more fodder to the call.
October 29, 2008
October 03, 2008
September 25, 2008
September 05, 2008
August 24, 2008
the social life of small urban spaces
Over the past week I've been reading through The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces by William H. Wythe. Originally published in 1980 it's a dissection of how people aggregate in and use public spaces.
I've been thinking about the physical world in relation to social media for a couple of months now. I have this notion that in the internet world it's no longer a technology concern we need to continue to disect-- it's more about sociology. We've always talked about designing interfaces for people and user interaction design, but what happens when we stop designng for our interactions with machines and start thnking about it as an excercise in urban planning?
The book was an interesting read. The analytics geeks in the crowd would get a kick out of it. How do people use physical communal spaces throughout a day/week/month/year period? What makes some spaces more desireable than others? Is it about the conversation it allows, or the vantage it provides? The similarities to using tags to collect user info made me chuckle (who's where when etc.). Call it this week's odd serendipity moment, I had been thinking about time lapse photography for a couple of weeks, they used time lapse to collect their data. Somehow I took that as a sign I'm on th right track.
I'm beginning to firmly believe the best social networks are just like the best urban spaces. When they allow a broad array of people to interact in a multiplicity of ways (one-on-one, one-to-many, passive observation, active participation et al), they are likely to be more successful.
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