2007/09/29: Social software as formalized autism

Danah Boyd is a Ph.D. student in Judith Donath's Social Media Group at the MIT Media Lab. Her argument is familiar: it's the agile software methodology manifesto from the perspective of social software, oriented towards explaining why current design thinking on social software does not work. It seemed, at first, like an indictment of positivist design of social software (design as an embodiment of scientific principles), but on second read I took it to be a recapitulation of what I was taught as an engineer: understanding the problem is 90% of the solution, and designers don't understand the problem. Namely, how people actually interact, socially.

The author's claim is that social software (Friendster, LinkedIn, etc.) is typically designed in a way that 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 fit anyone's actual needs. 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.