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Day 11 Agenda for Social Interaction Design

  • Pre-readings:

1. Interaction Design

2. Crumlish, C.& Malone, E.(2009). Designing social interfaces: principles, patterns, and practices for improving the user experience. O’Reilly Media.

For this book, we can only go through the table of contents.

3. What is social interaction design?

If you search “social media interaction design”, this slides which from gravity7.com will be the first result retrieved. I strongly recommend this slides as the “Social Interaction Design 101”.

  • Agenda

1. What is interaction design? What does the interaction design look like in social media?

2. Technical Design — Interfaces

3. Psychological Design

4. What’s the social media interaction design?

  • This section will mainly depend on our experience of engaging the social media and discussion.
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Everything Is Miscellaneous Takeaway

eismEverything is miscellaneous: the power of the new digital disorder by David Weinberger

After Cluetrain Manifesto, David Weinberger described a great trend of the digitalization of our world again in Everything Is Miscellaneous. I thought the subhead seems like much more suitable to represent the author’s idea. In the Chinese ancient mythology, the initial world looked like an egg where inside is very chaotic. A giant slept in the egg and cleaved this primeval chaos by a big axe after he woke up, and contributed every part of his body to form the mountain, the river, the sun, the sky, the animals, and us, human beings. So we’ve gotten the initial order since. In this book, what Weinberger defined the order of organization of the physical world is exact that initial one. After the knowledge and the language came about, a second order of organization appeared, which is the use of metadata to organize and categorize physical objects. Weinberger told many historical stories such as Plato and Aristotle to illustrate how people like to organize and categorize the world. But, one can never get the same two eggs on the table. Until the computers and their connections—networks have been developed, people didn’t really master the information. Because of getting rid of the limitation of the physical world, people can organize the information in anyway as long as the information explosion. Actually all the information are organized by the hierarchical hyperlinks. Besides this, the digitalization of the real world offered people the full authority to access the information, i.e. knowledge, and manipulate it. Since the digital file which consists of bit can be easily split, we are able to deal with the information in any way we want. But I have said, the author didn’t want to this world go back to the chaos. Disorder just meant the ease of learning knowledge. Learn more, gain more. We will know the physical world better.

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Pop Stars and Their Online Social Activities

Miley Cyrus, who may be a very famous pop star or movie star, I don’t know, left Twitter. I read this piece of news from mtv.com. Cyrus delivered an explanation in the form of a rap. In the video she raps, " I stopped livin’ for moments and started living for people … I want my private life private." … "Everything that I typed and everything that I do/ All those lame gossip sites take it and they make it news." It is obvious that Cyrus had been disturbed by her interactions with the social media. I don’t know whether other famous people are suffering this as the same as her. I assume some are. However, on another continent, pop stars are jumping into the ocean of social media in a hurry.

Through the observation on the Chinese blog and the literature review, I found the main function of the blogging in China is just for entertainment. That’s why so many pop stars create their blogs on the portal websites. The professional blog websites like Blogger or WordPress are not as popular as the blog tools which provided by the portal websites in China. As mentioned in Content Nation, the blogger of most famous blog in China is an actress and director. Opposite to Cyrus, too many stars are enjoying to expose their privacy to the public to sensationalize themselves. Why the reserved people from a traditional country which has a long history become so dissipated? As an audience, I have been tired of knowing their gossip. I want their private life private. I thought, without beliefs, people can never inhibit their behavior.

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Google Building Maker Tryout

"Building Maker is a 3D modeling tool for adding buildings to Google Earth. It’s fun to use, and an easy way to get on the 3D map." As a collaborative tools, Google building maker contributes its convenience to the construction of the virtual 3D world. I tried out this amazing tool and created an apartment building in the Valencia, Spain as below. The tool’s as simple as possible for the novices to do what the architects are doing. The virtual buildings are modeled based on the photos from several perspectives. What user only have to do is aligning each vertex of the new boxes or pyramids to in each photo. However,  I have to download the Google SketchUp to refine these artworks.  I can make my building as exquisite as possible by Maya or 3Ds Max. But I had to stop my construction at that time. Though as a veteran of 3D modeling, I don’t use SketchUp. Even if it is admitted that SketchUp is much more easily to learn than the professional tools, I have no time to learn it. Such a question came about that how to make the experts to be more effective and useful in the social collaboration.

googlebuildingmaker

I was imagining the solution to this problem. You know we can switch the display mode of Google earth between OpenGL and DirectX. In the same way Autodesk 3Ds Max does. So if the API exists, I can call the 3Ds Max software to do the beautification, or integrates parts of the controls into the Building Maker itself. Definitely the calling of the driver of the display card in the web browser will be referred to. No such solutions exist though. On the other side of this coin, why not put the building maker into the new version of Google Earth? It seems like perfect. Autodesk’s already developed the development kits for CAD. I believe that for its tools of 3D modeling is coming. Anyway, more integration could bring more effective collaboration in the process of content generation. I am looking forward to what I have said in the previous post that to build up a virtual community by these tools.