Just thinking - Social Usability

Alexandra is hot on usability. Her friend states that 'the web designer is dead. long live the inter/action designers!'

OK - I get that.

There must be something after movement to finally accept usability as a norm - social usability? - social architecture? No - that's similar to about American university reform in the 1960's.

Here's the issue as an academic would look at it:

"Does the internet empower communities or perpetuate the status quo? Can universal internet access resolve education, employment, and other social gaps? Findings show internet connectedness may have only a minimal impact on community capacity due to constraints such as family transience, difficult domestic circumstances, inadequate project resourcing, and poor literacy. Internet ubiquity may not be a strategically useful social objective unless contextual limitations are recognised and addressed."

Huh?

Again, the discussions are about the internet and not the impacts.

Social usability - how do we measure it? what are the KPIs? What is the EVA? There is certainly a positive net present value for social awareness but is it a negative or positive NPV for social design.

Design has the perception that it requires something tangible - a website - a product - a space.

Social usability can be defined on a broader plane - the unforeseen social acceptance of all three plus the memes that are generated.

Self-fashioned pundits have used the term social interfaces over and over and over again - all as a foil to sell the client something. Cookie-cut and sold again.

I think that society is getting more unique that standardized. It is getting diversified instead of consolidated.

There's something here - deeper - not yet describable - something like the internet was 20 years ago ...

Still thinking ...