Down the rabbit hole

Don’t wait for permission, just dive straight in

Social media projects are unpredictable, because what happens is the result of everyone involved the users as much as the people creating the tools. The only way to be sure your ideas will work is to try them out. The good news is that there are low cost, low risk ways to do this.

Tim Brown from IDEO argues that exposing your ideas to the real world early on is critical to their eventual success: “Rapid prototyping and ‘learning by making’ is already an accepted strategy for effective innovation. For participatory systems, this is even more important because the complexity of the interactions cannot possibly be anticipated by even the smartest of plans. The reality is that these prototypes cannot live in the lab; they have to be let out into the wild. So, we need to start getting comfortable with letting others participate in our innovation activities.”

So before you get too bogged down in research and setting up a full-blown project, we strongly recommend that you do two things: try some of the technology for yourself; and get into the conversations, online and offline.