The Online Dating Research Center held a conference in Vienna in April with the title, “Online Personals: “Scientists, designers seek same for good conversation.”
About the workshop
Online personal advertisements have shed their stereotype as matchmakers for the awkward to claim a prominent role in the social lives of millions of users. This one-day workshop will bring together social scientists and designers to discuss:
1. How people are behaving in online personals systems and how best to study this behavior.
2. How different personals systems handle self-expression, searching, matching, and communicating.
3. How the design of personals systems interacts with individual and cultural constructs of relationships and attraction.
4. New methods, metaphors, design paradigms, and gadgets for finding and communicating with dating partners.
Extended abstract (pdf). I’ll post more after I’ve talked to the organizers, this looks like it could have been interesting.
