Stewart’s diagrams showing overlaps of social networks in the GNE are beautifully reminiscent of Buckminster Fuller’s “Tensegrity” structures.

They also bring home the messy, nuanced and subtle nature of human social relations, and the attendent difficulty of recreating/augmenting them in a media where the ‘experience design[ed]’ is sometimes little more than “one page of paper after another slapping you in the face on a windy street” [© Jessica Helfand]

A hunch of mine is that successful social-software will seem messy like a meatball to plan, resource, design and build, but will have the beauty and poise of Bucky’s tensegrity structures when it happens…