Sunfleet

IDEO Business Card Brainstorm

Imagine if that stack of business cards you've been collecting contained some useful information! IDEO ran an "Identity Card Concept Project" that explored this idea with sketches of different possibilities. Definitely a creative bunch of ideas.

The one I find most intriguing is the proposal that a business card act as a "Listening Card" that helps you "identify and subtly characterize the people" you are interacting with by quantifying when they spoke in the meeting. You can characterize each person as either the "hectic loudmouth," "cool talker," "quiet wanderer," or "silent observer."

First off, this is similar in nature to my own doctoral research project, Second Messenger, where I demonstrated that showing people information about speaking patterns influences subsequent interactions. But I very much disagree with the claim that this is a "subtle" characterization of people. Quite the opposite! The visualization of speaking patterns is a blunt instrument for characterizing people's personalities and should be interpreted as such. Yet I do like the idea of collecting observed behavior information and incorporating it into a handle (the biz card) for later reference.

originally via information asthetics

Posted by Joan Dimicco in "Social Tools"  |  Comments[0]