Chris Dickman (bio)

That would seem to be the case with Paul Adams, who is currently also putting the finishing touches on Social Circles: How Offline Relationships Influence Online Behavior and What it Means for Design and Marketing, due for publication by Pearson Education in August. Look for an extract from that on Graphics.com.

Adams' Think Outside In blog embodies his ideas about business and design, which he sums up in the following way: "We need a new skill set, a new way of understanding people. A new way of understanding customers. We need to understand how people think, and what motivates them to behave in certain ways. The best way to do this is to design from the outside in. To observe people in their own environment, probing them so that we understand their behaviour. This understanding enables us to design things that are meaningful and valuable to people. So stop designing products and features, and start designing experiences."

Adams' point is that we need to pay more attention to the way people actually are, rather than basing design decisions on what makes sense to us or what we think will make sense to others. Basing a creation on one's own worldview has its place—notably in the arts, with novelists and visual artists traditionally drawing heavily on their own experiences. But this approach has limits, especially in more rigorous domains. We know now, for example, that Freud based much of his psychoanalytic theory on himself and his immediate family, before extrapolating this to apply to all of humanity, from prehistory to the indefinite future. However, it turned out that (luckily for us) Freud and his family were a one-off. Thus, the resulting dead end of Freudian psychoanalysis can be seen as a textbook case of designing from the inside out.

I mention all this here because Adams recently posted a monster slide deck from a talk he recently gave to the Voices That Matter web design conference. I can't imagine how he managed to get through all 216 slides, but the posted talk, complete with footnotes, is packed with enough insights to keep anyone involved in the web to ponder afresh the increasing role of social interaction. And as you might expect from Adams' Outside In focus he has lots to say about what we can learn from the offline social networks in which we engage. There's also intriguing nuggets, such as evidence gleaned from sources as diverse as Neolithic villages, the Roman army, Wikipedia administrators and online gaming communities to indicate that 150 is the maximum number of people with whom we can maintain weak social ties. Who knew?

I won't comment on more details here but simply encourage you to take your time going through the presentation above. Hats off to Adams for sharing his perspective.

Chris Dickman
Founding Editor, Graphics.com
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