Labs/ConceptSeries/StudentOutreach/UniversityofSydney/2010/DesigningforSocial

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Subject: Designing for Social

Social networking sites have become the Internet’s biggest attraction.

  • In January, 11.6% of all time spent online was spent on Facebook ,compared to 4.25% for Yahoo and 4.1% for Google.
  • Microblogging (e.g.Twitter) becomes a new way to engage relationships.
  • Many rising sites and applications contain social-related functions, e.g. Buzz, Wave, 4Square, Aardvark, Meboo, etc.

However, the social networks created online don’t necessarily match the social networks that we already have offline. How do online social networks affect people’s personal and professional lives? What problems, both known and unknown, do people have with current ways of online social networking? What opportunities exist for us to make things better?

Your task is to develop a solution to this problem that embeds user-centred social networking features within the Browser. Solutions can for example have any of the following forms: add-ons, specific functions/behaviors that can be carried by the browser, extra components or other shapes of the browser, reinvent new tab page or the browser chrome, or web application widgets, etc.

The goal of this project is to develop design process understanding and to train professional working methods for the early phases of user oriented product development through this topic.

About the Class

This is DECO2200 Interaction Design Studio, which is part of the Design Computing degree at the University of Sydney. The unit is taught by Martin Tomitsch (coordinator), Nikash Singh, Philipp Babcicky (tutors) and includes guest lectures by professional designers and developers. The main design project is organized in collaboration with Mozilla Labs.

Teams & Course Outcomes

Resource Links