I’ll be chronicling my education from start to finish so stay tuned for much more frequent updates starting in August.

Burger King clever as always is asking you to sacrifice your facebook friends for a free whopper. After you install the app, as you begin deleting your friends they are displayed in your news feed as such: “Adrian sacrificed Robert Mackie for a free Whopper.” Limit one per person. Commence the bloodshed

I’m still having a read through and will have some follow up thoughts but I thought I would share the link first. Here’s an abstract from the white paper:

Social network sites, online games, video-sharing sites, and gadgets such as iPods and mobile phones are now fixtures of youth culture. They have so permeated young lives that it is hard to believe that less than a decade ago these technologies barely existed. Today’s youth may be coming of age and struggling for autonomy and identity as did their predecessors, but they are doing so amid new worlds for communication, friendship, play, and self-expression.

This white paper summarizes the results of a three-year ethnographic study, funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, examining young people’s participation in the new media ecology. It represents a condensed version of a longer treatment of the project findings. The study was motivated by two primary research questions: How are new media being integrated into youth practices and agendas? How do these practices change the dynamics of youth-adult negotiations of literacy, learning, and authoritative knowledge?

Whitevoid:
Looks to be a company’s portfolio and it’s a recent FWA winner. One of the more fluid and usable examples of including the Z axis I’ve seen. As someone clicks into a navigation element it reveals the sub-elements in front of the higher level elements. This paradigm continues and the perspective is shown as such that you can still click the higher level items or click off in the white space to dismiss the current level.

Diller Scofidio + Renfro:
Another company’s portfolio. The mouse allows the user to manipulate space along Z axis by moving physically closer or further. The faster or slower the user moves the more momentum is given to the movement. There is also a solid feeling as the user progresses through each group of photos so they can almost count along as they pass through each group.

Let the experiments continue! I think our new found love of gestural interfaces is filtering into the web’s old mouse and keyboard paradigm.

reVerve

This project was quite interesting, they took movies and tv shows and tagged elements of the frames where the actors where fashioning purchasable products. I quizzed them a bit about their tagging process and for now it’s manual, not very scalable but you could see some real time user generated tagging going on and some business rule around X number of tags = a real product. One of the more practical projects at the event

remmbr

remmbr had a very straight forward premise: have you ever had trouble remembering an event and the details around that event? remmbr allows you to take pictures from your camera phone and have them sync to the remmbr site to help you recall what you did. Enjoyed a great bottle of wine? remmbr it for later. The project creator wanted to make it relatively private but I thought along the ambient intimacy lines some people might enjoy a public view of the stream as well.

ChattyTime

ChattyTime lets users coordinate their browsers in real time. Users opt in to the service and once connected one user can send another user a direct link right away. Need to know where the restaurant is? I’ll send you the yelp link direct to your phone. What would be really neat is if there was a collaborative aspect to it where people could see each other interact with the page.

Plott

Plott allowed users to follow an audio narrative of a city mashed up with Google’s street view. There were very interesting parts where the audio tour would mention a building and the street view would move to the object that was being described. I didn’t get to see if it was location aware too but definitely necessary to make it useful in real time.

Anti-paparazzi fashion

If you’re like me then the paparazzi follow you everywhere! No they don’t but for the top 1% of this country they may want to walk around with Anti-paparazzi fashion. Basically when a photo is being taken you lift your fashion piece up and it reflects most of the flash back to the camera man. Take that!

Chickabiddy

A therapeutic little bird that bounces around your screen as you play with a physical egg shaped object. Don’t bounce the egg to hard the bird gets mad

Wheelbug Exhibit

This little critters walk around autonomously with a few simple rules. Most of all they want the food, secondly they’d like to meet and greet each other, and lastly they’ll just meander randomly (hey they’re human!) The creator used electromagnectic fields as attractors and deterrents depending on the critter’s mood. In the end they usually go for a massive free for all for the food.

Stars Chairs (Sit, Tap, and Rock)

Technology has really dehumanized our surroundings but this project wanted to use technology to do the opposite. Sit back and relax in the chair and depending on your movement you will get some interesting natural ambient sounds in the background. Some great therapeutic applications, although dynamism needed to be tweaked for a more natural range but the gist was there.

Dra”Wii”ng Jackson Pollock

This was kind of fun. Take a Wii remote and use the gestural motion and turn them into paint blobs. Now repeat that motion in a general way. Take a look at your screen you now have your own stochastic process Jackson Pollock.

There were a lot of great projects and the room was packed full, so it was difficult to get around to every event but what I saw I liked. Lots of great nuggets that you can pull from for inspiration, really inspires you to go back to school to remember the fun you use to have designing.

Registration is in January and calls for submission are currently being accepted!

Take My Starbucks Idea or Dell’s IdeaStorm for example. They’ve been utilizing their user pool to make their products better and nip issues in the bud as they occur. There have been other analytics used as well to actually go where the conversations are happening rather than creating a gathering place. Having representatives of the company interject appropriately when necessary to help demystify or aid users with confusion point.

This post is more of a scrawling than anything else but it was prompted by the most recent crowdsource example I’ve seen by Herman Miller: ThoughtPile. They are posing questions periodically and eliciting responses from users. I like the visualization and playfulness of the experience.

If you’re looking for an easy extension to your brand that can give a great feedback loop consider some of the crowdsourcing examples.

Currently I draw inspiration from the Webb/Smith/Butterfield model:

As well as the Social Patterns on Yahoo Pattern Library but now I eagerly await Erin Malone’s and Christian Crumlish’s book Designing Social Interfaces. You can view the work in progress on their wiki.

We’re all still trying to suss out the building blocks and common questions: Do you want to promote competition, what are the repercussions? Are your user’s sensitive about privacy and security, how do you build for it? How is a reputation system built? How do you interject game mechanics to make your application enjoyable? How do you incentivize leaders to continue to be involved in a community? How do you engage lurkers to be participants?

I’m hopeful that the social software toolbox will become more recognizable very soon and that these questions and many more will be answered with the book!