It is with extreme pleasure, excitement and general happiness that I can announce that as of Monday I will start my new job as web designer/builder (or maybe even 'interaction designer') for www.headshift.com.
To quote the headshift site:
"In an increasingly interconnected world, smarter, simpler online tools are needed to support meaningful social interaction. Our job is to help organisations construct online communication projects, technologies and tools around the people they aim to serve."
In a nutshell, instead of using large, centralised, command-and-control style enterprise level applications such as, ooh, SharePoint, headshift take advantage of the readily available 'small pieces, loosely joined' social software tools such as blogs, wikis, etc, essentially tackling the problem from a more emergent, bottom-up, but importantly *human-centered* perspective than that of the enterprise applications - i.e. moulding the tools to the ways people work and interact, rather than vice versa. It seems clear to me that the folks at headshift *get it*, which is really exciting. I'm looking forward to contributing towards projects which has a definite, measurable, positive social benefit, and if we can help bring forth the emergence of the noosphere in the meantime, that would be lovely.
I'm looking forward to getting more deeply into all this social networks/network theory/emergence/mutual synergy type stuff as part of my job; hopefully I will soon sound somewhat more plausible when I talk about it. Heh.
(Oh, and I'd like to extend thanks to Tom 'Plasticbag' Coates, since I first spotted the job listing via his RSS feed. Isn't that just terribly modern of me?)
Well done! Hope it's going well. Now, get on and design us some interactions. I'll have two dozen.
Posted by: Tim | April 14, 2005 at 05:15 PM
Awesome news. Well done! I was sorely tempted to go for the social software consultant job there myself.
Posted by: Tom Coates | April 15, 2005 at 08:58 AM
Welcome Rik (additional letters removed to avoid the word BIANCA! popping into my head)....
Interaction designer is the title we shall know you by.
My thanks also to the lovely Tom Coates for gently washing you up on our shores via the sea of his linklog.
Posted by: Lee Bryant | April 15, 2005 at 12:23 PM