Open up your mind and say, ahh...

If you’re like me, you keep whole closets full of old stuff because you know it’d make a cool project (someday). The problem is that day doesn’t always come. Loose Joints, a kit designed by German designer Joscha Weiand, is meant to help you take that DIY furniture project to the next level.

Weiand graduated from Design Academy Eindhoven, where Loose Joints was his thesis project. The set consists of two simple components: seven types of white plastic joints about the size of dice, plus a load of simple wooden poles. It’s up to the user to concoct shapes and forms, which, as Weiand demonstrates, can get surprisingly complex. For example, he’s used the kit to construct a vortex-like cage for a hanging light and a rough facsimile of Marcel Breuer’s Wassily Chair.

The idea behind Loose Joints is to capitalize on what we already own–a bit like a furniture version of F.A.T Lab’s Universal Toy Construction Kit. Weiand says that he wants to empower people to make unique objects using mass-produced materials. “These days many products are mass produced to keep up with demand and lower cost,” he explains. “This means that many of us have exactly the same products in our homes. Loose Joints is a modular system that can be mass produced but can also be used to create unique products.”

Check out more about Loose Joints on Weiand’s website.

Earlier this month, Canonical, the co-creators of Ubuntu–a distribution of the open-source Linux operating system–announced that they were getting into the smartphone business. They previewed an Ubuntu-based smartphone OS with an aggressively gestural UI design. The phone doesn’t have a home button, a slider-based lock screen, a “settings” tile, or an app switcher toggle. Instead, a user accesses these functions by swiping various edges of the screen.

Gestural interfaces–which eschew visual “chrome”-like buttons and tiles in favor of swiping, pressing, or tapping directly on content areas–are just starting to go mainstream. But the Ubuntu phone is going all-in on these new interactions. They’re as baked-in to Ubuntu’s mobile design language as skeuomorphism is to iOS’s. I got in touch with Canonical’s head of design, Ivo Weevers, and Lead Phone UX Designer Mika Meskanen to ask them about jumping into the deep end of gestural interface design. (They responded jointly via email.)

Co.Design: Why did you choose this approach? Was it simply to distinguish from iOS and Android? Or is an “all-gestural” phone OS the future of phones in general?

Canonical: Traditional Japanese architecture teaches us some important design principles about the balance between space and objects. Things that are not needed are not in the way, to allow complete immersion into an activity. Objects are placed around the periphery of the room and so are easily accessible when needed. By studying design cultures like this and how people use their phones, we could design an experience that takes a leap from where mobile user interfaces were until today.

These principles can be seen in Ubuntu’s gesture-based interface, which gives the content or task at hand undivided attention on the screen. Everything else is peripheral, but is easily evoked from the screen’s edges. It means that it’s really easy to switch between favourite and previous applications, and access controls, notifications and settings without ever interrupting the natural flow of activity. Gestures are also very intuitive and give a natural feeling to engaging with your personal content and applications.

Typical phones insist on navigation via hard or soft buttons to go back to a home screen, and eventually to the desired destination. The edges of the screen give immediate access to the features that a user needs the most frequently on a phone.

Co.Design: Exactly what functions can be invoked by swiping from each screen edge, and why?

Canonical: During research, we found that most people use up to ten apps most frequently, so in Ubuntu a left edge swipe quickly reveals a list of these most used apps without ever leaving the current, open app. Swiping right flips between currently open apps. Most of the time, people want to use two or three apps only, and this swipe makes that very easy.

The top edge gives the user access to peripheral but key system tasks, such as accessing and responding to messages, as well as settings such as connecting to wifi, adjusting screen brightness, time, date, and battery life. For these settings, often users just want to take a quick peek or make a swift alteration without having to leave their application, going to a home screen and scrolling through settings, and therefore losing the ‘flow’ of the activity in hand.

The bottom edge of the Ubuntu screen reveals controls for that app only when they are needed, so users are immersed much more into the things that matter more of the time. Most of the time people want to simply engage with content. For example, it is the photos that matter when looking at photos in a hardbound album, not the scissors and tape used to stick them there. Intrusive control buttons or controls constantly available in the interface take away precious real estate, even though they are used only in a minority of situations.

Co.Design: Gestural interfaces have their advantages, but they’re very new and unfamiliar to most people. How do you make these features intuitive and discoverable to new users, when there’s no obvious visual cues or skeuomorphic affordances?

