“So, what can we do about the agency problem? Well, for one, I think that we’ll see an increasing number of design projects have open-ends to them. This will give the site owners flexibility to grab small amounts of time from the designers to do ongoing design maintenance, fixing smaller interaction problems that crop up over time. Second, I think more social design will be done by in-house designers. My friend Andy Budd (who co-founded the Brighton, England-based design agency Clearleft) tells me that they try to wean their clients off of them slowly by gradually pushing the work in-house. They might help the in-house design team get up to speed, but then they give them the reins going forward. This benefits both parties and seems like a good approach going forward because one-off designs aren’t well suited for software becoming more social with each passing day.” - × × ×