(8 weeks)
My Role
Primary and Secondary Research, Conducting Interviews, Drawing insights
Background Brief
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. At each stage, we gathered feedback from our mentor as well as our peers. These were fellow informational professionals with diverse backgrounds ranging from librarianship, policy-making, journalism, etc. Their feedback helped us in approaching our problem statement through various perspectives.
1. What we started off with - A VAGUE IDEA
1.1 The Solution Space
We wanted to design something that would focus on the misleading information that minoritized communities face in particular. Our plan was to implement a two method approach - a digital platform design and workshop - with the intent of creating a “safe cyberspace” for such communities online.
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.
1.2 The Idea
The workshop would be tailored toward minority students on campus to act as a support group and educational event geared toward understanding the negative effects of being exposed to toxic online communities and problematic information. The students would also be given a digital self-care toolkit during the session with helpful strategies and exercises to better their online experience.
1.3 Guiding Questions
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) ?
1.4 Feedback
Some mentor feedback prompted us to re-assess our initial idea. Designing a toolkit as well as a workshop at the same time would be difficult because each one requires different kinds of decisions and user testing. We could use a workshop to co-design a toolkit but there was also the time constraint of 8 weeks.
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.
2. What we settled on - A CLEAR OBJECTIVE
2.1 The Solution Space
After discussions and mentor feedback, we revised our plan along two main areas -
1. Scope of our design intervention - We decided to lessen the scope to a workshop alone.
2. 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.
2.2 The Idea
Brainstorming on the specifics of the target audience as well as the problem statement occurred almost simultaneously. Diving deeper into the idea of a healing toolkit, we realized that we each had our own (often long, winding) journeys to understanding and accepting our body-image issues; and social media platforms like Instagram did not make this process any easier. We married these ideas and decided our research would culminate in a healing, educational workshop, in which we would examine how Instagram impacts women of color’s self-image, while equipping them with tools to be better prepared when face-to-face with the endless scroll.
3. Brainstorming
We discussed how our social media feeds were rife with toxic beauty standards and rampant misinformation about what an “ideal” body should look like. These beauty standards often conform to narrow ideals and are reinforced by the celebrity culture on social media. They are typically reflective of white standards and lack diversity of all sizes, ages, skin shades, hair types and body shapes. This manifests itself in various other harmful ways, such as body dissatisfaction, body dysmorphia, eating disorders, diet culture etc.
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.
Our Goal
We wanted young women of color to start thinking about how to unlearn some of the more common ideas spread by society about beauty standards and body image, all while interacting with each other.
4. Secondary Research - Literature Review
We then referred to previous research conducted about and around the topic to gauge what had worked out well and what hadn’t. Since we were following the Research through Design methodology, our aim was to design a prototype, however elementary, and then test it iteratively with participants and introduce improvements.
Moreover, since none of us had tangible experience with conducting workshops, we also referred to literature that would help us brainstorm activities and gain insights about creative storytelling in workshops.
A comic story created during the Athens Comics Library workshops (Tsene, 2022)
A conceptual model. of eating-disorder symptomatology outcomes for Latina female adolescents (Opara et al., 2019)
4.1 Insights
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.
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”.
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.
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.
5. Storyboarding
We then decided to flesh out a storyboard to list out the activities and other relevant details of our workshop. It helped us ground our idea and plan the mechanics of all that we aim to do. Our workshop would comprise of three activities as highlighted in the storyboard.
5.1 Workshop Blueprint v1
5.1.1 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.
"I wish my feed looked less white"
- Tara
5.1.2 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.
5.1.3 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.
6. Testing
6.1 Testing Phase 1
After creating a rough blueprint of our workshop, we performed a quick round of testing with our classmates in order to get first impressions about the activities and gather feedback in terms of the planning of the workshop. We adopted two different approaches for this testing phase depending on the people we were interacting with. For people who fit in with our target population (aka women of color) we tested individual activities and observed their responses. For others, we explained the workshop flow and asked for feedback in terms of logistics and the flow of the workshop.
6.1.1 Feedback
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. Only bad workshops have lectures in them”. We ended up removing the activity from our design.
The length of the Workshop
While the initial plan was to conduct 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 and possibly repetitive as well.
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.
6.1.2 Workshop Blueprint - Introducing Icebreakers, Revisiting Activity 1
Icebreakers - We would ask participants questions about their background, their upbringing and how their consumption of social media had changed their perception of beauty. Since we were focusing on women of color, we would also include questions about their cultural norms and how these interacted with the westernised environment they now found themselves in
Activity 1 - Our research highlighted the positive effects of including drawing in a workshop as a form of storytelling. But the 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.
6.2 Final Designs
6.3 Testing Phase 2
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.
A snapshot of our notes from the testing sessions
6.3.1 Findings
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."
-One of the participants
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.
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.
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 answers. But at least now I know of the questions."
-One of the participants
6.3.2 Workshop Blueprint - Revisiting Activity 2
Activity 2 - Again, we noticed that most participants would end up talking about their "aspirational feed" since that was easier compared to a visual representation. So we decided to instead ask the participants to describe this "aspirational feed" via words or short phrases and created a word map from it afterwards
7. Conducting the Workshop
We conducted the workshop with a total of 3 participants. Roxie moderated the workshop, whereas me and Tara participated. in the activities alongside the other participants. While this was not the ideal way we'd hoped to conduct our workshop, time constraints prevented us from recruiting more people. Participating in it ourselves allowed us to have productive discussions mimicking a real workshop setting. Following are the snapshots from the activities
8. Reflection & Future Prospects
Through our participant interviews and workshop, we feel extremely confident that opening up space for these kinds of conversations is progress in itself. All of our participants expressed how, in one way or another, Instagram and the beauty standards it touts made them feel othered or minoritized. Clearly, it is necessary that we continue to create these open spaces for communities most affected by disinformation.
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.