Canonical: Touch interfaces have had the tendency to become very explicit. By consistently using edges instead of physical or software buttons that people have to poke at or aim for, we can leverage a range of human motor skills previously untapped–like muscle memory and finger dexterity.

User research found that gestural interfaces require a short learning curve. However, once learned they are very easy and become natural interactions quickly. There are already clear examples in existing products how the user can be informed effectively about the interactions, and by doing that the user gets access to a whole new world of interactions.

Co.Design: Aren’t design and open-source fundamentally at odds? How can Ubuntu’s design team ensure the best possible user experience when they can’t control what users will do with the software–including modifying, hacking, and forking it?

Canonical: Ubuntu design is led from our exceptional design team based in London, but also through engagement and collaboration at the right levels with other designers and community contributors around the world. There are great examples of co-creation projects that resulted in great products. For example, we have developed our own distinctive Ubuntu font,
which is a great example of a major new design led by our team and developed with the community across the world.

Developers have already shown that the open-source approach can result in great code, so we don’t see why designers can’t achieve the same.

Data privacy officials in Germany have reopened a probe to look deeper at Facebook’s face recognition technology and determine if the social networking giant was collecting member photos without their knowledge.

In June, an investigation into Facebook’s database of pictures — led by data protection commissioner Johannes Casper in Hamburg, was suspended after he said he would give Facebook time to update its policies. After several attempts and no updates, Casper is now reopening the investigation according to The New York Times. He believes that Facebook has been illegally collecting face-recognition data about its members in order to populate its photo tag suggest feature.

However, Facebook told Mashable that the feature is in line with the protection laws in Europe.

“We believe that the photo tag suggest feature on Facebook is fully compliant with EU data protection laws,” a Facebook spokesperson told Mashable. “During our continuous dialogue with our supervisory authority in Europe, the Office of the Irish Data Protection Commissioner, we agreed to develop a best practice solution to notify people on Facebook about photo tag suggest.”

Facebook’s facial-recognition software can sense who is in your pictures and make tagging suggestions. Rather than opting in to the feature, it is rolled out to all accounts and must be opted out if the user chooses to do so.

This was one of several features under scrutiny last year by data protection officials in Ireland. It underwent an audit to see if was legal to obtain this information. Facebook agreed to notify its users in Europe about the photo suggest feature.

Following Facebook’s acquisition of facial-recognition software company Face.com for an undisclosed amount of money in June, some users have expressed concern that the expansion of this type of technology on the social network could encroach on their privacy rights. Facebook hasn’t said what its future plans are for Face.com or its technology.

Image courtesy iStockphoto, youngvet

illustration by matt dartford

For decades, Steve Jobs extolled the virtues of “building the whole widget”–in other words, designing and manufacturing a computer or a digital media player or smartphone as an organic whole, from the molecular materials of the hardware to the abstract bits and bytes of the software. The resulting products may not always have been as inexpensive or utilitarian as the standardized machines that ruled the PC marketplace, but they did always possess the svelte and winsome quality that Apple’s loyal customers love with a passion.

Earlier this summer, Microsoft tried to make like Apple. The company had never itself built computers, out of deference to its many hardware partners, but on June 18, it revealed the results of a three-year secret project: a sleek and distinctive Windows tablet PC called the Surface. No mere iPad knockoff, the Surface is Microsoft’s effort to build a “whole widget” of its own. It could well be the most beautiful and best engineered Windows device ever made. And it has bells and whistles that won’t be easy for Apple to quickly mimic.

Google too has concluded that it can’t really compete against the iPhone long term without its own end-to-end laptops, handsets, and tablets–hence its $13 billion acquisition of Motorola’s cell-phone design and manufacturing business. The Motorola patent portfolio is valuable, to be sure, but Google wants to find a remedy to the fragmented world its Android architecture has fostered. The immense diversity of Android devices and generations of not-quite-compatible operating systems are beginning to look like liabilities, especially to app developers who don’t want to have to support multiple versions of their own products.

So with Google and Microsoft as emerging widgeteers, might Apple finally be losing one of its historic advantages? Hardly.

