Michael completed the first version of the Bumblebee Labs logo tonight and I gotta say, I’m very impressed with it:

We printed out the inaugural version of the logo on some very nice hand made fabriano paper I had lying around and the effect was striking. Whenever I’ve embarked on some grand new adventure like moving away from home or writing my first non-trivial piece of software, there’s always a point where I can’t manage to convince myself on a gut level that this was all there was to it and it’s all so simple. Surely starting a company must involve more than just two guys, sitting around and figuring out problems that need solving? I know intellectually this is how many a company starts but my gut is run by narrativium, not common sense.

Holding that piece of paper in my hand and feeling the weight of it suddenly made all of this seem more real, more substantial. It may be a minor thing in the scheme of things but it was a sign, to me, of forward motion…

I was an infant at the infancy of personal computing. At first, we’d clumsily bang on each other, crawling around our small living spaces, and not doing anything that could be strictly defined as “working” or “playing.” We fought a great deal, growing up. I would corrupt kernels, break hard drives… in retaliation, my documents would be corrupted, and my deadlines broken. It was a barely functional relationship, but we’d manage when we really needed to.

It wasn’t until my father asked me to build him a website that we started working well together. I was reluctant at first, but for $50, his website became my summer lemonade stand. The resulting product was crude, bitter in places and overly sweetened in others, but for an adolescent foray, it was just as cool.

Now adults, we’ve learned to work together in ways that were previously inconceivable, and excited as hell to be carving a path into this brave new world of computing as a social medium. This is the wild west of the information age, and I’m itching to lay down some tracks.

I’m Hang and I’m the founder of Bumblebee Labs. I grew up in a family of computer science academics and somehow, I absorbed the idea that that was what I was going to become. I entered into college with a burning love for computers and a macho desire to solve hard problems, the more technical the better. Over the years, that desire to solve hard problems has stayed with me, but without even noticing it, I started to drift towards the softer side of the spectrum: studying people rather than machines. Psychology, Economics, Politics, History & Linguistics were all fascinating to me, and I became interested in how technology could be used to impact people’s lives.

My path through graduate school was marked by puzzlement, more than anything else. I wanted to understand how to build “social” software and what theories and guidelines could be used to design the social interactions and nuances of this ever increasingly important communications channel. What does it mean to “friend” someone on facebook, and how did the design decisions that went into that impact that meaning? Should we support the everyday white lies that people use to smooth over their social interaction? If so, how? What new forms of social awkwardness are these tools creating and is there a smarter way to design them to avoid it? All of these seemed like obvious questions to me, and I was content to contribute to the surely mountainous stacks of existing literature on these very fundamental questions… until I went searching for that mountainous stack.

In one corner was a big group of communication scholars who were doing a masterful job documenting the impact that technology is having on society, and in the other was a big group of Human Computer Interaction scholars talking about how to design computer interfaces to be efficient and usable – but there was virtually no one at all talking about the design of the social aspects of our tools! Quite frankly, nobody really knows at this point what the hell we’re really doing when we unleash these massively transformative tools into the world. We’re making a series of blind stabs in the dark and hoping that whatever current bits of ad-hoc theory we have is enough to ensure success.

This has been the motivation for starting Bumblebee Labs. It got to the point where the only way for me to really understand how to build social software is to roll up my sleeves and build social software: to use everything I’ve been thinking about and figuring out in the pursuit of better tools and better interaction through deliberate design. Lets see how this will work out…

Bumblebee Labs is a new software company dedicated to understanding how people tick, and using that to build smarter and more graceful social software. We’re in the experimental phase right now, so we’re still trying to pin down exactly what it is we’ll be working on and how we’re going to be presented to the world. We’ve got a full slate of interesting ideas and concepts and not enough time in the world to execute them so it’s going to be an interesting experience.

At Bumblebee Labs, we strongly believe in the open design process. As designers and engineers, we learn from the examples of those who have gone before us. To progress as a field, we believe in a community which is open and willing to share every stage of design, warts and all. The Bumblebee Lab blog is an experiment in living under the self imposed withering flashlight of scrutiny, and hopefully, learning from it.

We’re going to opinionated, slightly irreverent and above all, human. It’s going to be a fun ride…