Social design network: the integration of social software in industrial design education

Like the mobile phone before it, it could be said that social networking via social software has transformed how people, or at least the under 35‟s communicate. As far back as 2005 in the US around 85% of University students used Facebook, a figure closely matched here in the UK (Kirschner, 2010). Although this figure has fluctuated of late, the overall trend is still on an upward curve. The media famously called this revolution Web 2.0 (O‟Reilly 2005), where due to technical advances in hardware and software, larger amounts of data, particularly images and video can be freely exchanged quickly and effectively over the internet. Social software as a whole has already been well-documented, and depending on how you see it, is either all the rage or so 2008 (Underwood, 2009) and applications such as wikis, blogs and social networking sites are increasingly being used in the education domain and have received widespread attention (Schroeder, 2010). Less well documented is the application of social software specifically in relation to industrial design and product design education