At the annual World Wide Developers Conference held June 11 in San Francisco–the first big event since the death of Jobs–Apple demonstrated how its software prowess and skill at building interlocking digital platforms is the real game changer. How? By enlarging the definition of the whole widget. Increasingly, the Mac, iPhone, and iPad do not exist alone. Instead, Apple now offers a multidimensional, integrated ecosystem of devices held together by the centripetal force of iCloud. Apple’s ideal customer, who likely owns at least one of each kind of product, can now share a single user identity, and core personal content and data can be viewed, consumed, used, or manipulated in familiar ways regardless of platform, with any changes or additions from one gadget instantly available on any of his other Apple gear.

In other words, Apple can now boast of providing a complete, coherent, and consistent digital experience at home, at work, in your car, and on the go–without any conscious effort on the part of the user. It’s as if just at the moment when the visiting team finally steps up to the plate, they discover that the home team has moved the fences out, raised the pitcher’s mound, and increased the distance between the bases. This is a different ball game.

Apple didn’t announce some silver-bullet innovation at the WWDC to make all this possible, but instead described literally hundreds of new features and data services borne of software, many of which integrate how all its hardware products create, display, and share digital information. New versions of its Mac OS X and iOS for portable devices, along with much-improved data storage and remote processing services accessible via iCloud, will all come together in the next few months to markedly improve the quality of the entire Apple digital experience. Indeed, in many ways, improvements for the Mac will result in new capabilities for customers’ existing iPhones and iPads with no new hardware required.

That is what you get when you enlarge the widget, and it doesn’t even reflect the inevitable hardware improvements Apple is so famous for delivering like clockwork.

Microsoft and Google clearly understand this strategy. But Apple’s ecosystem is the product of carefully nurturing smaller whole-widget ecosystems in such a way that they could be stitched together. Until recently, Microsoft has always tried to contort Windows to fit just about any class of hardware–using a one-size-fits-all strategy that has never played out well in non-PC devices. Google has tried to turn its browser software into a modest computer operating system, even as it took a completely different approach to Android smartphone software, and now is trying to make coherent architectures that are intrinsically different. Software can paper over just about any incompatibility, but a patchwork is not an ecosystem.

Apple’s Tim Cook knows he has to be very careful not to over-standardize these individually dazzling devices. That’s why it is unlikely that Mac OS X and iOS will ever subsume each other. The masterstroke is in using iCloud to knit them together, which hides the complexity of managing and not duplicating all those trillions of bits that each of us consume or manipulate every day. For today’s digital consumer, syncing data, managing your access to it, and keeping it all straight and secure is the key to a powerful digital experience that we are only now beginning to grasp. Cook, an operations wonk who is a master of taming complexity, might even be better at figuring this out than Jobs was. And since Apple usually improves any screen it focuses on, a new and improved AppleTV platform could become an intriguing fourth species in the ecosystem.

So while it’s certainly a bonus for consumers that Microsoft and Google have joined the game, Apple’s lead could conceivably widen before they can even begin to play. There will be glitches as Apple moves into its post-Jobs era, but Microsoft and Google have so much to learn that the company has plenty of time to figure out how to live without Steve.

Most iPhone peripherals aim low. They make the case a bit more durable or add a better speaker. They marginally improve a pretty darn good product.

The full Lapka sensor suite, along with its abstract viewing mode. A steel probe checks for nitrates, which are commonly used in chemical fertilizers.

But Lapka is something totally different. It’s an appcessory billed as a “personal environment monitor,” and through its collection of four peripherals, Lapka gathers analog measures of humidity/temperature, radiation, electromagnetic frequencies (EMF) and organicity (whether or not a food is truly organic). And it does so beautifully, with a mix of plastic and wood components–aesthetics that were considered down to the circuit boards, which will also match in white.

“Since this is a healthcare and environmental product, we used organic materials like wood and ivory-like plastic, it will look better with time… it’ll become your very own, personal talisman,” says Creative Director Vadik Marmeladov. “Our aim was to build an native iPhone accessory–not a design copy attempt. All our designs, usage simplicity, attention to detail and quality are based on Apple philosophy and mood, so we don’t have to copy iPhone’s shiny body to fit its aesthetics.”

Each peripheral obviously works a bit differently. The most compelling–the organicity device–uses a steel probe to check for nitrate concentration, which are commonly used in non-organic fertilizers. But the cleverness comes in how Lapka shares this information with the user. A parts per million measurement would make no sense to the average person, just like few of us have any understanding of acceptable radiation levels.

Sensors from left to right, top to bottom: EMF, Radiation, Humidity/Temp, Organicity.

