Designing for the group
Clay Shirky has posted a wise and straightforward piece about small things software designers could do to target and support group users of software.
Providing ways to aggregate information about the state of the group mind – ranking/filtering/applauding — as well as ways to allow roles within groups to be filled by shifting members of the group, allows social complexity to emerge from simple technology.
It's all about metainformational depth, tags, and flows. If designers make it easy for users to apply tags to information, either manually or automatically (I LIKE this post; I LEAN in this direction; this guy is posting TOO MUCH), those tags can be aggregated to produce patterns that reveal the group as an entity with an interesting life of its own.
Clay suggests thinking about simple changes to existing software that would allow groups to flourish through the feedback familiar to us in complex adaptive systems. He uses Craigslist and Slashdot as examples of gently-mutated software services that provide enormous value.
If only search was group-directed, or at least group-oriented. We must be at a very early stage of search engines — right now, we fling ourselves into a list, and emerge exhausted. Maybe some members of a group could be tagged as expert searchers. Maybe groups could compete for the affection of new group members through the power and precision of their searches. I'm not so interested in searching my own desktop, but I am fascinated by searching the desktops of the Bertrand Russells or Isaiah Berlins or William Jameses of today. And I want to be able to find today what I found yesterday and tagged for later reading — or that a group I'm interested in tagged for later reading.
Right now.
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