(8 weeks)
Consequently, future designers might build upon this workshop as more of a series of sessions, rather than a one-off meeting, so attendees can continue to wrestle with ideas together and ideally form a supportive network for one another. Additionally, future designers might narrow the scope of each workshop to one topic so as to keep the conversation on track.
This area is rich with avenues to navigate, and a topic per session will be helpful in continuing to have fruitful conversations.
Achievable Goals
We asked our participants if they had any takeaways from the activities, in a bid to gain some qualitative insight into how effective the intervention was. The first participant remarked that adding a WHY after each question was very important in helping her dig deeper into her own biases. This leads me to believe that participants leaving the workshop pondering over questions despite not having absolute answers to them - is a good starting point. In the vein of ‘chipping away at misinformation’, this is what we should be targeting for the first iteration of such a workshop.
“”
The WHYs are good, and important. There are so many questions now that I think of it. And I don’t even know the answer to them. But at least now I know of them.
Drawing isn’t much fun
The explore page activity (1) proved to be effective while the drawing activity (2) did not. Most didn’t really draw their ideal feeds but instead listed things they’d like to see. We realized that this would need to be reworked upon for future designs, which was disappointing as we had initially been the most excited for this activity and came across research backing it up. However, it was also an important lesson in realizing that no design can really be air-tight and that we should always be ready to find unexpected or even contrary results.
We repurposed the activity to create a bubble map composed of phrases and feelings that would best express their participants’ social media feed. They could then add words to better sum up their aspirations.
Credit Where Its Due
A participant mentioned that several popular trends stem from different cultures but none of these are credited when folks, primarily white influencers, borrow from them. For instance, a popular trend at the moment is the clean girl aesthetic, which “requires you to be at your best, without looking like you spent time getting there” (Resnick, 2022).
“”
It is a win to see more influencers and trends that showcase diversity, but seeing them packaged in a whitewashed way dilutes them. It is frustrating.
A (Social) Media Issue
A participant observed that it’s worth exploring and examining media as a whole. It is where we create narratives and tropes that pin people as heroes and villains. Hence, the absence and the misrepresentation of certain groups of people misinforms us about the human experience and about the way the world looks and operates.
Our explore pages, for example, is a mini “us” and that mini “us” is just as flawed and in need of a critical examination as the channels.
Each of us tested two (2) individuals who met our target criteria. We recruited participants from our social and professional circles. The sessions took approximately 45 to 60 minutes and we conducted them over zoom or in-person. In either case, the session was recorded and each of us took notes during the session itself as well. We then made sense of the data by putting everything into an Excel sheet to find patterns, both individually and as a group. Participants’ ages ranged from 19 to 24. They were all BIPOC as this workshop was designed for women of color.
Icebreakers - Conversational; introductory questions about ideas of beauty and media messaging
Discuss and Deconstruct - Participants share screenshots of their Instagram Explore page; a conversation about their time spent online and decolonizing beauty.
A Technological View - Participants draw what their ideal Instagram feed might look like and what they would like to get out of their social media experience
With a rough outline in hand, we asked for feedback from our peers in class. We did this by asking them go through our storyboard while explaining what the activities would look like. We would present some of the discussion prompts we had thought of from each activity and talk to them about it. Some of the invaluable feedback we received was -
1. The length of the workshop. - We were initially planning on conducting it across 3 hours, we decided it would be best to reduce it to 2. The activities we designed were short and discussion-oriented, hence a longer session would be tiring for the participants.
2. Icebreakers are very crucial. - We hadn’t given these lot of thought and it became clear that setting the right tone in the beginning would be instrumental in ensuring a safe and trustworthy space for the participants to engage in discussions, share their thoughts and personal experiences grappling with this topic. So we devised prompts for the icebreaker session and decided to test them out alongside the other activities as well during user testing. Additionally, we decided that as moderators, sharing our own experiences and anecdotes would help to kickstart the conversation and make participants feel at ease.
3. Workshops are about ‘work’. - The 2nd activity was an interactive presentation of data and on how algorithms are biased by design and play a role in furthering unrealistic beauty standards. But feedback made us realise that it would very easily devolve into a lecture and cause participants to withdraw from the workshop altogether. A critical piece of mentor feedback was that “workshops are supposed to be about work, you have to make the participants work”. We ended up removing the activity from our design.
4. Restricting to one platform is crucial. - We limited the scope to a single social media platform. Each platform comes with its own set of affordances and limitations and would go on to influence the discussions accordingly. We chose Instagram, as designing the workshop specific to one platform would result in more focused and productive discussions.
