as they like to see their own product taking bite after bite of the pc market. They still has a pretty good alliance with the Microsoft, especially with the iPod and iTunes as a Trojan Horse.
Google however has been trying to position themself hard against Microsoft’s online dominance, for instance trying to lure of users of from the MSN platform – by simply offering more for less, gmail, chat, calender, video, maps etc. to name a few examples.

Google has been launching one online app after the other “as proofs of concept”, trying to show that they could perhaps make a plausable contender to the holy Office package – for free. Calling Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to go megahard, pointing at the searchengine from Mountian View the no. 1. enemy of the Microsoft company, personated in Eric Schmidt, who Ballmer outbattered when he was cheif of technology at Sun.

Ballmer then pejoratively berated Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Lucovsky recalled.
“I’m going to f—ing bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again,” the declaration quotes Ballmer. “I’m going to f—ing kill Google.”

While there is not yet any formal aggrement on specific outcome of the Google and Apple top merge. It seems likely Eric is teaming up to battle with side by side with the other cool guys in the yard (that’s Steve Jobs). But still the puzzle remainsm, what could be the outcome of this? How significant will it be. Perhaps one scenario is a Google driven office package (developed on top of google spreadsheets and wordprocesser) native on Apple computers? To strees Microsoft away from their dominant position sustained by the Office package? don’t know – however the battle has begun.

As faithfull readers of this blog will notice, after my last design kind of deconstructed itself, I have made yet another redesign of the blog. Yes I know! Seems like all I do around here is arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic…. This time I went for at little more clean and modern look and feel. Adding also some Ajax functionality here and there, see for instance the shelf+ (in the menu). Read the rest of this entry »