In turn, the UI (which we’re currently unable to test) approaches each measurement at two levels. The first is a simple “is this acceptable” style measurement screen, which can contextualize worries like EMF based upon your predicted environmental exposure, or weather by typical temperatures in your area that time of year.

“For example, you can measure radiation on the plane and little bit higher level will be okay, because app knows that you’re won’t stay there for 24 hours and that higher radiation is common for the planes,” Marmeladov writes. “But with the same level of radiation in your kid’s bedroom it will alarm you and give you explanation to motivate your further actions. So, people don’t have to rely on their knowledge about radiation anymore to protect their family and themselves.”

This environmental snapshot can then be sent to friends.

The second way Lapka visualizes information entirely abstract. Marmeladov likens the experience to an Ambilight television, as onscreen particles accelerate in a red pool as the environment becomes less safe. This environmental snapshot can then be sent to friends, who can view it without purchasing the system. Of course, not having seen the effect in person, it certainly sounds a bit strange. But then again, how else but abstraction are we going to visualize these absurdly tiny details like radiation and nitrates?

As of now, Lapka is in prototype stage, ramping up for mass production soon. (We’ll see if these sensors can really do what they promise.) The collection of four peripherals should be available this December for roughly $220. And following that, Lapka’s team will likely chase all other peripherals, like an allergen sensor, glucometer, blood pressure monitor, oscilloscope, vehicle diagnostics device and fitness tracker. Your iPhone may soon resemble a centipede.

Your customers are not only becoming increasingly social, their digital lifestyle is fueled by mobile devices. Whether it’s a smart phone or a tablet, they are masters of the small screen experience and accomplished in the art of communicating with both their thumbs and their voice. The most riveting facet of the mobile revolution is not only what we’re witnessing, it’s what we’re missing in these important times of transformation.

These connected customers or Generation C as I refer to them are critical to your organization beyond their role of consumer. They are increasingly taking over the inside of your company as your everyday workforce. So in many ways, we are the very people we’re trying to reach. And, to do so takes standardization, transformation, and empowerment. This is the dawn of the mobile enterprise and as a result, digital strategists must think beyond the idea of a social business. Now’s the time to lay the foundation for an adaptive enterprise where mobile becomes one of the pivotal screens for employee and customer engagement, communication and collaboration. Without leadership and standardization however, employees will use their mobile devices as part of their work, but do so without regard or knowledge of best practices on what to do and what not to do and how it aligns with corporate policies and security.

Chris Silva, my colleague at Altimeter Group, just released a new report, “Power to the People: Identify and Empower Your Mobile Workforce A Three-Phase Strategy to Serve Mobile Workgroups.” It was written with the intention of helping businesses better understand the state of the mobilized workforce and how to increase productivity while empowering the connected employee.

As Silva noted in his post announcing the report, “My collaborator and editor Jeremiah Owyang and I began with a hypothesis that, as the age of mobile = email has come to a close, are mobile employees being served with the proper applications to make them be more productive? Our guess was that they weren’t, and largely, rollouts are just getting started but there are already some lessons to be learned. The most important is that different roles have different needs from mobility, and determining who is using mobile today, and what their needs are from mobile is the first step to a defensible mobility plan.”

As always, a successful mobile rollout examines employee and customer expectations, business goals, and long-term trends to develop a strategy that looks beyond Blackberries, iPhones and iPads and Droids. One of Silva’s observations hits the new mobile opportunity squarely between the eyes, “Within one large law firm that we spoke with, in the course of one year, the company went from 100% BlackBerry devices for mobile users to just 5% — the other 95% were all iPhones. As mobile application ecosystems continue to flourish, supporting mobile users is no longer about email.”

In his report, Silva lays out a three step process to choose the right tools and ultimately develop the construct of a mobile and adaptive enterprise…

1. Conduct a mobility audit

2. Examine Roles

3. Partner Choice

His research encourages those leading technology strategies to start with understanding the constituencies inside the organization. As executives, technical workers, and contractors have varying needs for mobile productivity, they do share the need to stay connected and productive wherever whenever.

Silva’s research identified three common internal roles around mobile engagement…

1. Information Worker: Need = consume

2. Field/Sales Worker: Need = collaborate

3. Executive/Technical Worker: Need = compute

Consume: Users inside of organizations are looking to access corporate information on the go. These information consumers are seeking information that is accessible and digestible on their device of choice.