5. Rethinking the drawing activity. - Our research highlighted the positive effects of including drawing in a workshop as a form of storytelling. But feedback was mixed. We decided to find a middle ground by having participants share screenshots of their Instagram Explore page and later during the workshop, draw what they understood would be an ideal Explore feed.
Activity 3
For the third activity, participants would collaborate to discuss relevant life experiences, learned biases, ideas of things to unlearn and how to unlearn them, and takeaways from the workshop.
Our workshop would comprise of three activities.
Activity 1
In the first activity, we would have them draw what their social media feeds currently look like, and then draw what they wish these feeds actually looked like. The idea for this stemmed from our discussions and was reinforced by the literature we read. We thought this would be an fun, interactive way to open up the conversation and invite the participants to actively think about what they consume on a daily basis.
Activity 2
For the second activity, we planned on talking about the technological biases underlying these social media platforms that reinforce problematic beauty standards. We would do an interactive presentation to discuss biases within algorithms and go over relevant infographics and images. This conversation would allow folks to discuss their own experiences, in addition to seeing these biases in real time.
“”
I wish my feed looked less white than it does right now.
-Tara
DRAWING AS AN ACTIVITY
Athens Comics Library’s case-study explained the effectiveness of using comics and graphic novels as a media literacy tool for marginalized communities. It elaborated how creating comics allows the reader to become a “willing collaborator” with the creator, filling in the gaps within the story. Creating comics on their own pushes one to think critically and validate their information and be responsible for sharing the content with the readers.
CRITICAL THINKING IS NOT ENOUGH
There are two distinct factors associated with media-related attitudes toward thinness—an awareness of societal pressures to be thin as projected in media, and the internalization of thinness pressures,”. Hence, simply teaching people how to deconstruct and question media messages without addressing the internalization factor is ineffective. Interventions should tackle internalization and awareness, in that order.
TRUST IS PARAMOUNT
We also looked at research in the areas of media-literacy programs and creative storytelling in workshops. It helped us understand how trust is an essential aspect when collaborating with a diverse group of people and is often thought of as “a precondition of creative collaboration”. So it is important to design activities that allow for the manifestation of trust in collaborative activities.
BODY-ETHICS
Investigating relationships among ethnicity, self-representation, and body aesthetic ideals among black and Latina women espoused the idea of reframing the discussion from ‘body-aesthetics’ towards ‘body-ethics’ - an ethic based on self-acceptance and nurturance - “of working with the body instead of trying to fight it, of caring for the body rather than trying to control it”.
Young women are particularly vulnerable in being subjected to such harsh and narrow standards of beauty and are consequently more likely to be affected by them. The increased exposure to same-aged individuals on campus and disordered eating patterns as a result of leaving home for the first time makes for an at-risk population of young women on campus. Problematic information in terms of what beauty should look like and how to go about achieving it is rampant.
Scope of our design intervention - We decided to lessen the scope to a workshop alone.
User population - We restricted the population to young women of color. This categorization was broad enough to allow us to get participants for user testing, but also specific enough to create a tailored intervention. Moreover, the fact that all of us shared this identity was important as it would not only allow us to bring in personal experiences to help with the design process but also provide much-needed passive catharsis in that we would be designing something for the problems we ourselves face.
It also became clear that while surveying users initially would yield important insights, we could take it further by “putting something on the table for them to react to”. Moreover, given our inexperience with designing workshops or toolkits, we realized an iterative design process in the spirit of research through design would be more productive and insightful.
How do you define a healthy online community?
How do you detox after being bombarded with problematic info / toxicity online?
How do you characterise a positive online experience? What can some of the strategies be? (eg. the inclusion of a moderator).
We planned to conduct a thorough and informative initial survey to provide the basis for our successive activities. The feedback would be used to host a workshop and design a digital platform or rather a toolkit that the students would test out and review. We would also obtain their own feedback in an end-of-workshop survey. The findings would be used to create a comprehensive plan and report that would act as a blueprint for other external groups to replicate and implement in their information organizations such as libraries, museums, and schools.
In my first semester, I took a course called Misinformation/Disinformation. It focused on understanding and addressing the challenges of misinformation, disinformation, and strategic manipulation in online environments. As part of the course, we were to investigate different design directions for addressing misleading information for a team project.
Our approach was loosely based off of the Research through Design methodoloy, in that we aimed to have a greater understanding of our topic through design interventions.
