Creating Community Environments

We are an ITP class (at NYU) exploring network interactions and implementations. This is a class blog. The post archive is from the Fall 2010 and Fall 2011 semesters, when the previous iteration of this class, "Creating Community Environments" was taught. Syllabus for the new Fall 2013 class over here.

[studiox-nyc]

As part of our continued interest in flow, here is an interesting article in the new journal Nautilus on the spontaneous occurrence of traffic jams and their relation to the behaviors of shockwaves in fluids. And, as you depart into Friday afternoon traffic, here is an anxiety-inducing video modeling how traffic waves emerge within closed systems.

  Circular Road 22 Cars from Nautilus on Vimeo.

[loyalcx]

It’s not the product that should be insanely great, but the experience of being your user.

Paul Graham on Doing Things that Don’t Scale

It’s the high-touch efforts—the things that will never scale—that often make the difference between success and failure. Delight your users, and create an amazing experience:

You should take extraordinary measures not just to acquire users, but also to make them happy. For as long as they could (which turned out to be surprisingly long), Wufoo sent each new user a hand-written thank you note. Your first users should feel that signing up with you was one of the best choices they ever made. And you in turn should be racking your brains to think of new ways to delight them.

It’s the small things that make all the difference.

(via loyalcx)

[blackbeardblog-blog]

There are obvious differences between the sites, driven by their interfaces - Reddit is discursive in a way Pinterest generally isn’t. But similarities too - both are what anthropologist Mizuko Ito calls “communities of interest" rather than “communities of friendship" - online networks whose connective tissue is shared passions rather than real-world proximity or real-life networks. 

[trentgilliss]

Self-absorption in all its forms kills empathy, let alone compassion. When we focus on ourselves, our world contracts as our problems and preoccupations loom large. But when we focus on others, our world expands. Our own problems drift to the periphery of the mind and so seem smaller, and we increase our capacity for connection ― or compassionate action.

—Daniel Goleman, from Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships

(via trentgilliss)

[explore-blog]

We are all compromisers. Did you tweet vicious language about MakerBot from your iPhone or iPad? Are you reading this on a Dell, a Sony, an HP laptop, a Blackberry phone? Then you bought a closed source product. What kind of a fundamentalist are you? I know I’m a terrible one, because, as much as I disagree with Apple’s corporate strategy, you can have my MacBook Air when you pry it from — strike that. You can have it when the newer, shinier one comes out. When that happens, I’ll be even happier if Apple takes a step in the direction of openness. Probably won’t happen, but, like the dog that goes happily to the front door when the doorbell rings even though it’s never for him, I am an idealist. One dynamic that happens in a lot of idealist communities: we praise our opponents who make even a small step in our direction, but we attack our own mercilessly when they make even a small step away from us. It’s counter-productive.

Tom Igoe in defense of open-source innovation and polite disagreement – the most lucid, thoughtful take on the recent MakerBot controversy. 

(↬ @blprnt)

[poptech]

It’s not the severity of the disaster that causes us to want to help, it’s whether or not we see ourselves in the victims.

David DeSteno examines the mechanisms of the mind that shape social behavior. (via poptech)

[treedance]

5 Things Every Presenter Should Know About People

Brain Pickings:

In 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People (public library), Dr. Susan Weinschenk unpacks the secrets of eliciting response from people — the core purpose of design, it’s been argued — through a combination of behavioral science, psychology, and practical examples to alleviate the misery and mystery of public speaking. 

This great short animated teaser offers five of the most essential secrets to a great presentation, whatever your discipline or topic.

FJP: If more people could keep these things in mind when explaining their work, we’d all be learning a lot more.

[jacks]

us·er /ˈyo͞ozər/

Noun 1. A person who uses or operates something, esp. a computer or other machine. 2. A person who takes illegal drugs; a drug user.

Synonyms consumer

During a Square Board meeting, our newest Director Howard Schultz, pulled me aside and asked a simple question.

“Why...

