As we use social tools on the web, design patterns are emerging. Social design must be organic, not static, emotional, not data-driven. A social experience builds on relationships, not transactions.
In 2008, Yahoo!'s Christian Crumlish introduced the idea of social design patterns to BayCHI. He returns in 2010 to share what he learned over two years. With his Yahoo! colleague Erin Malone, Christian created a wiki to gather social design patterns and published a snapshot of the wiki in book form.
Among the many principles of social design, Christian presents five:
Christian then describes five practices:
Finally, he discusses five anti-patterns, commonly-used design choices that appear to solve a problem but that can backfire and pollute of the commons. Examples:
Christian stresses that social design is an ecosystem in which designers must balance many trade-offs. Not every design pattern applies to every application, but good designers can use patterns to strike a balance that works.
Christian Crumlish announces in this talk his new position as director of Consumer Experience at AOL. Previously, at Yahoo!, he was well known as curator of Yahoo!'s Pattern Library, although he preferred to describe himself as a pattern detective. He was a design evangelist on the Yahoo! Developer Network team and helped develop the Yahoo! Open Strategy.
Christian has been participating in, analyzing, designing, and drawing social-interactive spaces online since 1994. He is the author of the bestselling The Internet for Busy People (McGraw-Hill, 1994), and The Power of Many: How the Living Web is Transforming Politics, Business, and Everyday Life (Sybex, now Wiley, 2004). He has spoken about social patterns at BarCamp Block, BayCHI, South by Southwest, the IA Summit, Ignite 2 (SF Web 2.0 Expo), and iPhoneDevCamp.
Christian has a Bachelor's Degree in Philosophy from Princeton. He is currently serving on the board of directors of the Information Architecture Institute as Director of Technology. He is also co-chair of the monthly program for BayCHI.
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