'Design dissolves in behaviour'
I'm getting the picture clearer in my head …
Good design means not leaving traces of the designer and not overworking the design. If you overdo the design, it will touch the beholder's consciousness.
I think that when people and things are within the boundaries of consciousness they are at their farthest from heaven.
Fabio Sergio (2002):
I've always had a desire to make the area where people, design and technology meet my playground, but I think I fell in love with the idea of a connected culture in 1996. What somewhat brought it all together, and pointed me in the direction I am still following professionally today, was one of Fritjof Capra's books, "The Web of Life".
Coming from a slightly more philosophical and ecological angle Capra created a coherent scenario, coupling Chaos and Complexity Theory-derived concepts with intuitions driven by the emerging internet phenomenon. He envisioned that the western world and its underlying cultural matrix were shifting towards a new network model. Even though he was not the only one to do so, just like others he was right. Needless to say I've been interested in understanding where that model would take us and our culture ever since.
Peter Morville (2002):
How do knowledge workers learn? How do they decide what to learn next? What motivates them to share? These questions are central to the challenges of knowledge management, and yet most corporate portals and online communities are designed in ignorance of their answers. The truth lies within the social fabric that connects people to people and people to content. Relationships, trust and serendipity play key roles. …
We use people to find content. We use content to find people. Success in the former requires we know what other people know and who other people know. Success in the latter demands good search, navigation and content management systems. We might also think of the documents themselves as "human surrogates," representing the knowledge and interests of authors. And of course, we humans also serve as surrogates for one another. …
We humans are very social animals. It's about time more of us started recognizing this in the systems we design.
Matt Jones (2003):
At the moment, it seems to me, the discussion of social software is massively technocentric, seat'n'screen-centric, expert-user-centric; possibly as an innocent result of those in its vanguard. For a real great leap forward IMHO, we need to cross the streams of social software and smartmobs with adaptive design. Expand and map the discussion from:
software-that's-better-cos-there's-people-there
to
places-that-are better-for-people-cos-there's-software-there;
and in both cases have the emphasis on people.
Caterina Fake (of Flickr; December, 2004):
I posted this from 43 Things, specifically the Crawl the Cafes of San Francisco "thing". 43 Things is social software in which you create a community of like-minded people who share your goals and aspirations, and in the case of this "thing", I was noting that I'd already "crawled the cafes of San Francisco" and was deeming it "worth doing". 43 Things is being built by a bunch of smart people, formerly of Amazon, who formed the Robot Co-op in Seattle. These guys came up to visit us a couple months ago, there being a lot of overlapping interests between our two companies, and they really get social software. Last night Stewart told me something that Matt Jones said when asked to define social software. "Social software", Matt said, "is something that gets better the more people are using it." This is a lot harder to achieve than it looks. First, it's really hard to build something that people will not only visit, but return to again and again. And then, once they're there, you find that most web sites get significantly worse the more people that are on it -- think Usenet or Yahoo chat rooms. And then, to look at social software that works, think of Amazon or Craig's List. One thing that both the 43 Things and Flickr teams have done is create a gregarious piece of software: it doesn't wall itself in, but interacts with other software, as evidenced by my ability to post on 43 Things and this blog at the same time, and likewise with photographs on Flickr.
And what, indeed, is del.icio.us without the Inbox? Matt Jones (December, 2004):
… a personal linkdump and lightweight way to spool things to the web …
Heaven is other people, and great social software temporarily without them is purgatory.
