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.

2006 is closing down. It sure has been exciting, yet at times a pretty bumpy ride. On a personal note, I successfully defended my Ph.D. in 2006. Got hold of the Doc title, Oh Yeahh. Finishing really felt nice, although it was a quite exhausting and somehow nerve wrecking exercise. Ending 3 intense years (and some) of work was to me very strange. I have also started on my new job, also very challenging in the best possible way, and great new colleagues to match it. Great, love it.

2007 looks to be just as exciting, however I hope a little less stressful. I’ll to continue developing the User Centred Design domain on my job, and already I looking forward to work on some interesting projects in the first months. Also I’m very excited to return to the ITU as an external lecturer. Together with Kasper “floc” Kofod , I’ll be teaching the course “Social Software design and implementation” in the spring. The course still needs a lot of framing, as it is the first time it will run, but we’ll be focusing on both theoretical perspective and try to design for social interaction.

I think it is save to say that 2006 was the year where “the new” social, democratic, user involved, driven and generated… what else… internet finally got massive traction, for better (there are a lot of new things going around) and worse (the 2.0 buzz is thickning considerably) ending in Time Magazine announcing that “you” (read: we) are the person of the year in 2006 – congrats by the way! Next year we will surely see how strong this “you, me, we” trend is, and we will start to see some of the consequences of and within the web 2.0 endeavour (it’ll need to prove that it is worthy of the attention). One major challenge, I think, will come to traditional media and corporate communication. Traditional ways of communicating, to innovate, to work etc. will become “stimulated” by the possibilities and challenges of the massive emergence of social software and personal media. A lot of this also goes into some of the interesting projects I’m involved in at work – so I’ll probably have some more insights throughout 2007. And I’m really looking forward to get to dwell into the area of “social software” together with hopefully a talented and a motivated bunch of students.

I’ll try to think more out loud in the line of this in the coming year. I promise.
Also, if anyone has some suggestion for or know of a list of mandatory or formative literature and/or central posts, case studies etc. on the whole social software web 2.0 – Please throw it in a comment or two!

Happy New Year all!

Image Credit Andy Smith

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.

Wow, tangible interfaces has surely come along way, just check out this multi touch "Minority Report" like demo and what seems to be navigation of Google Earth, and a super-funky DJ like interface.

more on Multi-Touch Interaction Research

Oh, and if you believe that graffiti can’t be deligthfully poetic then watch this.

Technologies form our world, we live and work with them, for better or worse. They are partakers in the shaping of our world and indeed we often shape technology to fit our everyday life practices. But can we say that technology is “natural” to us that we always get what we need. No never, technology is obviously always produced, encoded if you will, by companies or the individuals that design and deliver what “people want”. The seemingly logic of late capitalism, the market responds to technological innovations by consumption – adopting and renegotiating a technology or by rejecting it, by not buying into it.

Being a critical observer and reader of technology we often have to go lengths to find meaning in this field, as both users and producers of technology are “makers” technology. Users make technology what is it by taking it into use, and producers are making technology be constantly renegotiating their product with the users. Ideally. But often producers will somehow enforce a certain world view through their products “boxing in” the user, to certain mindset of how the technology should be used, or to ensure that the technology is not mis-used beyond the intentions. The “computer” is the clearest and still current battleground for this. In many cases the user do not own the technology after purchasing it, but are often prompted with a number of licensing and digital rights management agreements tying the user to the technology rather than the other way around – and this seems to spread beyond the computer.

Microsoft Live platform
Originally uploaded by niallkennedy.

It is not often we get to look right into the “world view” of the most dominant producers of technology. But recently Microsoft presented their portfolio for the future technology on their Microsoft “Live” platform. As the picture here suggests, Bill Gates and Co. have a very particular view on how dominant there position is and will be. With the three domains Microsoft seem to own it all.
Most significantly is the greyish cloud in the left corner, where zeros and one digits drip down on other devices. An antiquated iMac, mobile phones, blackberry that only partly runs Microsofts software resides here, behind the dotted red line that divides the Microsoft world, from the rest. I shall say no more, but let you judge for yourself.

UPDATE: Obviously Gates overpowered point is well worth comparing to Steve Jobs (Apples Ãœbercheif) zen like presentation style. Naturally that was not something the guys over at Prensenstation Zen would let go pass their nose to explore:
http://presentationzen.blogs.com/presentationzen/2005/11/the_zen_estheti.html
and here:
http://presentationzen.blogs.com/presentationzen/2005/11/it_was_one_of_t.html

Once again judge for yourself!