news

I'd like to form a news-reading group as a way to combat information anxiety. I'll read the New York Times and the Economist, someone else can keep track of gizmodo and engadget, and a third person will pay attention to the science rags, etc etc....
We'll all post the most interesting and relevant story or two on FB, and - assuming I ever socialize enough to make this feasible - we can be confident that stray trivia or current events needed to solve a design project or win a friendly debate are likely to be in the room.
This is not too different from what I see happening on my facebook feed this morning - just that it would be a little more coordinated. Maybe I could link my web browser with several other peoples' and see stories (or sources) that nobody in my group has looked at yet (probably that the general population [or even better some specialized population(s)] has indicated is worthwhile) highlighted or pushed towards the top of a list.
Or I could create a list of all the world's news sources and invite a few of my friends with a similar viewpoint to sign up and select the ones they're responsible for. The list would prompt each of us to read stories, type in a summary of what we've been reading, and keep track of what %ge of the content we've been covering.

nudging interactions

Even reading just the introduction to "Nudge" by thaler and sunstein inspires me to recast interaction design as the art of offering unlimited options in a manageable way. Or, equivalently, to recast their book as an exploration of how to embody Cooper's "novice, intermediate, expert" framework for interface design (which provides for multiple depths of learning-curves -> multiple densities of information for different user types) in other contexts.

While I'll probably soon find that they authors have already clarified all the following in the body of the book, I'll lay out my thoughts before they get all tainted and warped:
- Nudge asserts that there is some overlap between traditional (economic) costs/incentives and "cognitive effort" (and presumably other various) costs/incentives - but I think this might better be summarized simply as time. Cognitive efforts (research, analysis, interpretation) always require time, and other activities that benefit decisions - while they partially overlap cognitive efforts (reading, identifying what to read, formulating the question to ask someone) - require little or no cognitive effort (asking for an opinion, looking at more choices, sleeping on it) but always require time.
- Another way to approach this is that people just don't pay attention. Perhaps it should be a core principle (of industrial design? interaction design?) that the design should support the greatest range of awareness possible. This would mean that the design provides rich, pleasurable functionality whether the user is a total novice with zero interest in the item itself or a total geek who documents every aspect of the experience cycle. i.e. let the device play as big or as small a part in the user's life as the user may desire.

internet privacy

I want to hold some kinda workshop/collaborative brainstorming to help sort out ways to build confidence in a web anonymity and/or verification bank.
A list of issues I've personally seen this apply to:
- how to get gang members and/or victims to trust that a CeaseFire crowdsourced neighborhood activity website isn't recording their identity?
- what's the right level of detail to share in a diet/exercise monitoring group app?
- in Facebook, as well as every mobile app project I've designed: how to give users detailed control over which bits of info (profile, activity, network, etc) are shared with whom (public, friends, specific individuals, custom groups), without overloading them with a complex decision tree?

A list of participants to get all the necessary viewpoints:
- somebody who has worked for Verisign or any of its ilk
- a couple programmers
- interaction designers (of course)
- one of those behavioral econs, or anybody familiar with the psychology of trust
- somebody from a social networking anything (Ash Bhoopathy?)
- a couple average users
- somebody who doesn't use online services because of trust reasons
- somebody who's had their identity stolen