Responding and acting on social interaction design
Just read a thought-provoking article, "Re-framing the problem: Social Interaction Design". In it the author lays out his recent thinking on the problems of designing for the interactions of the social web and considers the usefulness of the social science concept of "framing" for addressing them. To summarise, he suggests that the huge interconnectedness of the social web creates arbritariness and ambiguity (a problem) and speculates that the design of a coherent user experience will require us to understand the framing of both the actor and the responder.
One of our strengths at Cubeworks is modelling processes and organisations using formal techniques like UML and informal techniques like site maps. How should this skill evolve when designing for the social web? How should we model a user's frame (given that a frame is a model of interpretation or perspective)? What happens to a use case when you need to consider both its actor and its responder?
Much food for thought in this design/social science/psychology area, including the idea of choice architecture and new thinking on decision-making.
I originally found the article through a tweet from @crumbs (an act to which I've responded).
