bjbjq Rikke: In this interview, you will meet Tom Erickson. Tom Erickson is an interaction
designer and researcher. He works for IBM in their social computing group at Watson
lab, in New York. Tom has been working for IBM since 97 and before that, he spent nine
years at Apple. He is the ideal person to tell us about social computing. Tom in your
opinion, what is the best way to do research in social computing? Tom: In my opinion, the
best way is to build a system as quickly as possible and open it to a large group of people.
In social computing, you are really concerned about to what degree the system supports social
behavior among people. That is not really something you can study in a lab. I think
the first thing almost anyone does is the developers start using it themselves. Of course,
just by definition anyone who is developing a social computing system is probably not
a good example of the ultimate users. The sooner you open the doors and get the public
in, or at least your public, the quicker you start learning what works and what doesn I
guess one of my rules of thumb for a system, at least for a social computing system is,
if people don t use it in ways that surprise you then the system if probably a failure
in some sense because you haven t made it robust enough to allow new forms of interaction
to emerge or self organize. Rikke: So you actually think that the programmer just starts
making the social computing system, instead of asking what people need, where should he
or she start? Tom: It depends on what you are trying to do and what the environment
is. Certainly asking what people need is one reasonable way to start or having a vision.
I think you can start from many points. I don t necessarily believe that you need to
start out by doing a needs analysis and then careful sketches, and then interactive prototype
and then user testing and then release the system. That is a perfectly valid way to do
it, but I think it also is reasonable to have the vision, build something, put it out there
and see what happens. That may not fly very well in some of the research community or
perhaps more academically inclined folks, but if you look at a bunch of the systems,
take Slashdot, take Wikipedia. If you did some kind of needs analysis to say, is there
a need for a user generated online encyclopedia, what kind of answer would you have gotten.
I know at IBM, we have a lot of internal debates about instant messaging. We eventually developed
an instant messaging platform called Sing Time, but early on the were questions like,
okay what is going to be the return on investment? Can we show that having this instant messaging
capability is going to make certain business processes more efficient? Those are enormously
hard questions to answer. The moment you start using instant message as part of your life
and you can just IM somebody and get an answer right back, it is clear the kind of value
it adds. To try to ask people ahead of time and say, do you need this that has never been
part of your life, the answers you get may not be very helpful. Again, it is really hard
to show the return on investment argument because typically what these kinds of systems
do is not make things more efficient per say, they qualitively change the type of interaction
going on. It is comparing apples to oranges in trying to say, how much better is this?
It is different. In my mind the ultimate metric is, if you have community of people who are
engaged in some kind of activity who are busy and have a lot of demands on their time, who
are flooded by information. I think that describes a lot of situations. If that community takes
up a system, I think that is a very good indication that it has value. Rikke: Okay, thank you
so much Tom for sharing some of your knowledge and perspectives on social computing. It has
been very interesting. You can also read the chapter Tom has written at HYPERLINK "http://www.interaction-design.org"
www.interaction-design.org . You can find similar chapters all written by leaders and
inventors. You can find videos as well. Thanks for watching. Social Computing How to do http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dmg3UhhypbU
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