“Before you can interact with someone through an application,
you will always firstly interact with the application itself.”

First off, IDEA09 was a smashing success.
All thanks to Russ Unger, the speakers, and volunteers for a spot-on job.

I’m not too sure on how many people were able to pick this up, but I found an interesting and startling contrast between the two presentations performed by Thomas Malaby & Maya Kalman. The two presenters and their thesis can be seen below:

Making Virtual Worlds: Games and the Human for a Digital Age
Presenter: Thomas Malaby
The rise of virtual worlds (World of Warcraft, Everquest) has prompted new questions about the status of games in a digital age. Thomas Malaby’s research at Linden Lab, makers of Second Life, suggests that game design and game development practice are becoming a key part of how some high tech companies operate. Instead of relying on top-down and procedural decision-making, these organizations contrive complex and game-like systems that promise to generate legitimate decisions from the ground up
But there are ideological commitments behind these efforts, with their roots in post-WWII American ideas about technology, authority, and they include even a rather peculiar notion of what being human is all about. In this transformation of the workplace – and our online experience – the human is imagined as a gamer of a particular kind. Malaby considers what this way of thinking about the human, one that saturates many of the institutions currently architecting digital society, tells us about the changing status of technology, creativity, and authority for a digital age.

Does Designing a Social Experience Affect How We Party? Of Course It Does!
Presenter: Maya Kalman
What makes an event whether social or corporate a true success? What makes you want to go to a party or networking event? And what makes you want to stay!
We’ve all been to networking events that were nothing to write home about or weddings, to be quite frank, that were a complete disaster, but what made it that way and what could have made it better?
That premise, of what should or could have been done to make that event a success is the core of the concept behind “Social Experience Design” and what we’ll be discussing in this session. Maya will explore what goes into planning the perfect event. How do we approach the task at hand? How do we insure success? What has changed in the last year and what are next year’s trends? And how have events and the art of event design changed now that “social networking” is part of almost everyone’s daily life.

OK, so for those of you who were there, you may remember Thomas as the “Video Game Guy” and Maya as the “Party Girl”.
In Thomas’ presentation, he proposed to the group (by quoting someone) that “Users do not interact with their environment, they interact with each other” (speaking about online interactive and collaborative games). Whereas Maya’s presentation strongly suggests that the environment you plan sets the mood and allow people to explore the engaging atmosphere that they are surround by.

Now, while I know that there are no hard rules to design theory, I am more so leaning towards Maya’s thesis of environmental design.
For those of you who play first person shooter games, (Counterstrike) for me, how many times have you entered a room to find one person running around exploring their environment. Sometimes you may see a player crawling into new spaces, exploring underground sewer systems and creeping through air vents and attics. In Counterstrike, it is extremely important for a player to both know and interact with their surroundings. If a player is not familiar with their surroundings, it means one thing- death.

I remember when stumbling upon a room with only 1 player, the player asked me to leave. In the video game industry, we know this means 1 of 3 things. Either he is testing out new weapons, trying to learn or perfect certain maneuvers, or they are interacting with the environment. I’ve seen on many occasions a player throwing a grenade through an air vent to see how far the grenade goes and at what angle it will land at. I’ve witnessed a player educate his team on certain areas of the map and create team strategy to help each other get on top of boxes to hide in an attic.

There is no way that I am saying that a user only interacts with their environment. But I am saying that a user’s first time in a room setting or their first time in a new land, or application invokes some form of interactivity. Before a user can interact with someone through an application, they will always firstly interact with the application. Even though this may only be a 1 or 2 time thing, users need to become familiar with their digital environment before they can interact successfully with others.

I believe both Thomas and Maya hold value in what they are saying according to their perspective regards, but I lean a little more towards Maya’s approach on designing an atmosphere that doesn’t necessarily make someone want to interact with it on an intimate level, but definitely provides a setting where people can come together and have an enhanced relationship based on their surroundings.

Remember, as designers, we don’t design relationships, we simply create the applications (or environment if you will) to allow relationships to flourish.

With the recent release of Tweetie 2, look what everyone’s talking about- not the interaction with their fellow mates- but the application itself.

Brett Lutchman