May 21, 2002 at 7 pm
· Filed under Usability/User Research
Elan recently linked to the Guide to Flirting, from the Social Issues Research Centre in Oxford. He linked to it because, well, he’s a flirt (and he’d be the first to admit as much). But it got me thinking a bit, and it’s worth a link for a couple of other reasons…
It’s a concise and generally accurate overview of the behavioral interactions that occur when people flirt. Everyone engages in flirtation, so it’s both a universal and highly personal topic. My undergrad thesis focused on sexual selection as an evolutionary force, so I once spent a lot of time reading up on stuff like this. Yep, who knew biology could be so interesting?
Many of the readers of this site are designers of some sort - call it infousabilinter-experitechtual design or whatever’s hip this week. As people all engaged in similar work, we become highly accustomed to thinking in a very particular way about people and their behavior when we design: we call them “users”, we watch them in carefully controlled, semi-scientific settings, we create aggregated yet highly specific representations called “personas”, and so on. Sometimes I need to remind myself that a designer’s mental model for understanding human behavior is just that - a model - and as such it’s worth challenging. Reading about flirting behavior is a fun way of shaking up our generally pragmatic view of interaction and the act of designing for interaction. Go read about The Jack Principles for another whack on the interactive head.
Finally (and most importantly), it’s pretty damn funny reading some cheeky English social scientists talk about the scientifically correct way to hit on someone at a party.
So, anyway, go read and apply your newfound knowledge. At the very least, knowing some of this stuff makes an otherwise boring party much more fun to observe….
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