The Playground

Design question:

How might design create alternative social media experiences that support healthier, more meaningful, and manageable social connections among young adults in the future?

The Project Outline:

This project looked into the relationship between young adults and social media in the future and how design can make things better. By setting the scene in the future, we have a better understanding of our lives today and the challenges we might face in the future, which provokes thinking and action. I worked closely with a diverse user group and experts from the related domain and identified that social media addiction might become a critical problem in the future. An alternative social experience that provides a positive connection and a manageable social circle for its users to find the balance of their social life is needed. The outcome is Playground, a social platform based on a local community, which provides a more tangible and positive social connection playfully for the users.

Design Process

01 STEEPLE Cards

‘STEEPLE’ stands for ‘Social, Technical, Ecology, Economical, Political, Legal and Ethical’. It allowed me to frame the insights I learned from a multi-dimensional perspective and establish a way to track societal shifts.
I used the ‘STEEPLE’ cards to clarify my thinking and start forming rough ideas about the future based on the desk research. I mapped the ‘STEEPLE’ cards differently until it showed some potential appetite and mindset for the future world.

02 User Research

My research lacked diverse human input. Therefore, to make my future scenario more human, I started gaining insight by engaging with potential users. I interviewed people from diverse backgrounds. I got many valuable insights into how people interact and their thoughts about social media, which brought my project to life.

03 Scientific Prespective

Apart from the human factor, I also tried to approach the problem from a scientific perspective. Trying to understand how our brains process information and make us addicted to certain things.

04 A Future Vision

I gathered and analysed the insights from my research and created a future scenario in which social media addiction becomes a critical problem. To make the future world more tangible for designing, I created fictional news and organisations, which belonged to that future world. These visual references can help people understand the future scenario I created and reflect on the life we are living.

“I feel very disconnect and lonely when I tried not to use social media.”---Wade (the reference of my extreme user persona)

05 The Design Opportunity

The design opportunity comes from a consequence of my future world. Many people fail to use social media less because of the side effect of feeling lonely and disconnected.

The future vision led me to a design opportunity: How can design create an alternative social media experience that provides a positive connection between users?