The default word here – ‘collaboration’ – is used to describe a whole range of social or collective acts, leading to confusion on what social action is, and making technology seem more promising than it often turns out. Without more nuanced categories for describing social behavior, product & design teams will continue to struggle to understand what making their product more ‘social’ means, and how to understand the ways in which people do things together.

The ‘social’ notion/frame itself has gone through several iterations: starting with the articulation of social networks, on to the understanding of information artifacts as ‘social objects,’ to, most recently, the notion of the ‘social layer’. Along the way, the technologies themselves have revolved around some (mostly asynchronous) form of content sharing (Flickr, YouTube),  communication (Facebook), and emergent aggregation (Twitter, Pinterest, Foursquare).

I present here a framework for understanding levels of social action, based on an excellent framing by Denning and Yaholkovsky. In Getting to “We”, Denning and Yaholkovsky describe multiple forms of social action, and how they are related, as well as how they are related to technology.

Levels of social action. From Denning & Yaholkovsky (2008). Getting to “We”.

D&Y talk about four different levels of social action: information sharing, coordination, cooperation, and collaboration. I shall not discuss information sharing here: it is the necessary foundation on which social action is built, but by itself is not sufficient to encourage social action.

Keeping in mind the design of web and connected technologies, I suggest a reframing based on motives and goals instead of behavioral complexity: Collective, Cooperative, and Collaborative.

Collective action

In the category of collective action, a mass of people collectively create something. But – importantly – creating something together is not the goal of the individuals themselves, but is a side-effect of their interactions with the system, which produces the results because it consumes its own exhaust and traces. However, the knowledge that certain actions (e.g. rating something) will produce public good might encourage people to do them more often.

Technology examples: most recommendation and ‘social interest’ systems, behavioral aggregation (Foursquare), or collection (Delicious).

Cooperative

Cooperative action introduces shared goals, rules of behavior, and structures of coordination. It has the following features:

1. The activities have stable and known rules that can be supported by structures of coordination – ways to let people become aware of each other’s actions and adjust their own accordingly. These rules are set ahead of time, or baked into the system.
2. The group has shared goals: the goals are the primary reason for the group working together. The goals themselves may be layered and/or have a structure of completion, but they are basically known in advance and fixed.
3. Roles start to form, and people take on different activities. Individual contributions are no longer equal or replaceable.
4. If the cooperative activity has an end-point, that need not be clear to the participants.

Technology examples: shared information collections, SETI@home, Amazon Mechanical Turk, user-feedback/bug-reporting systems.

Collaborative

Collaborative action adds identity, culture, and self-determination to cooperative action. Collaborative action tends to happen when many fundamental assumptions – the roles, rules, information, goals – are liable to change, perhaps because of the nature of the goal.

1. Identity: the group sees itself as a set of people that have a shared purpose and are coming together to achieve it.
2. Culture: the group has a set of values, which are used to justify and select between competing rules.
3. Self-determination: the group has a measure of control over its own destiny.

Supported by:

4. Measurement and methods for self-awareness, so group members have a way to model and describe the group’s activity.
5. Rituals, and layered temporal cycles of activity, to support multiple forms of cooperation, planning, and layered goals.

In the cases where collaboration is being used to solve a problem, there will need to be some sort of process. What that process will be, depends – as we know from participatory and co-design practice – on the exact problem and participants.

Of all these levels of social action, collaboration has the most extra-technological elements. Those elements can be reflected and embedded in the design of supporting technologies, but it is perfectly possible to do without designed technologies in order to achieve collaboration. The lesson here is that designing for collaboration is a lot more nuanced, and needs a lot more attention to the specifics of the activity. It may be that designing for collaboration means designing for appropriation, and to leave the technologies as open to interpretation as possible.

For this month’s Book Club, we have selected two titles:

1. Design Thinking: Understanding How Designers Think and Work, by Nigel Cross
2. Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action, by Simon Sinek

If you would like to read one of these books and submit your review to for publication on our website, visit our Engage page!

Please sign up by May 21st. We look forward to hearing from you!

Why are some people and organizations more innovative, more influential, and more profitable than others? Why do some command greater loyalty?

In studying the leaders who’ve had the greatest influence in the world, Simon Sinek discovered that they all think, act, and communicate in the exact same way-and it’s the complete opposite of what everyone else does. People like Martin Luther King Jr., Steve Jobs, and the Wright Brothers might have little in common, but they all started with why.

(Synopsis from Amazon.com)

By Nigel Cross

Design thinking is the core creative process for any designer; this book explores and explains this apparently mysterious “design ability.” Focusing on what designers do when they design, Design Thinking is structured around a series of in-depth case studies of outstanding and expert designers at work, interwoven with overviews and analyses. The book offers new insights and understanding of design thinking, based on evidence from observation and investigation of design practice. Author Nigel Cross goes to the heart of what it means to think and work as a designer. The book is an ideal guide for anyone who wants to be a designer or to know how good designers work in the field of contemporary design.

