A lot of people ask me what Google.org is, given it’s hybrid for-profit/not-for-profit structure. My personal take on it is that while Google has adopted the motto “Don’t be evil,” then the mission of Google.org is to actively do good.

The reality, however, is much more complicated. I highly recommend this piece from the Stanford Social Innovation Review: “Do No Evil”. The article is a detailed look at the six-year trajectory of Google.org, highlighting its transition from a grant-making institution to a engineering-driven, distributed organization within Google. The article also highlights the incredible difficulty that faces the young organization as it attempts to tackle global problems that others have wrestled with for decades, with questionable results.

I’m proud to be a part of Google.org, in large part due to the scope of its ambitions. However, this piece is a healthy reminder for everyone attempting to do social good to approach their work with humility.

People often ask me why I take such issue with all of these moronic games people play on Facebook. This article articulates my unease with them better than I have in the past. In short: “Social” games like these aren’t actually based on strengthening our social ties — they’re engineered to exploit them for profit, creating incredibly low-fidelity simulations of gifting and reciprocity behaviors that are just compelling enough to addict players. These games use our nature for someone else’s profit.

This pattern isn’t anything new: our whole society is based on generally-less-egregious versions of it. But this is the point: stupid Facebook games aren’t just stupid: They’re dangerous because they prime us for more of the same exploitation everywhere else in our lives.

Now that I’m at Samasource, I get to indulge my fascination with the ideas around “crowdsourcing” a lot more. It’s a new enough concept that even that term is falling out of favor. The whole idea tickles me because it allows for a whole new speculative realm of problem-solving.

First, here’s Clay Shirky from a year ago, breathlessly describing the Big Deal that crowdsourced collaboration models represent in the historical context of human production:

And below is a more recent, deeper look into these ideas, by Jonathan Zittrain. As it turns out, there are many issues to mull over with crowdsourcing: How do labor laws apply? What are the social effects of disaggregating and anonymizing your work to the point where you have no idea what ends your efforts serve? Zittrain does a back-of-the-envelope calculation: A brute-force Amazon Mechanical Turk search could identify any single Iranian protester out of 76 million photographs for a mere $17k. What are the implications of this? The first half of the talk is interesting and entertaining (and Samasource gets a mention, about 15 minutes in) but there is really good discussion with the audience in the second half: the place is packed with big thinkers:

UPDATE: Zittrain lists as one of the potential negative effects of crowdsourcing the ability for political operatives to simulate large-scale citizen actions online. This is also known as “astroturfing” (a play on the term “grass roots”), but crowdsourcing has the potential to reduce the cost of it dramatically. As it turns out, this potential negative effect has been realized: Here’s an article describing how rewards (offer) systems in online games are allowing the health insurance industry to get gamers to fill out surveys and send letters to their representatives. Done well, this would be very difficult to distinguish from genuine political expression. Thanks to Health Policy Dialog for the link.

I just saw Objectified at Yerba Buena, last week. I enjoyed getting a peek into the minds of the most respected industrial designers of the last few decades, but it disappointed me as commentary on the profession’s attempts to fill a larger societal role.

Good parts: the visuals were great. If you’re easily distracted by beautiful, manufactured objects (me == guilty), then you’ll enjoy all the nicely-shot closeups of everything from toothpicks to cars. There’s also a good amount of factory porn (CNC machines, injection molding, extrusions) which I particularly enjoy, since I love to see how things are made.

The interviews with the designers are also good. As with many documentaries I like, the filmmaker is silent, letting his subjects do all the talking. We get alternately profound and amusing glimpses into these designer’s minds, understanding how varied their design processes are (and how strange their obsessions.)

Where the documentary began to disappoint me was after an interview with Paola Antonelli (a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.) She provided an interesting voice for design, looking to a future where designer’s role has significantly expanded. Moving past the formal aspects of an object, it’s symbolic meaning, and even its immediate consumer context, she described a role for designers at the highest level of policy (politics, regulation, etc.) She believes that designers should be involved in any place where society’s behaviors are considered, where a system interacts with people.

