social-design.net

A BUDDHIST PERSPECTIVE ON PLAYING

admin — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 11:25:43 +0000

When an old buddhist monk visited France and saw some pensioners playing petanque he was quite surprised by that and said something like this: “How can they be playing like children and wasting their time, when there are much more important things to do? In our country people of this age go into seclusion and train and prepare their mind in order to die well and be reborn into a happy plane of being…I feel pity for them.

BUILDING A GAME LAYER

admin — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 11:24:02 +0000

By now, we’re used to letting Facebook and Twitter capture our social lives on the web — building a “social layer” on top of the real world. At TEDxBoston, Seth Priebatsch looks at the next layer in progress: the “game layer,” a pervasive net of behavior-steering game dynamics that will reshape education and commerce.

Game Theory in Action

admin — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 08:20:23 +0000

Kwang Lim tells about his collegue Sven Feldman applying a Game Theory Concept – The Gale-Shapley Mechanism – to help a city council matching children to kindergartens. The problems so far were e.g. inefficient matching, an incentive for parents to misrepresent their preferences, and “justified envy“, whereby a student prefers a school S that she was not admitted to, despite having a higher priority than another student who was in fact admitted to school S.
The proposal should supersede the approach used so far and involves the following steps:

In step 1, parents get to propose their first ranked kindergarten. Schools temporarily assign seats to proposers based on their expressed priority, others are rejected. In step 2, each rejected parent proposes her next choice. Schools then consider the pool of accepted students plus the proposer, and update their tentative offers based on expressed priorities. This repeats until a stable state is reached, at which point the tentative offers are finalized. This should keep everybody involved more happy.

Practical applications of game theory are making a difference in daily life.

read full article @ fastthinking.com

56 Million Americans Are Playing Social Games [STATS]

admin — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 12:33:38 +0000

It’s no secret that social games are one of the hottest (and potentially most lucrative) aspects of social networks today.

But it’s a mistake to think that casual, social network-based games are just for web geeks. A new study from market research firm NPD Group shows that one out of every five Americans over the age of six has played an online social game at least once. Altogether, that’s nearly 60 million Americans, adults and kids alike.

For a relatively new entrant to the gaming market, social gaming has made a huge debut.

NEOLUDDISM? NEOLUDISM!

admin — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 09:56:27 +0000

source: www.benjennings.com.au/images/nl_07.gif

Something to welcome or be afraid of. Is there a rise of Neoluddism? Opposed to change and technology replacing humans this term seems to be as anachronoistic as fresh in an Age of ubiquitous technology. Maybe the term Neoludism would be more inspiring…
thefreedictionary.com

PLAY IS MORE THAN FUN

admin — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 16:15:35 +0000

THE SOCIAL NETWORK – trailer

admin — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 15:34:48 +0000

David Fincher made a movie about someone who was still studying 6 years ago…

WHY USER COMPETENCY MATTERS IN SOCIAL DESIGN

admin — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 11:38:34 +0000

Adrian Chan, a social interaction consultant is blogging on Mashable about designing for social participation. His bottom line: Take an interest in what the users are good at.

mashable.com/2010/03/14/social-design-user-competency/

BETTER DESIGN FOR THE GREATER GOOD

admin — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 15:24:28 +0000

Design21 – A network for Social Design in partnership with UNESCO spanning Arts & Culture, Poverty, Well-Being, Communication, Education or Aid. A plattform for people and organizations dealing with with different, but overall ethically biased approaches towards Social Design. The networks mission is to inspire social activism through design. “Social change can happen through design!”

www.design21sdn.com

SOCIAL DESIGN BETWEEN UTOPIA AND EVERYDAY LIFE

admin — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 09:31:23 +0000

“Der Traum einer Sache – Social Design zwischen Utopie und Alltag” was the title of an exhibition at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna lasting from 3.Nov – 12. Dec 2009. The interdisciplinary framework tried to fathom the contemporary concept of “Social Design” by means of discussions, historical roots, motivations and promises displaying artworks, theory and design models. Questions in research were e.g.: “How can we deal with our scarce ressources?”, “How can knowledge be produced and shared?”, “How does all humankind profit from technological developments?”, “How can social problems be made visible?”…

Catalogue and Documentation in German only.