PUBLIC MARKS with search person

“Privacy is conceived of as an interpersonal boundary process by which a person or group regulates interaction with others. By altering the degree of openness of the self to others, a hypothetical personal boundary is more or less receptive to social interaction with others. Privacy is, therefore, a dynamic process involving selective control over a self–boundary, either by an individual or by a group.”

Over the past few months I’ve been talking with many people passionate about Information Visualization who share a sense of saturation over a growing number of frivolous projects. The criticism is slightly different from person to person, but it usually goes along these lines: “It’s just visualization for the sake of visualization”, “It’s just eye-candy”, “They all look the same”.

The following is a highlight of a competitive analysis I did earlier this year when I was involved in designing software that would allow remote research teams to work together. While software is still a long way from replacing all in-person collaboration it's becoming easier for remote or mobile workers to stay productive and communicative with their team. Certainly the tools we have available today are a vast improvement over what I used when I first tried telecommuting 12 years ago!

But sometimes, it makes sense to think of the real world as an interface. To design user interactions that make use of how people actually see the world -to take advantage of first person user interfaces.

A one-sentence overview of the poster concept

A scientific poster is a large document that can communicate your research at a scientific meeting, and is composed of a short title, an introduction to your burning question, an overview of your trendy experimental approach, your amazing results, some insightful discussion of aforementioned results, a listing of previously published articles that are important to your research, and some brief acknowledgement of the tremendous assistance and financial support conned from others—if all text is kept to a minimum, a person could fully read your poster in under 10 minutes.

A while back I wrote a little RDF vocab that extended the 2006 vCard vocab. It introduces a few extra terms which I thought were useful, mostly taken from the vCard 4.0 drafts at the time. e.g. a "lang" property to indicate languages spoken by the person represented. One other thing it has though is a more vCard-like way of representing telephone numbers, e-mail addresses, etc.

karlcow said...

Fascinating and very interesting. I may add another law to your experiment, though it would have to be repeated again to see if it's working.

Law 3: A fractal pattern encourages participation.

A fractal pattern is simple enough that the gratification is direct. One can draw a small shape which already makes sense to the person. (I have participated!). But because of the self-structure of fractal pattern, one is participating to a bigger scheme. Sense of collective achievement with grand goals.

Once the structure is big enough, it becomes visible, organized and then it is an object of power, which in return is its weakness. (Colonial states versus Guerrilla/Terrorism). Wikipedia becomes so big that it fights for copyright or have editors censoring content.

Though I kind of disagree with the conclusion of blogs versus wikis. Blogs are indeed easier to maintain but would it be because wikis are not really object of the commons, aka, there is still someone owning the object, it is a property of someone in the end.

I wonder also if there is a density rule in action. A tribe in a large forest with free will to move as they please versus a piece of land with a lot of people. There is very little destruction when the space is infinite. Take the drawing above and imagine a space which is infinite (possible in digital space), would participant try to destroy the work of others or just go further away to do their own drawing?

May 20, 2009 1:50 PM