As an aspirational voice, Antonelli’s point was well made. But that’s not where the profession is, right now, and the documentary doesn’t really provide a strong critique of that lofty aim. There is a well-justified angst these days in the design community over the role that designers have in fueling the endless and accelerating cycle of resource use that we have no hope of sustaining for more than a few generations. True, design is a valuable way to understand how people inhabit the world and to shape their experiences. But the vast majority of design occurring these days is simply a method of creating fashionable things that drive sales. Rob Walker (New York Times Magazine) takes aim at this, briefly, but then to address the point, the film shifts focus to IDEO headquarters where they are hard at work at minimizing the waste in… toothbrushes. The solution? A permanent handle with disposable heads. This Core77 review resonated with me:

At around the three-quarter mark in the film I started to squirm in my seat. The movie’s exploration of the relationship between human and object was all very interesting, but I started to wonder, Is this film going to be critical at all? And wouldn’t you know it, the very next scene cut to footage of e-waste processing centers, with CRT housings being disassembled, parts crashing, tumbling into massive steel bins, and (finally) some mention of what the impacts of all these objects that these venerated designers dream up might be. (Funny that I was relieved to see the dark side rearing its head! Like in all good narratives, no conflict no story.) Again, some good commentary by Rawsthorn, and then some follow up at IDEO, but I couldn’t help feeling that this essential part of the story of stuff was getting severely, almost negligently, shortchanged. I’ve been banging the “designers aren’t in the artifact business, they’re in the consequence business” drum for a long time now, so I wanted Gary to hold this foot closer to the fire.

This is a failing of the entire capitalist system as we’ve structured it so far, so you may say that it’s unfair to put too much blame at the feet of the lowly designer. But if designers are attempting to elevate their profession to the level of policy, I think it’s fair to point out how often they have failed to take the larger effects of their work into consideration.

Here’s another quick roundup of recent, interesting talks.

Saul Griffith: Inventing a super-kite to tap the energy of high-altitude wind

This is a short update on what Makani Power is up to. Some inspiring videos of their efforts to harness high-altitude wind power (the second most-plentiful renewable energy source, after solar.) It looks like they have the autonomous kite-flying control systems working; impressive!

P.W. Singer: Military robots and the future of war

“In this powerful talk, P.W. Singer shows how the widespread use of robots in war is changing the realities of combat.” Singer discusses the reality of automated warfare currently in play in the Middle East. There are many complicated, troubling implications of this shift in warfare. For example, remote killing distances our soldiers from the physical violence that they inflict. The violence is put at a remove, and the resulting recorded media loses its context. A lot of clips of drone strikes are online. Soldiers will often to refer to them as “war porn” and set them to music. On the other hand, the availability of this systematic video and data collection provides opportunities for public oversight.

Another point: automated warfare may lose for us the war of ideas that we are waging against insurgent groups. Here’s the contrast between the message intended and the perception on the ground:

Bush administration official: “It plays to our strength. The thing that scares people is our technology.”

Lebanese news editor: “This is just another sign of the cold-hearted, cruel Israelis and Americans who are cowards because they send out machines to fight us. They don’t want to fight us like real men. They are afraid to fight. We just have to kill a few of their soldiers to defeat them.”

Dan Ariely asks, Are we in control of our own decisions?

“Behavioral economist Dan Ariely, the author of Predictably Irrational, uses classic visual illusions and his own counterintuitive (and sometimes shocking) research findings to show how we’re not as rational as we think when we make decisions.”

Ariely gives a quick summary of several studies that show clearly how the presentation of various options can affect the choices we make. There are clear implications on user interface design, here.

This post isn’t really a set of notes. I was working during the keynotes with only one ear open to the talks. My ears perked up now and again during Tim O’Reilly’s talks. Here are little decontextualized nuggets that caught my attention:

• Tim uses the term “information shadows,” to refer to the unique identifiers and metadata around things in the world. The virtual side of Bruce Sterling’s “splimes.”
• Owning a namespace (@nagutron) is super powerful. Interesting that this convention actually came from the users. Contrast to the long facebook profile URL with id string; people don’t really feel like they own those.
• Clever bit of data harvesting: Power spikes when appliances start up have signatures that can actually identify make and model (AMEE, power monitoring startup in UK, discovered this.)
• “Antigenic cartography” is the term for 2d and 3d visualizations of genetic traits of related organisms. Used for flu virus mutation drift tracking.
• We are beginning to develop a “planetary skin” of sensor data. Tracking every bit of the planet’s health and human behavior. It’s still low-res, but just the beginning. Web 2.0 + World = “Web Squared”
• The Power of Less – Moore’s Law applied to world problems. Change the mindset to exponentially increasing efficiency.
• Gov 2.0 Summit

Workshop Title
Designing Social Websites

Presenter
Christina Wodtke (Boxes and Arrows)

It’s true. I attended two workshops pretty much on the same topic. The information presented in each was quite different, though, so it was good to have absorbed both.

