searching, finding, looking for and learning

The last few weeks have been about learning from zero in the best ethnographic tradition. I have been through different sources from pop culture (wired magazine, business week) to more academic papers in order to have a broad vision, try to get "the whole picture" about social networking.

I must say that it has being enlightening. Just now I feel that there are some discrepancies between the commercial meaning of social networks and the academic definition. So far I think that in the traditional meaning social networks are something that we have been building since we born, they are some sort of non tangible circles surrounding us, but for the so called internet social networks is most about the connections you can create.

Is interesting the fact that most of the time is just visualization. In the moment we can visualize this networks we are able to interact with them.

Secondary research / references

I have been reading some books for the last couple of weeks in order to get into the social networks panorama:

Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi


Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution by Howard Rheingold

Mobile Interaction Design by Matt Jones and Gary Marsden


Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life by Mizuko Ito, Daisuke Okabe, and Misa Matsuda

Information and Communication Technologies in Everyday Life: A Concise Introduction and Research Guide (New Technologies/New Cultures)

by Leslie Haddon

What is SoME?

SoME is my degree project at Umeå Institute of Design. Social networks are a human phenomena. People builds social environments around them during their lifetime. The term was first coined in 1954 by J. A. Barnes.

In the physical wold we manage our social networks based on traditional behavior and activities, such as having agendas and contact lists. However technology has allowed people to maintain and increase the weak links within their networks through different devices.

SoME is a project which aim is to generate a proposal of managing networking through a mobile device. The proposed scenario is 5 years in the future, 2012.

Project dates

Important dates of the project:

March 13-14 Mid presentation
April 24-25 Final revision with mentors and Programme leader
May 07 Submition of the Project report (3 printdowns)
May 14-16 Examination week
May 31 Deadline for updated project report
Jun 01 Degree exhibition

Kick off

Officially the project started on Jan 17th.

As a way to keep a more interactive relationship with my sponsor and mentors I start this blog, is also a way to keep track of daily information that might be relevant for the project and a quick way to share.


The project sponsor is Ericsson Research (Stockholm)

Project tutor Didier Chincholle
Project mentor: J-P Hagström
Program Leader: Niklas Andersson