Social media experience and interaction specialist, analyst, and consultant. San Francisco, California

About Social Interaction Design Writings SxD Blog

Introduction

Gravity7 is Adrian Chan, a social interaction design consultancy in the social media space. Social interaction design includes not only user experience design but also social strategy and execution. I am based in San Francisco, California.

I started work as a content producer for educational and entertainment CDRom projects in 1993, writing and designing for companies such as Scholastic, PBS, and Sony. I then had my own web development shop from 1995 to 2003. In the subsequent years I combined my interests in communication technologies and sociology by focusing on social media design and development.

I coined the term "social interaction design (SxD)" to suit the particular needs and interests of technologies of communication technologies and social media in particular.

I joined Deloitte Digital in 2012 and spent five and a half years helping to recruit and build a customer experience team of UX and design-minded consultants to bridge our studio design and onsite consulting teams. Through this I had a hand in crafting internal and client-facing documentation, deliverables, process and methodology, and more. I returned to independent consulting in 2017. I am now interested in applying social interaction design to the machine-social interface.

In my 20 years of consulting experience, I have run an online dating service, built websites great and small, designed content management systems, and branded companies. I have written countless requirements specs and set user flow and site architecture for over 40 web sites. My writings on social interaction design have been referenced by numerous designers and developers interested in frameworks for online social interaction. And a growing number of practitioners now recognize that social media design, like urban planning, must include some amount of social insight.

I blog on social media, film, and occasionally post for Mashable, Readwriteweb, johnnyholland.org, centernetworks, and the P2P Foundation. I am a Senior Fellow with the Society for New Communications Research, SNCR.org, and co-founder of the Sxd Salon with Adina Levin, Will Evans, Chris Messina, Rashmi Sinha.

Awards & notables

Workshop: What is Social Interaction Design? CHI 2007.What is Social Interaction Design?
Panelist at the Milken Institute Global Conference, April 2006.: Blogs, Wikis, MMORPGs, and YASNS: Shaking Up Traditional Education
2003 Maggie Finalist Best Online Publication Home Page Design, Best Overall Online Design, Best Online Publication for Yoga Journal.
2002 Maggie Winner Best Online Publication for Yoga Journal
Best Educational Technology Product The Civil War, by Ken Burns. Interactive Laser Disc.
Oracle Challenge Grant $100,000 winner for a cartoon-making toolkit.