#social object

The other day I was thinking about why people buy modern ceramic sculpture and then a fellow artists and friend walked into my studio so I brought up the topic. We immediately agreed, yes, people buy modern ceramic sculpture because it’s beautiful and/or in some way that specific piece of fine art speaks to their soul, even if they’re not able to verbalize it. 

Then she brought up Hugh MacLoed’s work on social objects….and I was like…what is that? She said ‘Social objects are objects that start conversations and bring people together.’ She said your organic ceramic sculpture or modern ceramic table lamps are a perfect example of this…

Fine Art as a Social Object

When you walk into a room in someone’s home, people often comment on how beautiful the room is, how beautiful the view is especially if you live here in Asheville, or they focus on a specific object in the room and either tell you that they think its beautiful and/or they as you about it…that’s why people like paintings or organic ceramic sculpture that has a story to go with it. People like to feel like they’re bringing, not only a beautiful inspiring work of art into their homes, but also a good story.

Social Objects in my Own Home

This, I can certainly identify with. As I’ve mentioned in previous blogs, I have a large collection of art from Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia, and South America. I LOVE it when people ask me about the art or strange objects hanging from my walls. I have to admit…sometimes I even get a bit disappointed when people don’t. And that is because I want to share the stories of my adventures and travels…in my head I’m thinking oh please ask me about the two red and gold icons above my tv so I can tell you all about my trips to Veliko Tarnovo.  Veliko Tarnovo is this gorgeous city built on a cliff with a medieval castle, which I often visited while I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Bulgaria. I bought the icons while I was there on this great relaxing weekend with my friend Wendy…who I later visit in Alaska….see… I even want to tell you all about it!

Starting Conversations Around Organic Ceramic Sculpture

Having social objects in your home are especially appealing when you are entertaining especially when they’re people you don’t necessarily know that well. Instead of having to go through the laundry list of everyday questions like ‘What do you do for fun?’ ‘Have you been to any good restaurants lately?’, you can instead use your organic ceramic sculpture (or painting or modern ceramic table lamps) as a conversation starter to lead into what hopefully will be a much more interesting conversation than you would otherwise have. In my own home,  it is my modern ceramic table lamps that are dotted throughout…those who don’t know me well Always ask me about them..

I’m fascinated by this concept now and definitely plan to delve into it more deeply. In the mean time, I invite you to think about what the social objects are in your home? 

Update: a more thorough explanation of the label here:

Two strains of thought converged recently for thesis.

The first was the idea of a nutritional label for bills, which was suggested to me by Michael Tofias. How do I distill the complexity of a bill into a compact piece of graphic that can be quickly absorbed?

The second was the idea of a social object, which invites the public to look at something together and converse over it. The idea comes from museum design literature, but social objects exists on the web as well. The YouTube video embed and the 9gag watermarked memes are prime examples. Both of these float out in the web, and invite visitors back to the platform.

For Project L, the label and the social object is the same thing.

So this is my first crack at it. I tried to visually convey six primary pieces of information: summary, scope, urgency, probability of passage, process, and bill content. How will I get this information? Luckily, a lot of this information is available through the efforts of other civic hackers. e.g.:

Summary, passage probability, and bill stage: opencongress.org

Bill content information: The IBM folks behind manybills.researchlabs.ibm.com has an algorithm for auto detecting the topic of a section of a bill!

Scope and Urgency: This seems to be the hardest part. Adler and Wilkerson outlined a method for coding in their paper, but there no way to currently automate it.

I'd love to hear suggestions for solving the scope/urgency coding problem, as well as feedback on the graphic design of the label!

p.s. Hurricane Sandy may be the best thing to happen to my thesis this week.

p.p.s. Some process sketches

After finishing our assigned reading for Public Interfaces,  Jyri Engeström’s article on object oriented sociality and Nina Simon’s “A Poetic Take on Social Objects", I began to think about how we share information in a small space, namely in the office or home. Simon talked about a “third thing” that facilitates a connection between one person (one thing) and another (second thing). The “thing”, in the context of social networks, relates to a social object that two or more people can share an experience around, whether a tangible object, shared time, or interest.

In our lectures, Ian Curry and Jake Barton have discussed the social object in the context of a public interface – a piece or object that brings people together and is the focus of a collective attention. With communication facilitated around a social object, strangers can engage in a conversation. On a smaller scale, a water cooler is a classic example of a social object in an office setting. A social object in the modern office could be a YouTube clip or I Can Has Cheezburger? link shared among co-workers. In the home, a social object can be a dinner table. These instances bridge a communication gap, promoting triangulation – serendipitous moments brought on by a shared interface.

In association with triangulation, Fritz Heider proposed the Balance Theory which postulates the psychological balance between two people depends on the similarity of their emotional valence. Relating to a public interface, the positive experience one person has with an installation while standing next to another person having a similar experience can spontaneously create an affinity between strangers, i.e. triangulation. This may shed light on, for example, the reasons for a trying experience between customer, cashier, and credit card reader, whereby the potential for triangulation has been usurped by a functionally confusing social object. 

Short Story

I've been interested in geeklist after hearing about it from a friend and wanted to try it. I still think it has potential but I absolutely HATE how they're promoting their service. 

Details

For me, social networking is nice way to get information that is interesting to me. The social aspect increases the potential for  interesting content to me because I trust people that I know that whatever they deemed worthy is worthy of my attention too.

Simple, right? Things that are truly good will spread to people that are the most interested because people with same interests/tastes are more likely to talk to each other. 

Not everyone sees it that way. We see a trend of promoting on social networks more and more. Sometimes, it's the disgusting yet very obvious "Tweet/Like this and you'll get X". Sometimes, it's contests (even ones involving skills) that require some kind of promotion on facebook/twitter to be eligible. I'm pretty sure most people are like me and hate this. Some might still do it because it's easy and does no harm (or so it seems).    

So far, I've stayed far from organisation/individuals involved in such practices. Enter geeklist. A trusted friend tweeted about it and I went and looked at their thing. The idea was nice (a site for developers to post micro-achievements) but there was this again, they wanted me to tweet about them as I was signing up and told me I would get quicker access to the private beta if I followed them, tweeted about them, etc. I was starting to get annoyed but I still found their service intriguing. I didn't start following them right away. However, after speaking with my friend about them, I got more curious and I followed away.

I started being flooded with tweets about people being granted access, quick invitation for people to tweet about them to get access, etc. I was more than annoyed but I figured I shouldn't dismiss their otherwise promising application just because their marketing techniques were irritating. I even went so far as to tweet an honest, originally composed tweet about them. I got some of their attention but no access. I thought meh, I could just wait for it to be open to everyone. I was still following them. That's when a trend of insignificant "cards" being retweeted by the geeklist folks started pouring. I started losing confidence. When their winner for the 100th card of the day was announced, I gave up:

I created the 100th achievement card 19th September 2011 

It seems that they're not just promoting badly on twitter, they're also promoting the less interesting usage of their service. 

In ordine dal più vecchio al più giovane:

http://gapingvoid.com/2007/12/31/social-objects-for-beginners/

http://gapingvoid.com/2008/01/02/why-the-social-object-is-the-future-of-marketing/

http://antoniotombolini.simplicissimus.it/2008/01/il-social-object-spiegato-agli-idioti.html