(Synopsis from Amazon.com)

Due to the Memorial Day Holiday, we will not have a Whiteboard session in May. We are now accepting RSVPs for the next Whiteboard @SonicRim on Friday, June 29th from 2:00-5:00 p.m. The first hour will be spent in networking, and then we’ll begin whiteboarding.

Please email chris@sonicrim.com if you are interested in joining us at our San Francisco office for another relaxed afternoon of drinks and creative conversation. To learn more about Whiteboard, read on!

 Background

Several years ago, the SonicRim team did a project on the role of whiteboards in office spaces. From this eye-opening experience, we learned that the whiteboard is a valuable tool for facilitating exploration, discovery, and collaboration. On a more philosophical level, it represents the void that we fill with our knowledge and imagination—a space that brings minds together.

So what’s Whiteboard?

We want to use Whiteboard @SonicRim as a platform for inspiring reflection among our community, and to start thinking about the future with a clean, blank space. We have 128 square feet of whiteboard at SonicRim, and we invite you to fill it with ideas about the relevance and purpose of our work. We’ll spend the first hour networking and mingling, and then move on to whiteboarding.

Who can come?

Practicing designers and design researchers, or people from industry jobs who are curious to learn about design research. Even if your day job requires you to compete with each other, the whiteboard is a platform for everyone to collaborate creatively.

Where?

665 Third Street, Suite 410 in the SOMA neighborhood of San Francisco

We have had four Whiteboard events so far. Check back on Monday, May 7th for a summary of the last session!

The March Whiteboard session was all about questions. There were about 18 of us– independent consultants, contractors, industry experts, students– and we began with an icebreaker that called for curiosity. Everyone was asked to write three to five questions on the whiteboard that were (closely or distantly) related to the field of design research. Once all questions were up, we all voted on the ones we wanted to further delve into. The most popular were:

- How can insights drawn from power users be extrapolated to all users? Can they?

- How do you convince a company to invest in a project with initially fuzzy outcomes?

- How do you position a user research team earlier in the product cycle at the conceptualizing stage?

- How do you express the value of design research vesus traditional market research?

- How can I research on an international scale with little to no budget?

Conversations that grew throughout the session surrounded many of these questions: how long-term client relationships build an appreciation for the process of qualitative research and leads to research projects at various stages of product/service development; the role of design research at various stages in product/service development; the value of research that produces unexpected results; and how to facilitate making insights actionable.

Although the plan was to split into breakout groups, the icebreaker questions kept everyone engaged until the end. So perhaps next time we will consider the ideas of mentorship, transformational experiences, the process of engineering compelling workshops, and fostering collaboration across internal silos. As always, in the end we’ll go with the flow of conversation, and collaboratively determine our areas of greatest interest.

Join us next time at the whiteboard– April 27th from 2:00 to 5:00 p.m. Click here for the event posting.

We are now accepting RSVPs for the next Whiteboard @SonicRim on April 27th from 2:00-5:00 p.m. The first hour will be spent in networking, and then we’ll begin whiteboarding.

Please email chris@sonicrim.com if you are interested in joining us at our San Francisco office for another relaxed afternoon of drinks and creative conversation. To learn more about Whiteboard, read on!

 Background

Several years ago, the SonicRim team did a project on the role of whiteboards in office spaces. From this eye-opening experience, we learned that the whiteboard is a valuable tool for facilitating exploration, discovery, and collaboration. On a more philosophical level, it represents the void that we fill with our knowledge and imagination—a space that brings minds together.

So what’s Whiteboard?

We want to use Whiteboard @SonicRim as a platform for inspiring reflection among our community, and to start thinking about the future with a clean, blank space. We have 128 square feet of whiteboard at SonicRim, and we invite you to fill it with ideas about the relevance and purpose of our work. We’ll spend the first hour networking and mingling, and then move on to whiteboarding.

Who can come?

Practicing designers and design researchers, or people from industry jobs who are curious to learn about design research. Even if your day job requires you to compete with each other, the whiteboard is a platform for everyone to collaborate creatively.

Where?

665 Third Street, Suite 410 in the SOMA neighborhood of San Francisco

We have had four Whiteboard events so far. Read about our last  session here!

As  design researchers, we often examine social categorizations– personas, life stages, generations, etc– to understand how commonalities across target populations can impact the way businesses interact with or cater to their customer base. In this piece, I examine the four main generation groups  (Traditionalists, Baby Boomers, Generation X, and Generation Y) as they apply to the Chinese population with reference to their use of technology. Here, I am using the term “technology” in reference to current mainstream products such as mobile phones, computers, and Internet.

