Designing for the anti social

Miles Rochford miles.rochford@gmail.com
IA since 2002, designing for the last 10 years working for Nokia.

Begins with the Panopticon model of prison. We are in the process of creating a social panopticon. We are allowing others to view us and we don't know when they are watching us or what they will do with it.

Ubiquity
Everywhere for everyone. We are always on-line. Consumption spreads faster today.

Eternity
Technology doesn't last forever.
By default, digital content is cheap to acquire, easy to keep and able to be rediscovered.
It now has distributed persistence.

"Remembering everything is strangely similar to forgetting everything."

Serendipity
Serendipity is a fairy-tale, it is magic.
You don't find it, it finds you.
Ambient Serendipity is discovering happy social coincidences.
Mediated serendipity is an attempt to create social luck, to generate joyful coincidences.
Bottom line: this is the environment we are building these social environments.

This presentation
Why do we share ourselves?
What implications does this have for design?
What can IAs do to create better social systems?
Facebook feed story - in the middle of a presentation, he needed to demo Facebook, and had not been on the site for a few days, so had no idea what would be in the feed. This led to this presentation.

Sharing the self

"We find reasons to do things, and reasons to do things together."

Why be social?
To live longer. Or at least long enough to pass on your genes.
Why share online?

Looking at - social surveillance
Looking for - growing the social graph
Keeping up - active or passive belonging

Notes from CHI 2008 paper

Public vs Private space
Privacy used to be physical. Social delay controlled the speed of information distribution.
Sharing was about entering a physical space.
Venn diagram of private / public and semi-public semi-private

Consequences
Sharing information had consequences - it always has had, it always will have.
Social networks make it easier to share information and harder to control the distribution of information.
The great preponderance of people who are designing social functionality are not aware that is what they are doing.

Enter the IA
Making connections is what we do.
We can encourage positive outcomes through persuasive design.
Designing for the [anti-]social.
Story of uploading a photo to flickr of having a beer, boss sees it on the flickr stream, comments on it. Gets back to them via cell phone.

Unintended consequences
Can be positive or negative.
Surfacing possible consequences can help people think about negative effects.
Designers need to be more outcome-aware.
Gaming a system is a way of forcing an unintended consequence.
Ambient intimacy now seen as ambient exposure.

Harmlessness
Default to harmlessness
Provide ways of reducing the risk and extent of harm, through time delays and sensible defaults.
Different people have different ways of assessing risk and judging harmfulness.
Ensure all actors in a system are harmless.
Balance of community risk, versus individual risk.

Reciprocity
One of the most powerful human behaviours.
Lurking and stalking are often undesirable, but not everyone is a contributor.
"Bartersharing" as a form of social contract mutual sharing behavior to manage privacy.
Karma is a very good thing.

Deniability
Everyone lies. Around 25% of the time.
We all know that people lie, we don't need to be told.
'Plausible deniability' lest us create alternative explanations - often involving time and location.

Granularity
Use different ways of looking at the same information to preserve privacy and usefulness.
Blurring zooming and anonymizing can all provide benefits for privacy.

Accountability
Empower users to be accountable for their data.
Let users own their data.
Make their actions visible.
Example of flickr and photos, should use the highest level of privacy of the people in the photo, not just the photo taker.
23andme - genetics personal social network.

Emergence
Allow people to apply their own meaning.
Support emergent behaviour through flexible design, open APIs and social platforms

People can be evil.
We need evil personas to establish goals and design system to keep them from achieving their goals.

Difference
We are all individuals.
People are different, in diverse ways.
Supporting difference requires empathy.
Language is loaded with semantic meaning, especially for relationships and emotions.
We encode prejudice into our systems, without even thinking.

Think globally
Showed that the average avatar in second life consumes more power than the average person in Brazil.

Summary
Think about the consequences.
Embrace the social.
Practice empathy.
Be human.

Slides will be at http://slideshare.net/rochford
miles.rochford@gmail.com

Podcast will be up at Boxes and Arrows in the fairly near future.