Social Design

Coding IS the Language of Women

Designing for a Wiki Way of Learning

Learning how to collaborate and work in groups coexists with learning how to participate in social writing practices with and through social media. Young people are entering higher education with high levels of personal digital experience. Their experience of collaborative learning with and through social media such as Wikis is limited. A wiki way of learning can significantly contribute to developing digital social team working skills.

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The Gendering of Social Media Skills

Historically, researchers have concluded that females self-report significantly lower levels of familiarity and use of web-based technologies than male users. This is not the case with social media. Female users of social media actually participate more and achieve higher domain knowledge than male users. This debunks the dominant deficit discourse around women, expertise, and technology.  

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Tearing Up The Syllabus

Learning experiences in higher education are highly scheduled and planned to the point that we design social and accidental learning moments out of them. In comparing what is experienced in creative industry workshops and retreats to what is expected in the formal learning experiences, we explore what would truly happen if we tore up the syllabus? And why professors resist the social and emergent models of learning design? Models that foster individuality, creativity and an inner sense of identity.

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Playing The Cello With My Mind

What are the artistic and educational implications of technology that reads your brain activity and displays it in graphical terms? How could it benefit our understanding of the creative process? It’s called OpenBCI, and it’s “Arduino-powered BCI that allows anyone with a laptop to access their brainwaves.” We imagine it could lead to a world where musicians, athletes, or anyone of great skill can automatically “turn on” “being in the zone.” It being open source is its key to it being, potentially, anything. Are we ready?

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Where is the Empathy in Tracking Our Children Online?

Behavioral tracking of individuals through technologies is far from innovative. Today we are surveilled more often and more smartly, than any other time in history. Data is today’s currency, data about adults and now our children. In this social insight, I share about an article I discussed with Jim Jacoby and Jim Cohen during our Design in the Moment podcast. The article was about the development of a new browser plugin that helps parents track their children’s web activity.

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For the Love of Drone Delivery

The way many of us think about a drone is as an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) developed and used for military operations; or for nonmilitary security work, such as surveillance. We don’t think of a drone as the continuous sound of a note or a musical chord we love; or as a powdered white drug designed to make us feel high. Could we ever come to love drones? We discuss the possible human impact of Jeff Bezos proposal for Amazon Drone Delivery and how we think and feel about its potential in messy human terms.

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Learning the Art of Social Spaces

Our social spaces are important not just because they might keep us warm or dry on a cold winters day; offer us a place for food or drink or transport to and from work. Our social spaces ~ the cafes, libraries, museums, galleries, trains, buses restaurants, and even our hallways ~ are important spaces because they are where our moments of joy, sadness, our most creative work and where our personal selves are shared with others. In this interview with Carol Jones we learn about what inspired the social design of Chapter Arts (UK).

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Bring Backstage Onstage with Social Media

Bringing backstage onstage with social media is one way to help share learning about artists, their ways of working, and their artwork. This approach, however, requires much unlearning of the use of social media as a marketing channel in order to learn how to participate in social, creative, and artistic ways in network social spaces.

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