Chinese Traditionalists are about 12 years younger than their Western counterparts, with the youngest being in their late 50s. Of the four Chinese generations, they are the furthest removed from technology. Although a few of them feel inspired to explore the technology, they are rarely given ownership of a computer at home for the simple reason that their younger family members don’t trust them to maintain the safety/security of the device. First of all, technology is considered to be vulnerable, be it hardware or software. Secondly, for a typical Chinese family in Shanghai or Beijing that makes a monthly household income at 10,000 RMB, a computer costing 3,000 RMB is a significant investment.

Born between early 50s to mid 60s, most Chinese Baby Boomers were not prepared for the emergence of technology in the 1990s.  Having lost their best years in major national disturbances such as the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), this generation values harmonious, stable family life more than anything else. They are extremely aware of the educational benefits of new technology, and rarely hesitate to invest in new gadgets for their kids– but for their personal use, they make do with hand-me-down devices from their children.

With computers rapidly occupying workspaces during the mid to late 90s, the Chinese Generation X has as much compliments as complaints about technology. The majority were not educated about technology at school but had to step into a workplace colonized by it. Those who had the rare chance to learn how to use a computer usually secured better jobs. This tremendous career reward quickly drew the entire generation into the chase for a bright technology-enabled future. However, they gradually figured that technology has taken too much away from their physical world, and then started to question the real value of technology adoption in terms of balancing their work and personal lives.

Chinese Generation Y was born with technology, and their comfort goes beyond regular use to addiction. Most young people of this generation were born after the One Child Policy, which was put into effect in 1979. Therefore a vast majority grew up alone without siblings. They are often called the “spoiled generation” because, being the only child at home, they are treated as emperors by their families, who fulfill their (almost) every request– including new technology. Growing up all by themselves inevitably made the Internet their best friend, which also distracts them from parents’ busy schedules. It is their preeminent companion at home and the only convenient outlet through which to socialize with people around the world.

The four Chinese generations have different desires for technology. While developing tech solutions for them, we should keep in mind that their generational characteristics will play an important role in determining which features speak to their personal needs. Cross-generational relations are also relevant because it is common to find multiple generations living together under the same roof. The interpersonal dynamics due to family roles will help shape the value proposition and features of a technology product.

The study of material culture is a critical but under-explored area of contemporary anthropology with powerful implications for design research.  Of course, as cultural researchers, we have techniques to elicit insights about how people interact with the objects that fill their world, but it isn’t always enough to ask participants how they interact with the stuff that surrounds them, or even observe them putting their stuff to use.  Sometimes, a researcher has to get dirty. 

In the late seventies, a new practice emerged in the discipline of historical archaeology that brought traditional “midden studies”—analyses of historical (pre-1950) refuse—out of the archaeological site and into the contemporary landfill.  The practice of “garbology” put researchers into the field (the dump) to study what Americans throw away.  Though it may sound like an unsavory approach at first, you can learn quite a bit about the gulf between what people say and what people do by scrutinizing what they toss out.  Garbage illuminates habitus. In other words, trash reveals implicit, tacit, or otherwise obscured behaviors.

Now, my point isn’t necessarily that we should request that participants reserve a week’s worth of garbage for our perusal as a component of their homework (though there are projects where I might consider that approach).  Instead, I want to underscore the value of thinking about cultural artifacts in ways that deconstruct typical value propositions.   A compelling example of this deconstructive process comes out of a Papua New Guinea prison.

In a chapter out of this volume, anthropologist Adam Reed examines how prisoners in Bomana gaol use cigarettes as a currency, a social lubricant, and as means for marking moments and changing their mind state.  The prisoners infuse cigarettes with value, but the cigarettes also exist in a liminal state, ready to be consumed.  Within the social environment of the prison, inmates alter the value schema of cigarettes, and in turn cigarettes act on the social mind of the inmates.

In another, recent example, waiters in a Swedish restaurant use ordinary whiteboard pens to mark their reservation computer’s monitor, because it is easier and less time consuming than interacting directly with the reservation software.  The waiters have adapted their approach to the technology to suit their working style, redefining the value proposition of the whole system.

The point that I hope to underscore with these examples is how things can serve as heuristics for discovering or illuminating phenomena in the world.  Too often, ethnography treats objects as ancillary to behavior, when in fact objects can reveal, mold, or construct entirely new patterns of behavior that would be otherwise invisible to the researcher.  In some cases, it may be valuable to position objects at the fore of an ethnographic study.  I plan on exploring the implications for design research in the future.

We are piloting the SonicRim Book Club initiative. This month we have selected two titles:

1. The Innovation Secrets of Steve Jobs: Insanely Different Principles for Breakthrough Success, by Carmine Gallo
2. Age of the Unthinkable, by Joshua Cooper Ramo

If you would like to read one of these books and submit your review to for publication on our website, visit our Engage page!

Please sign up by March 9th. We look forward to hearing from you!