Principles of Social Interaction Design: An Essay
Adrian Chan, social media expert and social interaction theorist at Gravity7, has written a long essay to collect his thoughts on social interaction design.
“Imperfect and unfinished as any project on contemporary products will be, my Principles of Social Interaction Design is now available for free download. This project has taken a couple of years, and in places bears the marks of a theory worked out over time. Some of my core concepts appeared in my blog posts first. These include the idea of frames — for both conceptualizing interactions, as well as for design thinking. Concepts of mediation, of symbolic tokens, of realtime streams may also be familiar from topics I have blogged about over the years. I have developed these into simple logics.
Now, as always, I believe that mediation is real — mediated interactions should not be understood by their simple reference to face to face situations. Mediation makes a real and measurable difference. And this difference is experienced and produced as a mental engagement, by means of which users fabricate, imagine, project, internalize, and much more, their interpretations of others and of social worlds in general.
As always, I believe that any designer of social tools should appreciate the multi-faceted manner in which these experiences become motives; orientations; activities; and ultimately, social practices. The user experience is, in social interaction design, both more necessary, and farther from reach.
Many sources were drawn upon for this project: from contemporary designers/thinkers/bloggers to canonical sociological, psychological, and linguistic frameworks. My effort to pull together theoretical and conceptual architecture from outside the design world, in order to accommodate the needs of both mediated user experiences and emergent social practices, is unorthodox. Hence I am calling this an essay. I am excited to see it develop over time.”
(via Johnny Holland)
