While developing social interaction design theory and the interaction frameworks that correspond to different breeds of social web applications, I make a living gigging. Most clients have social media in their DNA, and are often startups seeking expertise, product specs, design briefs and page flow and other design documentation. I thoroughly enjoy delving into a new company's goals to craft social interaction design goals that will best meet the company's needs while providing compelling user experiences.
Other clients are live and either seeking to increase adoption or to address unuse, disuse, misuse, or other user and social practice challenges. These companies frequently have the architecture, design, and feature sets required to accomplish their business objectives and to satisfy users, but benefit from design and front-end tweaks. These jobs involve the improvement of social navigation and social content structuring so that users find their way to doing what the platform is set up for, ultimately generating the self-sustaining participation that's needed for sustainability.
I also enjoy becoming involved in high-level strategic sessions and consulting to organizations yet to commit resources to a project. Here I will apply industry expertise as well as core assumptions about social practices and user habits and routines. I am currently expanding contacts in non-social media (e.g. non web 2.0) industries, and as web 2.0 continues to attract interest among existing media (print, advertising, broadcast, etc) and related markets, I welcome consulting enquiries and opportunities from all corners. I enjoy drafting social interaction design guidelines and goals for disruptive social technologies, especially.
Last but not least, I do think we can use social media for social good, for educational, organizational, and social purposes. The long tail applies to knowledge and information as well as to retail. To this end I have worked on non-profit sites and systems, and will continue to engage in opportunities to "do good."
Over the years I have drafted interaction frameworks for a number of use cases and user scenarios, from chat to live gaming. I keep this for use in projects and they allow me to get up to speed quickly on new challenges. While I also follow industry news and trends, and keep an eye out for best practices, fresh design solutions and new applications, I try to fit these into a big picture view of the field. We are developing new "socio-technical" competencies and routines, and insofar as these continually lay down new ways of finding, exploring, discovering, interacting, relating, and producing ourselves, our culture, and our social institutions, the social web is truly a social design challenge.
The future offers fascinating possibilities, some of which will capitalize new markets and enrich upstarts, some of which will result in fool-hardy expectations and disastrous investments. In either case, we can ce sure that the socialization of our information economy into a social economy may completely undo long-standing habits in the production of what we know, how we know it, how we care about it, what we do with it, and with whom.
For more on rates and deliverables, and a bit more on what I do, click here.
(additional clients under non disclosure agreements)
View Adrian Chan's current resume (pdf)
"Adrian was a huge factor in propelling a multidisciplinary team of both inside and outside resources from concept to killer demo in less than 90 days. What we got was on-time, on budget, with a result of key stakeholder buy-in. Ground-breaking creative, business strategy, and project management flexibly adapting to the abrupt changes of projects in pitch mode - that's the package." Mark Plakias, VP Strategy & Design, France Telecom/Orange Labs, 2007
"Adrian is insanely brilliant. He's one of these guys who is 100x more creative than us mortals. He knows web 2.0 backwards and forwards. You will learn a lot from working with Adrian. His sharp intellect, keen interest in people and persistent focus on the question "what really motivates your audience?" has led to big "aha!" moments about the direction of our website." Perla Ni, Greatnonprofits.com, 2006
"Adrian is an exceptional thinker and provides an incredible amount of creativity for the development of GoingOn's platform, and insight into human behavior within the developing online world which is extremely valuable for our company and customers. He is also easy to work with and a strong collaborator for ideas on any team." Bernard Moon, Goingon.com, 2006
© 2007 by Adrian Chan. All Rights Reserved.