Visual and Code

Joel Spolsky linked to this article by Clay Shirky, A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy, which was surprisingly interesting and applicable in many many different contexts, such as Interaction Design and Entrepreneuring, and of course group psychology in general.

Shirky writes

Of the things you have to accept, the first is that you cannot completely separate technical and social issues. There are two attractive patterns. One says, we’ll handle technology over `here, we’ll do social issues there. We’ll have separate mailing lists with separate discussion groups, or we’ll have one track here and one track there. This doesn’t work. It’s never been stated more clearly than in the pair of documents called “LambdaMOO Takes a New Direction.” I can do no better than to point you to those documents.

I would say that this is one of the most central aspects of Interaction Design; one cannot separate the interaction from the technology that realizes the artifact. Much in the same way an architect cannot construct a material free house. It matters (no pun intended :-) what the house is built of and what we see and feel.

The main subject in the article, or talk really, is social software. Anyone who is about to think about such software should read the talk!