Social Software: The Other 'Design for Social Impact.' by Gentry Underwood

These are not questions that most social software today answers effectively. How many of your friends on Facebook do you actually consider friends? What does it mean to poke someone? Twitter begins with the question "What are you doing?" but most of the worthwhile tweets don't answer it.

At IDEO we've started using the term "social interaction design" to describe the work of creating tools for both human-computer and human-human-interaction


Human-centered approaches to industrial and interaction design have long focused on studying human behavior to create informed and appropriate designs. A social interaction designer must consider not only people, environment, and existing tools, but also the unseen elements of the system such as social relationships, power dynamics, and cultural rules.

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