Boyd Autistic Social Software 2005

Summary

The author claims that the way that social software (Friendster, LinkedIn, etc.) is designed to be used models how autistic people or people with Asperger's Syndrome are taught to engage in social interactions: programmatically. "Step by step, we dissect social affect and try to formalize it so that these kids can understand the world" (p. 3). Current social software codifies social interaction in much the same way, but this does not anyone's actual needs, and in fact people will typically try to find ways around the built in social interaction rituals (p. 4-5), if they do not abandon the product altogether.

The paper suggests that designers should design social software around how people actually interact (using a user-driven iterative design methodology (p. 6)) instead of rigidly modeling poorly understood behaviors and offering the resultant product to people to use.

Critique

Very familiar: this is the agile software methodology manifesto from the perspective of social software, detailing why current design methodology does not work. Seems like an indictment of positivist design of social software.