Collaborate: Workers may be creating information in the field, such as notes, drawings, recordings, and photos, and need a path to access and store information on corporate data stores. Current tools in place, such as Microsoft SharePoint, rank poorly among these users and IT departments due to a lack of support for popular mobile platforms.

Compute: Heavy travelers and temporary workers (like contractors) are looking to tablet devices to be the only piece of tech they carry day-to-day. An emerging class of solutions aims to give these users access to the enterprise applications, the corporate desktop, or both from the tablet or even smartphone the user is toting.

Participating organizations were then asked to rank their mobile challenges. Collaboration associated with remote/field professionals ranked at the top of the list with 61% followed by those who need access to complex computing tasks at 27%.

To help businesses grasp the state of mobile chaos within the organization, Silva leaves decision makers with three actionable steps to assess, learn, and design an informed and scalable mobile enterprise…

1. Conduct an audit for level-set: Before embarking on user identification and role analysis, the initial and most critical step is to perform a level-set. The question to answer is what are the devices and who is using them?

2. Understand user needs by conducting detailed stakeholder interviews and human factors analysis: The analysis completed in step 1 will highlight favorite tools, but as Silva cautions, they may not be the ideal choices for the long term.

3. Choose the right solution by creating a weighted partner model: Inputs form the previous two steps will help identify the platforms that demand support, as well as the groups most in need of mobility.

With all of the talk about social media and the need to create an infrastructure to support a social enterprise, we cannot overlook the importance of mobilizing the workforce. Doing so enables employees to more effectively collaborate with team members within to improve collaboration with customers externally.

Shortly before Facebook’s turbulent IP “uh oh”, GM announced that it was pulling its $10 million advertising budget from Facebook. Controversy erupted. Accusations ensued. Camps divided into three factions, those who support GM, those who support Facebook and those not yet ready to take a stance either way, but are paying attention.

It will forever be known as “the meeting” between Facebook sales executives and General Motors Global CMO Joel Ewanick and other GM senior marketing executives. In the end, Facebook and GM each walked away with less than they had walking into the meeting. Facebook lost a premier advertiser and also lost Ewanick as an advisor to its invitation-only client council. GM lost the ability to demonstrate leadership in a time where the advertising and automotive industries are flailing. All is not lost however as GM will continue to spend $30 million annually in managing its Facebook presence through earned and shared media strategies.

So what happened in that now infamous meeting? Perhaps one day, its premise will inspire an episode of AMC’s Mad Men…

It’s a dark, dimly lit room illuminated only by a projector. Cigarette smoke fills the only visible light. On the wall is an image of Facebook’s timeline. Don Draper leans forward. His words cut through the smoke. In a calm voice with menacing undertones, Draper asserts his one and only reason for staying in that room, “my client has requested a home page takeover. Now, before you respond, allow me to be clear. This, what it is you’re selling, your advertising products, they don’t work for us. We have deep pockets and we’re willing to invest in the right partner that shares our vision. Now, how about you play nice like all of the other media partners and give us what we want.”

Facebook responds, “no thank you.” The sales team then shuts their iPad and MacBook Air lids and proceeds to leave the room in what almost seems like a well-rehearsed exit. They must do this often. Draper sits back in his chair and exerts a simple, but telling response, “huh…”

While many speculated what actually took place in the meeting, Advertising Age’s Cotton Delo reported that the scenario above is probably not far from the truth. GM is interested in Facebook’s audience, but believes that the ad formats currently available are unattractive and ineffective. The automaker’s team desired bigger, higher-impact ad units. After all, GM and many other brands around the world have learned the art and science of advertising by investing in campaigns that stand out from others, literally and figuratively.

So why is Facebook steadfast in its position to not cash in? The answer is user experience. Facebook is home to over 900 million engaged users. U.S. users alone spend 441 and 391 minutes per month on average interacting on Facebook’s desktop and mobile platforms respectively. Mark Zuckerberg and the storied “build and ship” culture he’s created is passionately dedicated to improving and not compromising the user experience. For the time being, anything that disrupts that experience is off the negotiation table even it means the company must walk away from $10 million deals. As a publicly traded company however, it must now also improve investor experiences.

