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Diagram
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Title
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Patron as Society
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Building Architecture
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In Gothic architecture, buildings were not just the product of the church institution but it was also a product of the secular society of merchants and craftsmen.
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Architecture Intensive Disciplines
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The internet as an architecture is a product of society. Individuals who have either business or personal interests have helped to build communities that keep the internet alive with new ideas. Craftsmen skilled with the knowledge of HTML and other web based technologies have helped shape the internet. It is a social pre-occupation. The user as a patron can reject a product of construction. Today, society as a patron can pass judgement on anything in the public domain and collectively can support or reject architecture.
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Case Study A: Large Corporate IT
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With the ease of deploying and accessing web based applications, social commentary has become relevant. We tended to have access to systems only if we were a known user with a password. Most web applications and portals cater for an anonymous user knowing that their system is in the public domain. We can therefore form an opinion on anything we can access - even if we can't go further than the home page. It is no longer just the perception of a user base that matters but also the community "out there" who are able to access a site's content.
People who did not have access to a portal's secured contents such as reports, would pass a positive or negative comment of the site based on their experience of what they accessed - even if it was just the home page. While tracking page hits, it was obvious that perceptions were being formed about a system from glancing the surface. It raises many questions about how we measure success and how important is society as a patron.
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Case Study B: Small Commercial Team
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In a commercial software environment, market perception can make or break a product (as was illustrated by this case study). Non-users of the system had a say on the appeal of the software simply by conveying a negative idea about the product or a feature it does not support. Because the product was perceived to have a short coming, the market's negative sentiment could detriment sales.
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