Filtered for... the design of virtual spaces

Musing and reflecting on some recent things I’ve seen around the design of virtual spaces:

New Digital Spaces

Love seeing the creativity of taking other tools and turning them into party spaces - from Figma to Google Sheets:

Thoughtfully Designing the Virtual Space

Khoi has a wonderful teardown of Google Classroom - but the idea generalizes well. The design of digital spaces requires understanding what things you’re trying to optimize for…

It’s a virtual space, of course, but in a quarantined world it’s become a vital space, one that millions of children and parents are entering daily, usually for hours at a time. And it sends an unmistakable message about how it values the students who use it.

New Frontiers of Virtual Spaces

This essay from Jon is excellent - and explores the embodied / physicality aspect of digital spaces:

A whole wave of spatial social applications will be born out of this time, and these applications will serve as the breeding ground for insights that make their way out of social and into other major verticals. This will be an extremely generative time for insights and innovation in the way we build software. Designers and developers will begin using spatial interfaces in non-traditional ways, taking design patterns from gaming and applying them to non-competitive, explicitly social use-cases.