At some point, brands will need to see additional options for paid media. By design, advertisements should be engaging rather than distractions. But a large part of the problem has nothing to do with form, but instead function. Advertisers are still deploying uninspired digital ads on other platforms. Many bring that methodology to social media. Accordingly, the metrics traditional marketers use to measure success in social networks are limited to impressions, reach, clicks, and engagement.

“A bad ending follows a bad beginning.” – Euripides

Advertisers need to think about new end-to-end experiences that inspire and engage a far more connected and discerning audience. Home page takeovers are for Myspace and the digital nomads who roam elsewhere on the web. Facebook is a new type of co-created canvas that requires different strokes to attract a savvy clientele.

Even though GM remains committed to Facebook through earned, owned, and shared programs, it appears to carry a traditional philosophy and approach to its everyday community strategy. General Motors currently is home to 383,000 Likes. Chevrolet boasts just over 1.2 million. Changing lanes for a moment, its competitor Ford has more than 10 million fans globally with 4 million supporting Mustang, the single largest vehicle fan page on Facebook.

I reached out to Scott Monty who leads Ford’s Global Digital Communications for his thoughts on GM’s move. Ford sees Facebook as a new vehicle for storytelling where paid, earned, owned, shared, and promoted media converge to create a new story board that begets new rules. According to Monty, “Ford is accelerating our efforts in Facebook and other social platforms. It’s all down to execution. We’ve found Facebook ads to be very effective when strategically combined with engagement, great content and innovative ways of storytelling, rather than treating them as a straight media buy.”

One of Ford’s much touted successes on Facebook was its introduction of the 2011 Ford Explorer via its “Reveal” campaign. The company claims that the combination of advertising and creative storytelling helped it outperform a traditional Super Bowl advertisement for a fraction of the cost.

Monty emphasized support of Facebook, “We continue to have a strong, collaborative relationship with Facebook, which includes first-of-a-kind vehicle reveals, advertising and innovative ways of sharing content. Our engineers have also been working with Facebook engineers to develop unique and safer ways of integrating the car experience with Facebook.”

Ford’s Facebook strategy is also an extension of a more empathetic marketing and sales campaign that’s underway worldwide. I had the chance to interview Jim Farley, Ford’s first CMO during Blogworld Expo in Los Angeles. His mission as instructed by Ford President Alan Mulally was to, “get people to fall in love with the blue oval all over again.”

When brands approach marketing and advertising opportunities with a purpose, the results that follow are commensurate with an investment of both intention and execution. In other words, you get out of it what you put into it. And according to a report due this week, comScore has found that Facebook ads are effective. In a report by CNBC’s Julia Boorstin, she explained that comScore thinks Facebook ads are having a “statistically significant positive lift on people’s purchasing of a brand.”

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For years, advertising has made a business by thinking outside of the box. But when it comes to flat, consumerized networks such as Facebook, perhaps the industry needs to think outside of the box once again. Facebook is not without fault however. It too must help advertisers create and measure successful campaigns while enticing the community of active users to support the brands they love. Over the last few weeks alone, Facebook introduced new APIs to help advertisers design “clicks to action” within its marketing efforts to trigger what could be unconventional, but possibly more meaningful outcomes. It challenges marketers to think beyond the Like or traditional impressions for that matter.

In what seemed to be a direct response to GM’s adieu, Facebook also introduced a clever new tool that shows marketers just what they’re missing. Now within the timeline, marketers can see reach data for each post. Information includes the number of total fans who may have seen the post and the amount people who were reached through paid promotion.

Facebook is teaching marketers that it’s not just about whom you reach, the opportunity also lies among those you do not reach today.

The court of public opinion may be weighing in on the matter of Facebook vs. GM. But I think the real case is against the people in social networks vs. traditional marketing methodologies. What’s clear is that Facebook is intent on serving users first. Perhaps advertisers could take a cue from Zuckerberg to rethink experiences through advertising and marketing campaigns that consumers can’t help but click, share, and engage.

Conference Room: Shutterstock

In September 2011 at its f8 Developer Conference, Facebook introduced the social world to frictionless sharing and Action Verbs. With the rollout of its Open Graph, the 900 million strong social network declared that the future of engagement would be driven by both implicit and explicit actions. Explicit actions require the user to click a button such as “Like,” “Share,” “Recommend,” or “Comment.” Implicit actions on the other hand only require that the user run an app designed using the Open Graph platform where updates (or Action Verbs) are sent to the timeline automagically depending on what the app is designed to do.

