Hi! My name is Kay, I'm an Austrian
designer and researcher, and on behalf
also of my co-author Chris I will be
presenting today "The Shape of Social
Media: Towards Addressing (Aesthetic)
Design Power." And I'll get to why
(Aesthetic) is parenthesized in a second,
but first, I want to very quickly explain
our motivations. So this all began
because I read a paper on the addictive
features of Social Media a couple of
years ago, and was fascinated by the
connection between gambling machines and
the mechanism of refreshing a page - so
you can see here some screenshots that I
took of the loading animations of
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Tiktok
when I read that.
And we thought we would for sure find
academic research where, you know, the
effects that social media have are
connected to specific design features,
because this is also often discussed in
public spheres and in design
practitioner communities. But there was
not a lot.
Which is weird! Because every field that
has to do with design has discussions
about what essentially, with an umbrella
term, could be called design power:
So you've got Dark Patterns in UX/UI,
you've got Persuasive Design and Nudge in
technology design more (stutters) broadly,
you've got hostile architecture in
architecture, and you've got... well
essentially, advertising really just is
design power obviously as a field,
So these are all very well-defined,
field-specific ways to speak about the
power that design can have,
and they include the whole of design,
right, the duality of form and function,
although some tend to focus more on one
or the other.
So we're going to use this umbrella term
of design power for all of them as a
purposefully vague term, meant to make it
easier to discuss design power across
disciplines.
Because design in itself is such a vague
term - like when I was taught design in
German, design as an anglicism often leaned
more towards the formal and aesthetic
side, right,
so hailing from this and from a visual
design background, the focus on
function when we're talking about design
in technology obviously irks me.
Especially since commercially, like with
dark patterns, aesthetics are, in fact, an
important focus. For instance, Facebook
have reported on their own A/B testing, and
if you're (stutters)
if you're a business they allow you to
A/B test your ads to see which one works
better, right.
And there's also plenty of discussions
about how the alt-right uses memes and
aesthetics.
And all these discussions highlight the
power formal design can have.
So our aim is to kind of highlight, for
HCI research on social media, what
everyone else is already discussing: that
aesthetics have power,
and that the form things take makes a
difference.
And (stutters) of course you know you can't - and
probably shouldn't - separate the form from
the function, because they are a duality.
But just for the purpose of gaining some
ground where it's disregarded, we will do
just that,
for a bit.
Uh, so we're gonna try and explore the
aesthetic design power of social media
now. So to do this, we collected some
screenshots from popular commercial
social media platforms Facebook, Twitter,
Instagram and TikTok, and using rules
of thumb like contrast, repetition,
alignment, proximity, and the concept of
negative space,
basically I went off to essentially
critique their design in an iterative
process of looking, comparing, taking
notes, coming back, discussing it, coming
up with some interesting trends, going
back to check, and so on.
So here's some stuff we found that we
thought was interesting,
and some questions we had that we think
need answering.
So first off, these social media
behemoths are looking more and more the
same,right, so none of them allow for any
theme customisation,
and they all have this 'trendy' white
Tech-y minimal aesthetic look, and it
serves to draw the eye to the content,
which is as prominent as possible. Like
the newest app and the newest features
actually got rid of negative space
entirely, but i'll get to that again
later.
So they all use the same language, right,
and with this language one of the things
they're saying is: "Look at the ephemeral!"
So within the low key and monochrome
backgrounded space around the content,
right, this virtual space,
the few instances in which contrast is
used really stand out.
So all of these apps are visually saying
"Look at this live content, quick, now! You
might miss it, look, there's actually 1.1
k people watching it right now! You
wouldn't want to be left behind, would
you?"
So, (laughs) like, these,
these are aesthetic choices, right, that
can have power. They influence us. And on
instagram it's like, "Look at this story
by someone you follow! It's only there
for 24 hours! - Look at the green story,
which indicates that it's shared only
with close friends! That means it's just
for you, and you, you're special!" - Which
brings me to the next big shared focus:
green for social presence. So research
shows that even the perception of a
social space has an influence on our
behavior and feelings,
and we are constantly reminded of the
social context on these platforms.
Equally important but usually
highlighted with red, on the other hand,
is any sort of social feedback.