[joshbyard]

[itsokaytobesmart]

We’ve seen slime molds “chase” their dinner, and we’ve seen them recreate the Tokyo rail system (whoa!) by maximizing efficiency in growth … now the ability to “map” their surroundings without “mapping”?

From joshbyard:

Brainless Slime Molds Shed Light On The Evolution of Memory

“We have shown for the first time that a single-celled organism with no brain uses an external spatial memory to navigate through a complex environment,” said Christopher Reid from the University’s School of Biological Sciences.

…“Results from insect studies, for example ants leaving pheromone trails, have already challenged the assumption that navigation requires learning or a sophisticated spatial awareness. We’ve now gone one better and shown that even an organism without a nervous system can navigate a complex environment, with the help of externalized memory.”

The research method was inspired by robots designed to respond only to feedback from their immediate environment to navigate obstacles and avoid becoming trapped. This “reactive navigation” method allows robots to navigate without a programmed map or the ability to build one and slime molds use the same process.

When it is foraging, the slime mold avoids areas that it has already “slimed,” suggesting it can sense extracellular slime upon contact and will recognize and avoid areas it has already explored.

…“We then upped the ante for the slime molds by challenging them with the U-shaped trap problem to test their navigational ability in a more complex situation than foraging. We found that, as we had predicted, its success was greatly dependent on being able to apply its external spatial memory to navigate its way out of the trap.”

(via Brainless slime mold uses external spatial ‘memory’ to navigate complex environments | KurzweilAI)

[beingblog]

“I define connection as the energy that exists between people when they feel seen, heard, and valued; when they can give and receive without judgement; and when they derive sustenance and strength from the relationship.”

~Brené Brown from The Gifts of Imperfection

photo by Willem J. Pollen (Taken with Instagram)

[thekhooll-deactivated20210705]

Musical Swings

A giant collective instrument made of 21 musical swings; each swing in motion triggers different notes, all the swings together compose a piece, but some sounds only emerge from cooperation. The project stimulates ownership of the new space, bringing together people of all ages and backgrounds, and creating a place for playing and hanging out in the middle of the city centre.

[literaryjukebox]

Visit Original Link

We are the sum of all people we have ever met; you change the tribe and the tribe changes you.

Dirk Wittenborn in Fierce People

Song: “The Tribe” by Helmut

bandcamp

[theatlantic]

Here, but Not Here: Family Portraits Held Together by Skype

We live in a world in which some of the people we are closest to are often not near us at all.

When we document our day-to-day existence in photographs and Instagrams, these people are absent. Their presence in our lives is absent in our digital memories. 

Photographer John Clang’s series Being Together seeks to correct this. Using Skype and projectors, he captures families visually as they are virtually. 

“In these images,” Clang told me over email, “I am marking the time for these families, enabling them to remember these strange moments of togetherness with the technology presently available. The picture doesn’t stop here, it lingers on in their memory. It embraces the intimacy and closeness of a family, no matter how far apart they are.”

Read more. [Images: John Clang]

[curiositycounts]

Trailer for The Universal Language, a new documentary tracing the history of Esperanto, the artificial language created in the late 1800s by a Polish eye doctor with the vision of a global tongue. 

[communitp]

You can pay and download this documentary here. And remember when we read Arika Okrent's book, In the Land of Invented Languages? Part of her interview in the documentary is included in the trailer above.

[communitp]

Thanks for a great semester

Another semester of CommunITP ("Creating Community Environments") at NYU's ITP graduate program has come to a close. 

For more information about the course, watch this space. And you can contact the professor, Kristen Taylor, by emailing her at her first name at kthread dot com. 

We'll continue reblogging here as we find more posts about our favorite topics of community, storytelling, narrative, and content experiments.

[communitp]

Babies + Kanye/Jay = Hilarity

These haven't made it up on knowyourmeme yet (as far as I could find), but you can find more on the single greatest tumblr of 2011:  watchthecradle.tumblr.com

SEE ALSO:

[communitp]