dConstruct 2008 highlights

September 8, 2008 | Post a comment | Tweet This

dConstruct 2008: Designing the Social Web On Friday I attended dConstruct in Brighton which is a great conference looking at designing the social web.  For the keynote speech Steven Johnson from Outside.In spoke on the Urban Web.  He recalled a story of a cholera outbreaks in London’s Soho in the 1850’s, which were found to be centered around one particular pump on Broad Street by investigator John Snow and local reverend Henry Whitehead.  Whitehead spent time networking with locals and knew the majority of people in the area, he was able to collect first-hand information as to what pumps households were using in a time when information wasn’t readily available positioning the reverend as the social hub.  He then went on to talk about Radar, a tool that monitors conversations around your local area.  The demonstration was quite impressive so I would advise going to have a look.

Next up was Aleks Krotoski talking about similarities between the gaming industry and the web design industry.  She described types of systems that shape the industry like controlled systems that games designers use to keep the interest of the player i.e. give more as people play more, different levels, unlocking clues etc.

Joshua Porter spoke next focusing on leveraging cognitive bias in social design.  His talk was absolutely fascinating describing how now, designers need to add social psychology tools to their skill set in order to create stickiness.  He described the bandwagon effect whereby users tend to follow others when little information is given to understand a problem.  He also focused on ownership bias, where people will tend to place a higher value of things if they feel a sense of ownership first.  For example, when you visit a website and it allows you to create something from when you first land, you are much more likely to register with that site because you have already invested time.  He gave examples of Geni and Fresh Books both as companies who are using social psychology techniques well within their homepages.

Daniel Burka, Creative Director at Digg and co-founder of Pownce talked about designing for interaction.  He talked about encouraging positive participation by encouraging users to sign up for a site as they encourage trust within a service.   He referenced the site Get Satisfaction who ask their users “How do they feel?” through the use of faces users can use to rate their postings.  He also made the point that when building a site, try to avoid negative competition which is something they found originally with Digg when the same people would always appear to be the top diggers by digging existing content.  He also made the great point that sites have to allow for flexible participation to enable the site to adapt to different data as it develops.

Tantek Celik then spoke about social network portability and also published his presentation here so you can read it first hand.

The highly entertaining Matt Jones and Matt Biddulph then spoke on designing for the coral reef (yes you read that right).  They described Dopplr as a social physics engine, a piece of software that underlines the physics of the world in terms of how things behave.

Lastly Jeremy Keith talked about the systems of the world.  This talk was absolutely fascinating and the podcast will be available soon so I would advise you to go and listen to it as there was far too much information within it to write.

Posted by Jamie Coomber | Filed Under Blog, Events, Social network  | Post a comment | Tweet This

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