UX + Community Building

UX Design + Community Jason Sack Director of User Experience, Zeus Jones April 6, 2009 - MinneWebCon, University of Minnesota

Participate & Interact @jasonsack / #mwc09 (twitter) drop.io/minnewebcon (chat, comment, upload) jasonsack.com (my blog)

What is Experience Design? It can be a struggle to understand new design forms. As Marshall McLuhan said, we look at the present through a rear-view mirror.1 Here are some definitions of experience design according to some widely respected thinkers:

NN/g User Experience [Design]: encompasses all aspects of the end-user’s interaction with the company, its services, and its products.2

Bruce Sterling Experience Design is: the most imperialistic of all design disciplines to date.3

Jesse James Garrett User Experience Design is: Designing any kind of product in a way that takes into account the psychology and the behavior of the people who use the product.4

Another Suggestion Experience Design is an approach to solving problems that is: • media agnostic • interdisciplinary • holistic • driven by a deep understanding of human behavior, cognition, capacities, desires, and context.

What is Community? An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.5 -Martin Luther King Jr.

Community is (Inter)action A community is not merely a group of individuals. It is created by the interaction of those individuals. A group can be static, but a community is dynamic and adaptive. German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies identified two major types of communities: Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft6.

Types of Community Gemeinschaft (community) organized around common goals, shared interests built on support and solidarity a neighborhood rather than a society

Types of Community Gesellschaft (society/company) organized around self-interests industrial/capital context consumption/material focus

Participatory Design Socialization is broken, because the system behind it, the national society, is being dissolved by network agents. We are in a position to design experiences that support community building using interaction and existing human behavior, rather than controlling or interrupting it. A variety of participatory systems can empower positive group interaction: • Structured • Organic • Hybrid

Participatory Design Experience design that empowers community must be built on what Mozilla’s Mark Surman calls an architecture of participation.7 Some examples of participatory design: • Ancient Rome: Villa dei Misteri • Medieval Europe: Cathedrals • DIY Community: Burning Man • Hybrid Digital Experiences: Usemore

Ancient Experience Design Villa of the Mysteries, Pompeii - 60 B.C.E.

Villa of the Mysteries The ancient Roman villa Immersion contains a community center Narrative wherein participants were initiated into the Dionysian Illusion Mysteries through an elaborate, Entheogens guided ritual. Exclusivity The ritual produced an ecstatic connection with the divine consciousness through the use of a variety of interactive experiences.

Villa of the Mysteries Immersion The hall was designed to evoke a state of profound unity with the narrative, acted out as part of the ritual through interactions with the initiates and the mural itself. 8

Villa of the Mysteries Narrative Initiates were guided through an interaction with the prime players in the divine mythology, becoming participants in the sacred.

Villa of the Mysteries Illusion Some interactions drew power from illusions, such as the convex mirror being used in conjunction with a death mask, causing the viewer to believe to have been miraculously transformed.

Villa of the Mysteries Entheogens After fasting for nine days, initiates began the ritual by drinking of the Kykeon. Anthropologists believe that the Kykeon may have been a psychoactive compound that amplified the effects of the experience. The ritual manifested death and rebirth among the initiates, a catharsis which created intense bonds amongst the initiates.9

Villa of the Mysteries Exclusivity The Dionysian Mystery Cults were effective spiritual communities, in part because no one, under pain of death, could reveal what happened within the sanctuary. Nothing builds engagement like a secret. Which reminds me - is Gmail still in beta?

Fast Forward One Millennium...

Cathedrals Educational Symbolism Narrative Inspirational/Engaging Sensory Devices Scale Interaction System for Community Interaction Schools Marketplaces Civic Centers

Chartres Cathedral, France Symbolism: Sculptural Portal Decoration

Cathédrale Notre-Dame, Paris, France Narrative: Weighing of Souls

Franziskanerkirche, Salzburg Germany Scale: Architecture and Engineering

Coutances Cathedral, France Sensory Devices: Space and Light

Incense Sensory Devices: Scent

Chartres Cathedral, France Interaction: Labyrinth

Fast Forward 900 Years...

Burning Man Black Rock City is a kind of Petri dish, and Burning Man is an experiment in generating culture.10 Burning Man is a reaction to a fabricated world of vicarious experience, a world yearning for community.

Burning Man We need some deep and drastic therapy to break this spell. We need to reestablish contact with our inner selves. We need to reinvent a public world. We need immediate connection to the natural world of vital need. And this is where my work and the experiment called Burning Man comes in.12 - Larry Harvey

Burning Man Creative Community The Burning Man event is governed by the 10 principles of Burning Man, which are radical inclusion, gifting, decommodification, radical self-reliance, radical self-expression, communal effort, civic responsibility, leaving no trace, participation, and immediacy.11

Burning Man The touchstone of value in our culture will always be immediacy: experience before theory, moral relationships before politics, survival before services, roles before jobs, embodied ritual before symbolism, work before vested interest, participant support before sponsorship.13

Burning Man These artists are not thinking about the likelihood of selling their work; rather, they are creating it as a gift to the community ... This kind of creative freedom seems to encourage collaboration and cooperation between artists, rendering competition somewhat irrelevant.14

Hybrid Experience Design

Hybrid Experience Design Help the citizens of Austin live more sustainably using currently available technology and social media principles. Rather than focus on changing behavior by helping us use less, we can focus on doing more with the excess resources we already have. This platform empowers community by connecting individuals and groups with common needs and goals.

Types of Community Experience Villa dei Notre Dame Burning Man Usemore Misteri Gesellschaft Gemeinschaft Structured Organic Open Adaptable Sustainable Interactive

Decentralized Culture Decentralized community flows from decentralized media, but we are in the adolescence of the network age. How can we stay forward-looking and build community experiences in today’s transitional culture? 19th century urban planner Ebenezer Howard suggested that radical hopes for a cooperative civilization could be fulfilled only in small communities embedded in a decentralized society.15 It is these small communities that we can build and connect.

Designing for Community We design experiences and systems that consider existing behavior and support positive change. We design interactive experiences that help each other to move from consumption to conversation. We challenge old ways of thinking. We think globally, and act locally. We close the gap between our old habits and our new awareness of interconnectedness.

Thanks. @jasonsack / #mwc09 (twitter) drop.io/minnewebcon (chat, comment, upload) jasonsack.com (my blog)

References 1 The Medium is the Massage Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore. 1967. 2 User Experience: Our Definition Nielsen Norman Group. http://www.nngroup.com/about/userexperience.html 3 User Experience Design Bruce Sterling. http://blog.wired.com/sterling/2009/01/user-experience.html 4 Teawith Teresa - Podcast Interview with Jesse James Garrett. http://www.teawithteresa.com/2009/02/what- heck-is-user-experience-design.html 5 The words of Martin Luther King, Jr. Martin Luther King, Coretta Scott King. Newmarket Press, 1984. 6 The city: urban communities and their problems By Alan S. Berger. Brown, 1978. 7ACity That Thinks Like The Web (Draft) Mark Surman, Executive Director - Mozilla Foundation http:// www.slideshare.net/msurman/draft-a-city-that-thinks-like-the-web-presentation 8 Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion by Victor Grau. MIT Press, 2004. 9 TheRoad to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries By R. Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann, Carl A. P. Ruck, Huston Smith 10-14 Burning Man http://www.burningman.com/ 15 Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier By Robert Fishman. MIT Press, 1991. Usemore: (C) 2009, Zeus Jones. All Rights Reserved. Images used under creative commons license, from http://commons.wikimedia.org/

UX + Community Building

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