Facebook in major privacy clampdown

Over the next year Facebook will implement changes on how personal data is used.

Read article

The overuse of the word "participatory"

Here’s a 2 minutes video from Kru Research (lobal think tank focused on "empowered patients") showing that the age of "participatory medicine" has begun.

I'm wondering if they can call this change on applied medicine "participatory" - they are not designing anything new and was there a lot of 'collaboration' with the patient? Offering websites that allow patients to inform themselves doesn't create consensus.

see video

Maybe it should be called: empower the patient to be able to read up on what they have been told by the doctor, but not necessarily understood or forgotten.

SMS PhD: 'pointless' text messages analysed

A PhD has just been completed looking at the language of txts. Interesting emphasis on pointlessness in the title of the article, though whether this is actually important in the PhD itself is unclear.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/mobile-phones/5982272/SMS-Phd-pointless-text-messages-analysed.html

Why does pointlessness matter? It may be (or may not), as we have said before, that older users expect there to be an extrinsic purpose in electronic communication, whereas younger users do not. I don't know if this researcher looked at the age of the texters, but might be worth asking.

See that book I keep mentioning: Robin Dunbar, Grooming Gossip and the Evolution of Language.

Article in Interactions magazine

This might be useful in itself or have some useful pointers:

Supporting healthy aging with new technologies
Brian D. Jones
Claudia Rébola Winegarden
Wendy A. Rogers

interactions
Volume 16, Issue 4 (July + August 2009)
The Waste Manifesto

SECTION: The value of culture

Pages 48-51

Year of Publication: 2009

ISSN:1072-5520

http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1551986.1551996

What is Social Networking now?

One of the issues we may need to discuss when we meet is what we now mean by Social Networking. I don’t think this need be a problem, but we may need to clarify the difference between Social Networking as an idea (which I think is what we are about) and Social Networking systems which are increasingly being used for anything and everything including business, political campaigns, CSCW and so on.

An interview with the father of social networking

With Facebook, 25 year-old Mark Zuckerberg, turned a dorm-room diversion into a cultural phenomenon. His next goal? To finally turn the company profitable.

Read here

Using Provocative Conceptual Designs to Foster Human-centred Innovation

Came across this recent PhD which might be useful in considering how to support participatory design without ending up with the lowest common denominator.

"A Critical Artefact Methodology: Using Provocative Conceptual Designs
to Foster Human-centred Innovation"

available online at http://www.simon-bowen.com/?page_id=40

Chris Rust at Sheffield Hallam writes:
Simon's work explores some practical implications of the critical design methods developed by Dunn and Raby, Bill Gaver and others. He has synthesised and evaluated ways for designers to use provocative concepts, "Crazy Ideas" as he describes them, to stimulate stakeholders to engage in productive speculation about aspirations and needs that might not be revealed by more conventional user research techniques. In particular he positions the designer at the centre of his methods, tacitly "processing" the insights from stakeholder workshops into new, more relevant design concepts to stimulate further rounds of stakeholder thinking, rather than relying on explicit analysis.

To support this Simon has developed a description of such processing based on Michael Polanyi's theories of tacit knowledge in action. I find this a most useful building block in the body of work being done here at Sheffield Hallam by myself and Nicola Wood with more to come from Rizal Rahman and Cigdem Kaya whose PhD studies are extending it in different directions. You can find this description on pages 171-173 of the thesis: 6.2.4 Designing as ‘processing’ and Polanyi’s indwelling

I've developed a short account of how Simon's work has stimulated my own thinking on how Rittel and Webber's work on wicked problems might be a basis for design methods, prompted by members of this discussion list who have suggested that wicked problems might be interesting but don't seem to provide help with methods.
http://chrisrust.wordpress.com/2009/03/02/an-argumentative-process/

Best wishes from Sheffield
Chris

...............................................................
Professor Chris Rust FDRS
Head of Art and Design
Sheffield Hallam University, S1 2NU, UK
+44 114 225 6772
chris@chrisrust.net
http://chrisrust.wordpress.com/

Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the
future of the human race. - H. G. Wells