The outline of the talk is roughly:

1. Overview of augmented reality
2. Social interaction perspective on current AR experiences
3. Definition of ‘social augmented experiences’
4. Common interaction design patterns for AR
5. Social ‘anti-patterns’ limiting design of augmented experiences
6. Design principles for social augmented experiences

(The audio quality is quite good, and the cameraman captured most of the slides nicely — so this is a recording worth watching.)

This year’s TWAB featured several talks on augmented reality, ubiquitous computing and related topics; you’ll find recordings of these on the Chi Nederland Vimeo channel: http://vimeo.com/chinederland

Many thanks to the organizers and volunteers for putting on such a well-run event!

TWAB2010: Joe Lamantia — Playing well with others: interaction design and social design for augmented reality from Chi Nederland on Vimeo.

For reference, here’s the session description from the official program:

Augmented reality blends the real world and the Internet in real time, making many new kinds of proximity, context, and location based experiences possible for individuals and groups. Despite these many possibilities, we know from history that the long term value and impact of augmented reality for most people will depend on how well these experiences integrate with ordinary social settings, and support everyday interactions. Yet the interaction patterns and behavior we see in current AR experiences seem almost ‘anti-social’ by design. This is an important gap that design must close in order to create successful AR offerings. In other words, much like children going to school for the first time, AR must to learn to ‘play well with others’ to be valuable and successful. This presentation reviews the interaction design patterns common to augmented reality, suggests tools to help understand and improve the ’social maturity’ of AR products and applications, and shares design principles for creating genuinely social augmented experiences that integrate well with human social settings and interactions.

Special points to those who spot the embedded April Fool’s joke…

You can download the podcast, check out the show notes, and subscribe to the full Radio Johnny feed here: http://johnnyholland.org/2010/03/08/radio-johnny-joe-lamantia-on-augmented-reality/

Hubris alert: I admit to having grandiose schemes to influence the evolution of an emerging medium, by consistently hectoring the world on the importance of tools for simple content creation…

Here’s an excerpt:

With the exotic, mixed realities that futurists and science-fiction writers have envisioned seemingly just around the corner, it is time to move beyond questions of technical feasibility to consider the value and impact of turning the realities of everyday social settings and experiences inside out. As with all new technologies as they move from the stage of technical probe to social probe, this AR transformation will happen case by case and context by context, involving many factors beyond the direct reach of UX design. However, as a result of the inherently social nature of augmented reality, we can be sure the value and impact of many augmented experiences depends in large part on how effectively they integrate the social dimensions of real-world settings, in real time.

The first four design principles are:

• Default to the Human
• Enhancement Not Replacement
• Build Real Bridges
• Stay Off the Critical Path

Of course, this is just a starting list, and they raise almost as many questions as they attempt to answer.

Some of those follow-up questions include: what other principles are there?

Are there ‘anti-principles’ to be aware of?

What’s the best way to make these principles part of designing augmented experiences?

Read the full description here, and then register here!

Bonus: All workshop attendees will receive a free copy of Social Mania — the social patterns design card game unveiled at IDEA09.

Last year’s rendition was positively invigorating, with participants from experience-based businesses like Zappos, and practitioners from leading firms like Adaptive Path.  But this one goes to eleven: we hope you’ll join us!

I’m part of a panel titled The Next Wave of AR: Exploring Social Augmented Experiences that’s addressing this question at the Where 2.0 conference in San Jose in late March / early April.  We’ve got a good group of speakers that includes Tish Shute (Ugotrade), whurley * (whurleyvision llc),Jeremy Hight (Mission College, CA), and Thomas Wrobel (Lost Again).  Our goal is to look ahead at how augmented reality will soon evolve to include — or be based on! — meaningful social interactions and dynamics at small and large group scales.

In the spirit of co-created social augmented experiences, we’re asking for audience contributions: in the form of simple scenarios that describe the future of social AR.  What will it feel like? Who will you interact with?  How will these experiences change everyday life?

Panel Summary (full description on the Where 2.0 site)

This panel will discuss shared augmented realities, considering some of the essential possibilities and challenges inherent in this new class of social augmented experiences. The format is presentation of a small set of scenarios (defined in advance, with audience input) describing likely future forms of shared augmented realities at differing scales of social engagement for discussion by a panel of leading practitioners in technology, experience design, networked urbanism, interface design, game design, and augmented reality.

Current augmented reality experiences put who you are, where you are, what you are doing, and what is around you at center stage. But we can already look beyond the first stage of interactions assuming a single user seeing simple arrows and tags indicating POIs, and begin to explore shared (multiuser/multisource) augmented realities.
These social augmented experiences will allow not only mashups, & multisource data flows, but dynamic overlays (not limited to 3d), created by distributed groups of users, linked to location/place/time, and syndicated to people who wish to engage with the experience by viewing and co-creating elements for their own goals and benefit.

Share your scenarios for the Next Wave of AR in the comments or elsewhere (tag nextwaveAR socialAR), and come to Where 2.0 and see the panel!

The structure for this tutorial is part method review (on how to understand people’s goals in a structured way), and part sharing of re-usable patterns found after researching goals.   Since the context of origin for both the goals and patterns was complex international finance, some translation of the raw materials and examples and the synthesized patterns into a realm closer to home for ordinary people is likely in order.

As you’re going through the slides, I suggest using your own activities that involve information finding and making substantial financial decisions as a reference.  Not all the examples that I selected as the basis of exercises during the tutorial made across the cultural barrier between North America and Northern Europe: I was surprised at how many people (in a professional audience) have never bought house or car…  Which proves yet again that this is one of the areas for user experience design to work on as a discipline.

And as we had a small, noisy, and rather warm room right after lunch, I should say big thanks to all the participants and volunteers — everyone — who made an effort to engage.

Even design education is a work-in-progress, it seems.

Driven by dramatic shifts in technology, economics, and media, nothing less than a transformation in the makeup and behavior of our personal identity is at hand—what it is, where it comes from, how it works, who controls it, how people and organizations use and value it. As a direct result of this transformation, the experience people have of personal identity—both their own and the identities of others—is changing rapidly. As designers of the blended digital, social, and material experiences of everyware, we must understand the changing nature of personal identity. And now that humanity itself is within the design horizon, it is especially important for design to understand the shifting experience of digital identity.

The second part will look at the implications of these changes for our experience of identity.  As I put together my predictions for what identity will be like in 10 years, I welcome input — what do you think?