And in our sort of cultural circle,
that's an alarming kind of color, right,
it's intense, red. And also intense is the
heart symbol, which (stutters) used to
signify, you know,
more intimate kind of feelings, but has
kind of developed into this less deep,
more complex meaning - um, this is a whole
other topic, right... um. Bottom line, the
social context is highlighted, and
socio-emotional triggers are made to
stand out as much as possible, they're
also, you know, often animated. And one of
the most interesting things to us, that
we discussed a lot, was how first of all,
public feedback tends to be more
mediated than feedback in private
conversations (so you often can only
react with a heart and nothing else).
But even within private context, or when
offered the choice, this is always
limited to seven to eight emoji - and
i don't know about you but that does not
describe the range of feelings I'm
capable of (laughs at own joke). And this is a clearly
limiting aesthetic design choice, like
you could just as well let people choose
their own emoji themselves,
but there is some sort of reason you
aren't, right? Whom and what does this
limitation serve? Why is this happening?
And what's also always really
interesting is to see when design
principles are kind of used in reverse,
like, to hide.
So not only does advertisement look
exactly like other content on these
platforms,
the label - first of all, they never use
that word, it's always "sponsored", "promoted",
or "paid partnership", right - and second,
it's always squeezed in and greyed out
with all the metadata. So they aren't
saying
"whoa, just want to make sure you know
this is an ad!",
they are doing the opposite: they're
actively trying to pass off ads for
regular user-created content. Another
thing that you may be noticing on the
slide, that I've pointed out already, is
TikTok's landing page and content
screens,like, their main public spaces, so
to say,
uh, differ significantly from the other
platforms'. So this was also something
that really stood out and was really
interesting to us, because TikTok is
the youngest app and has the youngest
user base.
It's arguably the most immersive of them
all, so we wonder what kind of difference
this heads-up display might make. There's
research showing social media can be
addictive, and that they make you
dissociate; that there's pressure to
perform and fear to miss out. So it would
be interesting to find out: (stutters) how does
the aesthetic, the surface of this all,
impact these effects?
Uhm, (stutters) does this more immersive
interface promote that kind of stuff?
(Stutters) Does it draw you in more? Do you
feel more like you're in it? And i need
to stress these are all critical
speculations, right, so they're drawn from
subjective understanding of design
language,
and they're all - you may have noticed -
questions and not answers. But there are
some indicators to support some of these
things, for instance in regards to our
speculation that more immersive and
ephemeral content is preferred,
Instagram have stated they will
prioritize video, and both they, TikTok
and Facebook have recently introduced
live videos.
So, you know,
that begs the question: are all of these
aesthetic choices purely economic
choices, or what other reasons are there
behind these choices, right?
So, is constantly seeing the same emoji
influencing our emotional reaction to
content? Who gets to choose these emoji?
Why were they chosen? What reasons are
there for not allowing users to choose
our own emoji, or, you know, create custom
emoji? But what's arguably more important
than knowing the reasons behind design
choices, is examining what effects these
choices have on us. So
this means we have a lot of questions.
Because the way things look or feel or
sound can make it impossible (or require
higher effort)
to use a design artefact a certain way.
But we don't know
to what extent this look or feel or
sound
plays a role in this.
And we do know the harms of social media
disproportionately impact those who are
already vulnerable,
such as people experiencing mental
health issues.
And we don't know how aesthetic design
might differently impact groups like
children, the elderly, people with
learning disabilities, neurodivergent
people, or even just newer and less
social media literate users.
And i don't have time to go into it here,
but there are several examples from
academic and design research, as well as
non-commercial alternative platforms,
that prove that changes to functional as
well as formal design can have an impact
on reducing the harms of social media.
So i think in looking towards, you know,
what kind of social media do we want, we
need to acknowledge the power of
aesthetic design,
and maybe talk about regulating it.
You know, this disregard for aesthetics
is kind of tiring, because, just because
they're simple and intuitive to
understand,
doesn't mean they can't have a really
powerful effect.
So we hope we've kind of managed to
provide a bit of an impulse in that
direction here, into addressing these
matters and acknowledging the importance
of aesthetic design.
So thank you for listening to our video,
and we're hoping to be seeing more
discussions around this topic in the
future!