Instructables has implemented a hodge-podge of social features, many of which have increased user engagement. But it’s hard to know how to move forward: How do we tie these together? What’s the full set of user behaviors we’re ultimately aiming to support?

The prior workshop (my last post) went into detail on a comprehensive set of social software design patterns. What problems can be addressed, what behaviors encouraged, and how? Christina Wodtke’s talk delved deeper into the theory of social software. What is the case for doing it in the first place?

In this workshop, Instructables was used as a case study at several points in small groups and by the whole room. I gleaned a lot of insight from these conversations on why social features would improve Instructables, and how. More importantly, I’m recognizing now that a number of buzz-worthy features won’t actually benefit us much.

Detailed notes, links, images, and the full slide deck can be found after the jump.

Note: By the way, I’ve noticed upon reading over my notes that it can be unclear what parts are the speaker’s thoughts and which are my comments. Sometimes my interjections are bolded, sometimes they are in brackets, and sometimes neither. I hope it can be inferred from context, but I apologize for any confusion.

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Workshop Title
Designing Social Interfaces: Principles, Best Practices and Patterns for Designing the Social Web

Presenters
Erin Malone (Tangible UX) and Christian Crumlish (Yahoo!)

This was the first workshop I attended this week, on Tuesday. Malone and Crumlish have done a ton of work assembling a comprehensive set of design patterns that can be applied to social software. In their workshop, they ran through a number of scenarios, each showing how various patterns might be applied.

What’s interesting here is that each pattern codifies not only the justification for its application, but also the pitfalls that can be associated with each. One example of many: Letting users form an identity through your software forces them behave as there is now something at stake. Give them a reputation system that incentivizes too much competition, however, and your networks will break down.

Detailed notes, links, images, and the full slide deck can be found after the jump.

Note: I mention Christina Wodtke’s presentation a number of times in my notes. This was a workshop on the same topic that I attended later that day. Those notes will come my next post.

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This short biopic essay discusses a trend linking India and its diaspora that would be great to see to this extent in Vietnam. Snippet:

Our parents’ generation helped India from afar. They sent money, advised charities, guided hedge-fund dollars into the Bombay Stock Exchange. But most were too implicated in India to return. Our generation, unscathed by it, was freer to embrace it.

Countries like India once fretted about a “brain drain.” We are learning now that “brain circulation,” as some call it, may be more apt.

India did not export brains; it invested them. It sent millions away. In the freedom of new soil, they flowered. They seeded a new generation that, having blossomed, did what humans have always done: chase the frontier of the future.

We’re developing a new set of features at Instructables, with the potential of making it easier for many new users to interact with (and get useful information from) the site. With that lowered bar, however, comes an increase in the many problems of social software and group interactions online. To prepare, I’ve been reading about a lot of similar features on other sites.

While surfing, I came across this entertaining piece by Clay Shirky: a 2003 ETech talk entitled “A Group is its Own Worst Enemy.” I’ve included a snippet below; click through to see my outline, which I created simply as a crib sheet to refer back to in the future.

Writing social software is hard. And, as I said, the act of writing social software is more like the work of an economist or a political scientist. And the act of hosting social software, the relationship of someone who hosts it is more like a relationship of landlords to tenants than owners to boxes in a warehouse.

The people using your software, even if you own it and pay for it, have rights and will behave as if they have rights. And if you abrogate those rights, you’ll hear about it very quickly.

[...]

The patterns here, I am suggesting, both the things to accept and the things to design for, are givens. Assume these as a kind of social platform, and then you can start going out and building on top of that the interesting stuff that I think is going to be the real result of this period of experimentation with social software.

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