Danah Boyd is a PhD student at UC-Berkeley and a researcher at Yahoo! Research Berkeley. She delivered a talk at the O’Reilly Etech conference earlier this month titled “G/localization: When Global Information and Local Interaction Collide.”

Two concepts in the rough crib for the actual talk I found particularly interesting:
1. embedded observation
2. design for reinterpretation

Here’s a paragraph on each (thanks to Kathy Sierra for the link):

The designers of [Craigslist, Flickr and MySpace] are engaged in embedded observation. They are living in the culture that they are helping to frame. They are aware of the others living in that culture and constantly engaging with them to really understand the emergent behaviors. They recognize their power as designers and try to use it to benefit the collective rather than their own personal goals. Their design process is stemming from this embedded observation, producing a state of “flow” to use Cziksentmihalyi’s term. The designers love what they are doing and infuse their passion into the systems. This is a very powerful way of doing design.

Don’t design for perfection - design for reinterpretation. No matter how perfect you see your design, it will be modified, altered or manipulated in use. If you design for perfection, you will be disappointed in what people do. Design conscientiously but plan to react immediately after something goes out.