P2P By Design

RSS Archive

P2P By Design provides radical design thinking for brand builders and business leaders. It is dedicated to showing how design
can help businesses adapt to the peer-to-peer world rising from our networked culture. It takes a radical view, because, in this new world, the only path closed to us is the one where we turn back.

Preferred Posts P2P Examples Ask me anything

July 16, 2012

From Communities to Emergent Cities: The Evolutionary Trend of Social Media?

Back in 2009, Richard Florida observed that, “Worldwide people are crowding into a discrete number of mega-regions, systems of multiple cities and their surrounding suburban rings.” This trend resulted in what he calls “talent-clustering.” Flowering from this clustering, Florida claims, arises “the creative class.”

I find this particularly interesting when you overlay it with the stuff Sébastien Paquet has been talking about in regards to “Emergent Cities.” He writes,

“Ideas — big ideas — are flying fast and furious, and I’m starting to get the sense that they’re set to begin to gel together over the coming year.

“Most of these people are now aware of one another and adeptly making use of microblogging — talking AND listening — to become acquainted with one another and building mutual trust and knowledge. They are first-rate knowledge network weavers.

“Network weaving is critical, I believe, because if something groundbreaking is to emerge of all these interactions, it will first have been nurtured within the protected environment of community - just like innovations start out as fragile prototypes in the lab before getting robust and making it big in the real world.”

What he sees is a set of tools and customs — protocols — that give people of commons interests to grow “virtual cities.” He doesn’t mean virtual in the sense of “online.” He means virtual in the sense that there is no legal demarcation of city limits. They are bonds of citizenry that exist in the mind.

Paquet adds:

“Joining the right emergent city provides a creative person with affordances to: “Share her ideas and goals;

“Get oriented in the network of members;

“Enter relationships with people who need what she wants to create;

“Become known (gain “currency”) and build reputation and trust relationships;

“Get support in the form of knowledge and perhaps time;

“Find partners who share her intent;

“Develop the skills she needs;

“Mentor others who are on a similar path;

“Feel a sense of belonging;

“Disengage, if she’s not getting what she needs.”

You could argue that Paquet is talking about nothing new. “He’s just talking about communities of practice.” Sure, that argument has weight. But when I consider that the groups he is talking will have their own productive capability, their own currency systems, their own reputation management systems, their own markets, their own “exports,” I think the concept look less like like a community of co-workers and more like the ecology of a city.

So, if the later is true, how does this change our conception of peer-to-peer activity?

Just something to think about.

12:35pm | URL: http://tmblr.co/ZgAnuuPTSKx6

July 9, 2012

Is A New Design Discipline Branching Out From IxD?

In the early 1980s, Bill Moggridge designed the first notebook–style computer for GRiD Systems. When he brought the first prototype home in 1981, he basked in its ingenious industrial design. But as soon as he started playing with it, he felt himself

“being sucked down into the virtual realm, concerned only with how I interacted with the software, and forgetting the existence of the physical object. That’s when I realized the significance of human-computer interaction.”

Bill realized that designing human–software interactions was significantly different than industrial design. It demanded different research, different skills sets, and different ways of thinking. He felt an affinity between the disciplines, but believed they were not the same thing. He named this new field he stumbled upon “interaction design.”

I often feel that we are reaching similar bifurcation in the practice of design. For the last couple of decades, Design (yes, design proper) has steadily expanded its concerns beyond non dynamic objects and fully controlled experiences. The design theorist and intellectual John Thackara has written a new ethos for designing for a complex world. Hillary Cottam won the Design Museum’s Designer of the Year award for her work in what she called Transformation Design. Philippe Starck, who made his career in creating some of the most lust-worthy objects, said:

“I was a producer of materiality and I am ashamed of this fact. Everything I designed was unnecessary. I will definitely give up in two years’ time. I want to do something else, but I don’t know what yet. I want to find a new way of expressing myself …design is a dreadful form of expression…. In future there will be no more designers. The designers of the future will be the personal coach, the gym trainer, the diet consultant.” (PSFK)

Tim Leberecht at Frog Design wrote a nice post about this shift in which he quotes a phrase JP Rangaswami coined at this year’s Enterprise 2.0 conference: “Design for the loss of control.” Tim adds,

“His point was more IT-specific, arguing that the combination of pervasive digital infrastructure, software-as-a-service, cloud computing, social software, and smart phones have enabled employee- and customer-driven solutions to a degree that renders top-down IT systems obsolete. As Dion Hinchcliffe of the Dachis Group writes: ‘Enterprises currently expend considerable resources trying to impose control on a situation that increasingly appears like it not only can’t be controlled, but almost certainly doesn’t need to be.’”

It’s also theme many marketing strategists and innovators rightly impress upon their clients and agencies.

So if we accept Rangaswami’s (and this blog’s) premise that the future is about mass collaboration (a.ka. distributed control), the question becomes:

How do you create an infrastructure that allows self-lead individuals to come together in productive, collaborative creation?

This is fundamentally a design challenge. Many people see it as an IxD challenge, specifically. But I’m not sure about that. IxD, in the main, concerns itself with Human–computer interaction (HCI). I feel like that while “Designing for loss of control” is informed by HCI, it is not defined by it. (In a parallel example, Ixd is informed by graphic design but not defined by it.) Instead, I think this design challenge has more to do with computer-supported cooperative work. The design based in such a domain is what I’m calling “P2P design.” (For a example see my post on Droog’s “Downloadable Design” and consider if it is IxD or something else.) Here’s a working definition:

P2P Design (n): A discipline that cultivates mass collaboration using networked technologies, storytelling, and peer–to–peer production models: crowdsourcing, wiki–production, collaborative filtering, commons, crowdwisdom, P2P renting, crowdfunding, mass customization, etc.

To draw a stronger distinction between IxD and P2PD, consider these comparisons:

GENERAL OVERVIEW
Interaction Design: IxD shapes digital things for people’s use.

P2P Design: P2PD creates “infrastructures of cooperation” to spur mass collaboration.

PRINCIPLE DOMAIN OF INTEREST

Interaction Design: Human–computer interaction (HCI).

P2P Design: Computer–supported cooperative work (CSCW).

RESEARCH AND STRATEGIC EMPHASIS

Interaction Design: IxD concerns itself with the user–object relationship. It emphasizes individual user psychology and behavior.

P2P Design: P2PD concerns itself with networked relationships. It emphasizes group psychology and behavior.

GOAL

Interaction Design: IxD aims to achieve ease of use, clarity, and fit to activity.
P2P Design: P2PD aims to achieve network effects, positive externalities produced by participants, and evolution of the designed infrastructure by its participations (see “produsage”).

I should say that I do believe there are many self-identified interaction designers who practice P2P design. They just do not think of it as a separate discipline. In my opinion, the disciplines are siblings and not twins. IxD is necessary for P2P design but P2P design is not necessary for IxD. These are all working thoughts, but I’ll return to this topic again and again because I find it fascinating.

3:35pm | URL: http://tmblr.co/ZgAnuuP0JQYR

Filed under: p2p design future innovation ixd interaction design

July 5, 2012

"The final destiny for the future of the company often seems to be the ‘virtual corporation’—the corporation as a small nexus with essential functions outsourced to subcontractors. But there is an alternative vision of an ultimate destination—the company that is only staffed by customers. No firm will ever reach that extreme, but the trajectory that leads in that direction is the right one, and any step taken to shift the balance toward relying on the relationships with customers will prove to be an advantage."