But, this frictionless experience is not without its friction.

As Open Graph apps such as Washington Posts’ Social Reader or Spotify send updates into user Newsfeeds, such as “Brian Solis is reading…” or “…is listening to…,” what happens next is where friction is at risk of sparking. As I warned in earlier this year developers who don’t think through the end-to-end user experience or the “click to action” from engagement to the Newsfeed to the desired social effect may not only lose momentum, they may reverse adoption.

The goal of an Open Graph strategy is not to just send an interesting Action Verb into the timeline to entice a click, it must unlock a microcosm of fellowship. The Action Verb is just the hook, but it is what unfolds next that influences whether or not a new user installs the app and continues to use it as part of their everyday Facebook routine. Indeed, the Open Graph is an open invitation to creativity and innovation. At the same time, it’s also an opportunity to introduce ways to expand relevant shares and app-generated engagement from social graph to social graph.

Automatic status updates using Action Verbs are just the beginning. Now Facebook is introducing Action Links. If Action Verbs are designed to trigger the social effect, Action Links are intended to drive intended outcomes or “clicks to action.”

Here we see a couple of difference examples where an automatic update now included a link at the bottom for friends to take action. In the Fab example, the Action Verb is “faved” and the Action Link lets friends “Fave this Product.”

Like Action Verbs, no pun intended, the success of Action Links is dependent on the experience as designed by your UX or dev team. The click must, in the very least do one or more of the following…

1. Serve a purpose

2. Offer entertainment

3. Deliver engagement

4. Contribute to self expression or personal branding

5. Enable commerce

Don’t rule out F-commerce just yet. 8thBridge developed an entire platform on Facebook’s Open Graph that demonstrates what’s possible with Action Verbs and Action Links. In the example below, you see the introduction of three new buttons, “I Want,” “Love,” and “Own” on the TOMS e-commerce site. Upon the click, an Action Verb update is sent to the user’s Facebook Newsfeed expressing the sentiment tied to each button. At the bottom of the update, friends are invited to add the item into their own bag trying social and e-commerce together through peer-to-peer influence.

8thBridge also visualizes how Action Verbs and Action Links tie into a user-centric social commerce ecosystem where Facebook services as the epicenter for personal experiences and engagement.

As AllFacebook shared, the 8thBridge Graphite launch included several ecommerce partners that connect people, experiences and brands through what I refer to as the A.R.T. of engagement (Actions, Reactions and Transactions). While primary Action Verbs were based on Want, Own, and Love, other unique examples include:

Deb: I want, Ask a friend, I’m wearing

Guitar Center: Play

Hallmark: Tearing up, Smile, LOL

Nasty Gal: Neeed (yes, 3 “e’s”), Gimme, and Three hearts

Oscar de la Renta: Wore

Aside from the fact that GM abandoned Facebook advertising for the time being, it’s time to see Facebook as a vibrant and connected community, not as a stockade of eyeballs. The Open Graph opens the door to an entirely new egosystem of user-centered experiences that have yet to be fully defined or harnessed. And, that’s the point. Action Verbs and Action Links are only as meaningful as the outcomes and journeys they create.

Image Credit (edited): Shutterstock

For those who attend them, furniture fairs and “design weeks” are full of parties and relaxed lunches. But for those who exhibit at them–especially young designers–they can be fairly nerve-wracking. “Seeing our projects in Milan, London, Stockholm or Paris gives us goosepimples,” write Spanish design team MUT Design.

The young office of four debuted a number of pieces at the Milan Furniture Fair in April. Among the new work, which included a hanging chair and these Koi fish tiles, was Zig Zag, a faceted mirror that reflects distortions and optical illusions.

ZIg Zag is actually more of a modular system than a piece of furniture. Each mirror is a series of octogonal aluminum extrusions, faced on one side with a strip of mirror. The extrusions are airbrushed in rusty oranges and muted blues, forming lovely gradients of colors “inspired by the favorite landscapes of the team.” Then they’re soldered together at varying widths and oblique angles, creating reflections that fracture and displace the user.

Like the fun Spanish cousin of a Donald Judd piece, Zig Zag invokes abstract expressionism with a big dose of play. MUT, for their part, say the mirrors are about human interaction: “They’re faithful to the promise of creating designs whose final results depend on the participation of the user.”

Read more on MUT’s website here.

Via FastCoDesign: http://www.fastcodesign.com/